This photo of an awe-inspiring icy landscape is without a doubt one of the best we have ever featured in our weekly Imaggeo on Mondays. The Icelandic glacial lagoon Jökulsárlón is gloomy and cold. Yet the brilliant blue of the ice and the turquoise of the water stand out beautifully in this image, giving it a je-ne-sais-quoi of magic. The photographer, János Kovács, a geologist at the University o ...[Read More]
Cryospheric Sciences
Imaggeo on Mondays: Cordillera del Paine
Images such as the one above inspire scientists and nature lovers alike. This photograph, showing a Chilean landscape with elements representative of various Earth-science disciplines, is simply stunning. In a beautiful mix of shapes and colours, a quiet lake with floating icebergs appears tucked in between a roughed mountain in the background and a colourful double rainbow in the foreground. The ...[Read More]
Geosciences Column: For permafrost, (sediment) size does matter
In this month’s Geosciences Column, David Bressan – now a regular EGU contributor – highlights a recent result published in The Cryosphere with implications on the occurrence and preservation of alpine permafrost. The last 150 years saw an increase of 0.8°C in the Earth’s mean global temperature. In mountain ranges like the European Alps, however, this rising trend is even more pronoun ...[Read More]
Imaggeo on Mondays: Sequoias in full moon
The Sequoia National Park in Sierra Nevada, California, is one of the most beautiful wilderness areas in the United States. The park, spanning over 1,600 square kilometres, is home to high mountains, deep canyons, and long and pristine caves. But its most distinct feature are giant sequoias, the world’s largest trees. Sequoias (Sequoiadendron giganteum) grow to an average height of 50 to 85 metres ...[Read More]
Roundup of EGU Twitter Journal Club 1
The EGU’s Twitter Journal Club had its first virtual meeting yesterday, discussing an article on a climate change related blunder made by The Times Comprehensive Atlas of the World and the swift response of an international group of scientists. You can read a full transcript of our discussion on our brand new Storify page. Even though Twitter went down after an hour’s discussion, we ...[Read More]
EGU Twitter Journal Club: Article 1
The EGU is pleased to announce the launch of its Twitter Journal Club, a regular, interactive online discussion about a timely scientific article. Full details can be found here. Our first ever article, described below, covers a climate change related blunder made by The Times Comprehensive Atlas of the World and the swift response of an international group of scientists. The Twitter discussion w ...[Read More]
Imaggeo on Mondays: Halo
“Ring around the sun or moon brings rain or snow upon you soon.” Before the development of meteorology, visible atmospheric phenomena, such as halos, were used to forecast the weather. Though meteorological prediction has come a long way since then, these extraordinary halos really do appear in the sky on otherwise ordinary days, a lesson learned by Farahnaz Khosrawi when she saw the sun rise on a ...[Read More]
Imaggeo on Mondays: Melt Stream
Supraglacial lakes are created when water forms in depressions on top of a glacier, remaining there until it dissipates by seeping through crevasses, or cracks in the ice sheet. Despite their sometimes impressive size, supraglacial lakes may drain in a matter of hours under the right conditions, when the pressure they exert on the ice causes it to crack creating a sometimes spectacular lake draini ...[Read More]
Imaggeo on Mondays: Icy Landscape
Ice is a hazardous beauty, ephemeral in nature and, under the right conditions, capable of dominating landscapes. Earlier this year, while North America enjoyed an unusually mild winter, central and eastern Europe experienced brutal cold spells. The continent witnessed widespread freezing as cold air swept south from Siberia, claiming hundreds of lives, knocking out power supplies, and disrupting ...[Read More]
Drill cores and climate: An EGU 2012 poster presentation
In the past few weeks, we have been publishing various reports from the 2012 General Assembly, courtesy of our guest bloggers. Today, we bring you yet another report, in video format this time, produced by the lovely Sue Voice who worked at the press office in Vienna. The video features Otago University’s Christian Ohneiser talking about his PhD project. Christian tells Sue how drill cores, ...[Read More]