This view from the Port Hills of Christchurch in New Zealand glances South over Governors Bay into the distance, where an Aurora Australis is visible near the horizon. Almost in the center of the starry sky the Southern Cross with its 2 Pointer stars are showing prominently. Description by Ulrich Schreiber, after the description on imaggeo.egu.eu. Imaggeo is the EGU’s online open acc ...[Read More]
February 2021 is an important month for Martian missions, with three arriving at our planetary neighbour within 10 days. Many people have been following the USA’s NASA Perseverance mission, as they landed the new Perseverance rover, with it’s specially designed Ingenuity helicopter in the Jezero Crater in the last 24 hours. Earlier this month the Chinese mission Tianwen-1 also entered ...[Read More]
The image shows the increasing moon on March 16, 2016, seven days before the full moon. 53.3% of the lunar front are already illuminated. The moon does not glow on its own, but its surface reflects the sunlight. The sun always illuminates a complete half of the moon, which, in its orbit around the earth, always turns its face (which we see at full moon) toward the earth. The reason for the ...[Read More]
The object of this photo is the transit of planet Venus in front of the Sun which took place on June 6th 2012 and was the last event of this kind until 2117! This is a very rare event with respect to a human life span and the transit always happens in pairs, 8 years apart, with a repeatability of more than two centuries. The picture was captured on the shore of the Black Sea, in Vama Veche, Romani ...[Read More]
2020 was a brilliant year for our blogging network here at EGU. Across the EGU’s official blog, GeoLog, as well as the network and division blogs there were so many interesting, educational and just downright entertaining posts this year it was hard to get the blog editors to choose their favourites! Nevertheless at the beginning of January, to celebrate the excellent display of science writing ac ...[Read More]
Laboratory visualisation of solar wind interaction with Earth’s magnetic field. The Van Allen radiation belt, Earth’s magnetosphere, “bow shock” and a solar coronal hole can all be seen, and are emphasized with the ‘Planeterrella experiment‘, a vacuum chamber in the shape of a bell jar with the ‘Sun’ on the left (in the form of a large metallic sphere) and the ‘Earth& ...[Read More]
120 years ago in 1901, Swedish meteorologist Nils Ekholm used the term ‘greenhouse’ to describe the heating effect that a planet’s atmosphere has on the surface temperature of the planet, the first time that this now much-used and abused metaphor was published. He wrote: “The atmosphere plays a very important part of a double character as to the temperature at the earth’s surface, of which the one ...[Read More]
In the midst of summer when the sun does not set at high latitudes one can sometimes catch a glimpse of the mesosphere shortly after sunset or before sunrise. These thin veils, known as noctilucent clouds, are the highest known cloud-like structures forming at about 80km above the surface. At this height, they are still lit by the sun and can be seen from lower latitudes many hundreds of kilometer ...[Read More]
Cyclone Idai, which was labelled by the UN as possibly the worst climate calamity to ever hit the Southern Hemisphere, pounded Beira, Mozambique, in March 2019. The European Space Agency images revealed that a huge new inland ´lake´ measuring about 80 miles by 15 miles, an area the size of the European state of Luxembourg, had suddenly been created by the catastrophe. However, millions of residen ...[Read More]
The indigenous name of the 3405 meter high Fitz Roy mountain in Patagonia, on the border between Argentina and Chile, is frequently translated as “smoking mountain”. This photo may visually explain an origin of this name. On the day the photo was taken, vortices downwind of the peak drew warmer, humid air from below, forming banner clouds at the leeward site of the Fitz Roy mountain an ...[Read More]