Geoscientific Methods

The existential modelling crisis – and how to overcome it

Lucia Layritz September 5, 2025

Photo depicting wildflowers and resprouting shrubs after a desert wildfire, taken by the author, Lucia Layritz

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]

A leap of faith: Should we trust AI with a million-year problem?

Asmae Ourkiya August 8, 2025

Photo by Dan Meyers. Source: Unsplash

Artificial intelligence (AI) has been here a while, and it isn’t going anywhere, not any time soon. It has become an integral part of many lives and businesses. When I speak of AI, I am not referring to GenAI (generative AI) that writes your emails for you: Think about the algorithms that suggest what movie you should watch next, the voice assistant that adds milk to your shopping list, and ...[Read More]

AI: the good, the bad, and the forgotten

Lucia Perez-Diaz May 1, 2025

AI: friend, or foe? (Credit: Lucia Perez-Diaz, www.luciaperezdiaz.com / @DrLPerezDiaz)

AI is here, and when I say here, I mean e-v-e-r-y-w-h-e-r-e. For all you know, this blog may have been written by an algorithm (it wasn’t — I’m not a robot, promise. Or am I?). In what feels like the blink of an eye, AI has gone from a curiosity to a fully-fledged co-pilot in science (and out of science). It’s generating satellite imagery, helping compute paleo-climate predictions, or writing your ...[Read More]

How can scientists see ice underground? Recent study reveals how!

Asmae Ourkiya February 14, 2025

This picture was by Patrick Klenk at an ASSESS-GPR site at the very end of one of their experiments where they monitor hydrologic processes with Ground-Penetrating Radar.

When it comes to peering beneath the Earth’s surface, geophysicists have an arsenal of high-tech tools at their disposal. But what happens when you need to track something as elusive as underground ice forming and melting in real time? Enter borehole Ground-Penetrating Radar (GPR), the underground detective that helped Peter Jung and his colleagues image frozen subsurface volumes in an experimenta ...[Read More]