GeoLog

EGU Scientific Divisions

The spectral shadow of Samalas: When climate models conjure the Earth’s forgotten fury

The spectral shadow of Samalas: When climate models conjure the Earth’s forgotten fury

This Halloween, we turn our gaze from fictional haunts to the chilling, rigorous world of paleoclimatology. The paper by Hartmann et al. (2025), published on Climate of the Past, focuses on the implementation of external forcings in a regional climate model around the 1257 CE Samalas volcanic eruption. This paper can be quite the unsettling investigation, since it treats the Earth itself as a time ...[Read More]

GeoTalk: Meet glacial hauntologist, Elizabeth Case (you read that right, a glacial hauntologist!)

Elizabeth Case

Welcome to GeoTalk, Elizabeth! Could you introduce yourself and your background? I’m a genderfluid glaciologist living between previously glaciated, currently glaciated, and flood-prone landscapes. I am a postdoctoral researcher at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. I did my bachelor’s in physics at the University of California, Los Angeles, and my Ph.D. in glacial geophysics at Co ...[Read More]

Slavery in the geologic record – Environmental and geomorphological legacies

Slavery in the geologic record – Environmental and geomorphological legacies

From 1525, when the first human trafficking ship departed Africa, to September 22, 1862, when the Emancipation Proclamation was issued, more than 300 years passed. This was enough time for the exploitation of humans and the earth to leave a permanent mark, one so profound it is now visible in the geological record. Not only did the age of chattel slavery during the Modern era shape the land and th ...[Read More]

The existential modelling crisis – and how to overcome it

The existential modelling crisis – and how to overcome it

Recently, we had a big name in fire ecology visiting our institute. He had come, among other things, to look for records of a certain fire-adapted shrub in my university’s herbarium. While myself and a colleague helped him go through the stacks of pressed and archived specimens, I asked him why there were so little contributions to the herbarium in recent years. His response was: “People sto ...[Read More]