Geosciences Column

Geosciences Column: The science behind snow farming

Olivia Trani March 9, 2018

A layer of sawdust and wood chips hides a massive pile of snow in South Tyrol. The thick cover protects the snow from the summer heat. Winter sport destinations have been 'farming' snow as a way to guarantee white winters. Credit: Grünewald et al.

For roughly the last decade, some ski resorts and other winter sport facilities have been using a pretty unusual method to ensure white slopes in winter. It’s called snow farming. The practice involves collecting natural or artificially made snow towards the end of winter, then storing the frozen mass in bulk over the summer under a thick layer of sawdust, woodchips, mulch, or other insulating mat ...[Read More]

Geosciences Column: How fast are Greenland’s glaciers melting into the sea?

Jon Fuhrmann February 9, 2018

The Greenland ice sheet is undergoing rapid change, and nowhere more so than at its margins, where large outlet glaciers reach sea level. Because these glaciers are fed by very large reservoirs of ice, they don’t just flow to the coast, but can extend many kilometres out into the ocean. Here, the ice – being lighter than water – will float, but remain connected to the ice on the mainland. This phe ...[Read More]

Geosciences Column: The hunt for Antarctica’s oldest time capsule

Ruth Amey January 12, 2018

Preparing the ice corer for deployment, EPICA project, Kohnen Station, Dronning Maud Land, Antarctica (Operators: Prof. Dr. Frank Wilhelms and Lorenz Karsten). NB: This image is not related to the study featured in this post . Credit: Hannes Grobe, Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research (distributed via Wikimedia Commons).

The thick packs of ice that pepper high peak of the world’s mountains and stretch far across the poles make an unusual time capsule. As it forms, air bubbles are trapped in the ice, allowing scientists to peer into the composition of the Earth’s atmosphere long ago. Today’s Geosciences Column is brought to you by PhD researcher Ruth Amey, who writes about recently published resea ...[Read More]

GeoSciences Column: Don’t throw out that diary – medieval journals reveal the secret of lightning

Rohan S. Byrne December 8, 2017

‘Lightning Below the Summit’, 36 Views of Mt Fuji, Hokusai c. 1830 (Wikimedia Commons)

When 17th century Japanese princess Shinanomiya Tsuneko took note of an afternoon storm in her diary one humid Kyoto summer, she could not have imagined her observations would one day help resolve a longstanding scientific conundrum. Statistical analysis of her journals has revealed a link between lightning strikes and the solar wind – proving that your teenage diary could contain good scien ...[Read More]