EGU Scientific Divisions

70 years of tech: Does it serve science or separate us from it? My take as an EGU media professional

Asmae Ourkiya September 4, 2026

When I joined the European Geosciences Union in 2024 as a media professional, my primary mandate felt straightforward: democratising scientific understanding and building durable, trustworthy bridges that connect scientists, researchers, journalists, and public communicators. Now, in my third year at EGU, I find myself looking out over our scientific community with a mixture of reverence and uneas ...[Read More]

How long does an ecosystem remember the weather?

Wenli Zhao August 27, 2026

“Plants carry traces of past weather. Reading them may help us navigate a hotter, drier world.” Wenli Zhao As global warming intensifies drought frequency, understanding how ecosystems store and deplete water is critical for anticipating vegetation stress. This blog walks us through a novel groundbreaking study published on EGU journal Hydrology and Earth System Sciences (HESS). Led b ...[Read More]

From under Lake Nyos: The geology, physics, and engineering of limnic eruptions

Asmae Ourkiya August 21, 2026

On the evening of August 21, 1986, an unusual stillness blanketed the green highlands of northwestern Cameroon. The local villagers in Nyos, Cha, and Subum were preparing for bed, totally unaware that the crater lake nearby had reached its breaking point. Without warning, a wave of gas burst from the lake and spilled over the volcanic crater rim and cascaded into the valleys. Unseen, heavy, and co ...[Read More]

Under the Mediterranean sun: The thousand year tale of changing skies

Nazzareno Diodato and Gianni Bellocchi August 17, 2026

When you picture the western Mediterranean, you likely imagine sun-drenched beaches, terracotta roofs, and bright blue skies. But has it always been this sunny? A groundbreaking study published in the journal Research provides a definitive answer: it has not. By pulling back the curtain – or rather, the cloud cover – on a thousand years of climate history, scientists have developed the ...[Read More]

A geoscience reality check on World Biofuels Day

Asmae Ourkiya August 10, 2026

On a humid morning in Augsburg, Germany, on August 10, 1893, a ten-foot iron cylinder roared to life for the first time. The engine belonged to Sir Rudolf Diesel, and running through its veins was not the petroleum distillate we associate with his name today, but in fact, peanut oil! Diesel’s early experiment proved something revolutionary for the late Industrial Revolution: the engines driving hu ...[Read More]

Thirty years after Biescas: Rethinking alluvial fan flooding and infrastructure failure

Asmae Ourkiya August 7, 2026

Thirty years ago, in August 1996, a catastrophic flash flood swept through the Las Nieves campsite on the alluvial fan of the Barranco de Aras near Biescas in the Central Pyrenees of Aragón, Spain. The tragedy claimed 87 lives and injured over 180 people. This makes it one of the most severe weather-related disasters in modern European history. In the decades following the disaster, geoscientists ...[Read More]

Reflecting on fifty years of Mars through Viking 1’s lens

Asmae Ourkiya July 30, 2026

On July 20, 1976, a machine of steel and titanium dropped through a thin atmosphere and touched the dirt of Chryse Planitia. Scientists at NASA held their breath, since five years earlier, the Soviet Union’s Mars 3 probe had died less than two minutes after touchdown. To mitigate this nightmare, engineers programmed Viking 1 to scan its own footpad first. If the lander sank into oblivion, hu ...[Read More]

Mangroves at the edge: Coastal ecosystems in a year of climate extremes

Guilherme Abuchahla July 24, 2026

This Sunday, July 26, marks the International Day for the Conservation of the Mangrove Ecosystem. We are currently experiecing critical crossroads globally, where groundbreaking data on global forest recovery collides with the immediate threats of an escalating climate crisis.El Niño is pushing Pacific sea surface temperatures toward levels that rank among the highest on record, and climate specia ...[Read More]

Why do Earth’s hidden stress fields matter for our future? Let’s explore the latest insights from the World Stress Map database

Asmae Ourkiya July 17, 2026

Beneath the serene landscapes we inhabit, the Earth’s crust is a battleground of constant, immense, and invisible tectonic forces. While humanity typically only notices this deep-seated stress when it violently releases in the form of an earthquake and volcanoes, these forces have always been shaping the structural bedrock of our planet. Understanding this hidden architecture is one of the most vi ...[Read More]

Taking Pride in our planet: Protecting oceans for queer and trans survival

Vanessa Raditz June 29, 2026

In Spring of 2025, just as I was preparing to release the Queer Climate Justice StoryMap I had been building for two years, I received a difficult email from my lead community collaborator, an LGBTQ+ foundation, describing the devastating legal and financial situation the newly inaugurated Trump administration had put them in. We decided to set the project to private to protect the queer and trans ...[Read More]