This week’s Imaggeo on Mondays is brought to you by Alexis Merlaud, an atmospheric scientist from the Belgian Institute for Space Aeronomy. While the wonders of the African atmosphere feature in his photography, the East African Rift has a much bigger tale to tell. Drawing from all aspects of geoscience Alexis shares its story… This picture shows Kilimanjaro, Africa’s highest mountain, at sunrise. ...[Read More]
Imaggeo on Mondays: Iceland’s highlands
This week’s Imaggeo on Mondays provides a little insight into what you might find beneath your feet as you explore the Icelandic highlands… You can stumble upon wild blueberries, better known to botanists as vaccinium uliginosum, in cool temperate regions of the Arctic, as well as other mountainous areas including the Pyrenees, Alps, and Rockies. They thrive in wet acidic soils – the sort y ...[Read More]
Geosciences Column: Shifting the O in H2O
Wherever you are in the world’s oceans, you can identify particular bodies of water (provided you have the right equipment) by how salty they are. You can get a feel for how productive that part of the ocean is by measuring a few chemical components in the water column. And, year on year, you will see a recurring pattern in how things like temperature, salinity and oxygen content vary with depth. ...[Read More]
Imaggeo on Mondays: Friends in the field
Out in the field you encounter all sorts of wildlife and while mosquitos are the most frequent (and most unwelcome), they generally don’t interfere with your equipment or your data. The same can’t be said for all animals though, and many scientists have to strap their equipment out of reach, barricade it with barbed fences or place it in a relatively indestructible black box. It’s a particular pro ...[Read More]
Counterintuitive solutions improve public transportation and urban design in Seattle
The Emerging Leaders in Environmental and Energy Policy (ELEEP) Network brings together young professionals from Europe and North America with the aim of fostering transatlantic relations. Former EGU Science Communications Fellow and ELEEP member Edvard Glücksman reports back from a study tour of the US Pacific Northwest. After describing urban planning strategies in Oregon in his first post, here ...[Read More]
Imaggeo on Mondays: Scope for science and art
Great geoscience photographs aren’t always shots of beautiful landscapes. Sometimes there are stunning things to see at a much smaller scale. This week’s Imaggeo on Mondays showcases one such curiosity and highlights how research images can reveal a lot about the natural world when exhibited as a form of art. Thin sections are a fantastic way of finding out more about rocks, soils and tissue struc ...[Read More]
For the love of rocks
We often have a way of seeing patterns in otherwise random features, and rock outcrops are no exception. Do you see the heart on its side? To the untrained eye an outcrop like this is simply a heart-shaped feature in an otherwise grey rock. But to the geologist, the layers, swirls, shapes and colours tell a story. The ribbons in the granite show that the rock has been subjected to sheer forces and ...[Read More]
Improving quality of life through urban growth boundaries, 20-minute neighbourhoods, and public transportation in Oregon
The Emerging Leaders in Environmental and Energy Policy (ELEEP) Network brings together young professionals from Europe and North America with the aim of fostering transatlantic relations. Former EGU Science Communications Fellow and ELEEP member Edvard Glücksman reports back from a study tour of the US Pacific Northwest. In this first of two posts, he describes the unique urban planning strategy ...[Read More]
Imaggeo on Mondays: Pitter-patter of little paws in Patomsky crater
This week’s Imaggeo on Mondays is brought to you by Dmitry Demezhko, who describes how Patomsky crater may have formed and why it keeps scientists puzzling… Patomsky crater, also known as Patomskiy crater or the Patom cone, sits in the Irkutsk Region of Eastern Siberia. The site is a curious cone with a crater at the top and a small mound in the center. The cone totals some 39 metres in height and ...[Read More]
Geosciences Column: Using tall trees to tot up tropical carbon
Forests in the tropics account for about half the above-ground carbon on Earth and as the trees grow older they are capable of storing more and more. In fact, their carbon-storing potential is so large that they are increasingly being viewed as a means of mitigating climate change. Take, for example, the United Nations effort to reduce degradation and deforestation by assigning value to forest car ...[Read More]