Within the heart of the Malagasy Hauts-Plateaux, the rolling grasslands are pitted by deep incisions locally referred to as lavaka (‘hole’ in Malagasy). These mass failure features provide vast quantities of terrestrial matter to local freshwater arteries, accounting for over 80% of the annual sediment load of the Betsiboka River. The collapse of the overlying …[Read More]
EGU Scientific Divisions
GeoTalk: meet Alicia Fantasia, researcher in ancient Earth climates & ECS representative for SSP Division
Hello Alicia, thank you for agreeing to this interview! Before we dig in, could you tell us a little about yourself and your research? Hi Simon, many thanks for giving the nice opportunity to present my research activities. I am Alicia Fantasia and I was born in Switzerland. I have always been passionate about the …[Read More]
Imaggeo On Monday: The Heart of a Stone
Heart-shaped glomerocryst (aggregate of phenocrysts) made of plagioclase and pyroxene in a cordierite-bearing dacitic lava from Lipari (Eolie Islands). I study the crustal xenoliths of these lavas to understand the processes accompanying high-temperature metamorphism and crustal melting. But I came across this spectacular glomerocryst and couldn’t help but take a picture! Polarized light photomicrograph. Crossed …[Read More]
Imaggeo On Monday: Salt marsh in El Rocío (Huelva, SW Spain)
The coast line of Huelva is furrowed by wetlands and sprinkled with salt flats. These areas are a sanctuary for wildlife and are visited by migrating birds travelling between Europe and Africa. In these wetlands grow the salt cedar, the Phoenician juniper, the mastic tree, the Montpellier cistus, the rockrose, the kermes oak, rosemary, cordgrass, …[Read More]
GeoPolicy: Don’t Look Up – could better science advice have saved the planet?
Note: Spoilers Ahead! If you haven’t already seen it, go and watch Don’t Look Up – and then come back to this blog to find out what the scientists in the film could have done to better connect and communicate with the policymakers involved! Don’t Look Up gives us a terrifying example of what could …[Read More]
Imaggeo On Monday: Intriguing artwork by heat-loving microbes
The geothermal area Sol de Mañana is part of the Altiplano–Puna volcanic complex shared between Bolivia and Chile. The area is characterized by volcanic activity and the sulphur springs host mud lakes and steam pools. The different colours stem from thermophilic, hyperthermophilic and acidophilic bacteria that colonize areas of varying temperatures. Description by Julia Miloczki, …[Read More]
GeoTalk: Meet Alessandro Musu, magma researcher & science communicator!
Hello Alessandro, thanks for joining us today! Before we delve deeper, could you tell us a little about yourself and your research? Hi, thank you for having me today, I am Alessandro Musu, a PhD student in Petrology and Volcanology at the University of Geneva. I have currently just started my third year. The main …[Read More]
Imaggeo On Monday: Križna jama
The Križna jama Cave on the east side of the periodic Cerknica Lake in Slovenia is an underground karstic cave primarily famous as a rich site of bones of the extinct cave bear, Ursus speleus. The eight kilometer long cave is full of stalagmites and stalactites (sometimes called drip-stone decorations) and also boasts 50 underground …[Read More]
Congratulations to the winners of the EGU Best Blog Posts of 2021
At EGU, we like to believe that a new year is more meaningful when we pause to look back at the year gone by – just a brief glimpse to appreciate all our good work and progress! 2021 was certainly an excellent year for our blogging network at EGU. Across the EGU’s official blog, GeoLog …[Read More]
Imaggeo On Monday: Quartz – sericite mylonite, Calamita, Elba
Concomitant thrusting and magmatism resulted in the development of ductile mylonites in the Calamita Schists, part of the contact aureole of the Late Miocene Porto Azzurro pluton. This mylonite is made up of stretched and recrystallized quartz layers, interlayered with thin sericite-rich levels. Sericite resulted from the crushing of contact-metamorphic minerals such as andalusite, cordierite, …[Read More]