Media

Interview with Peter van der Beek, President of EGU

Asmae Ourkiya June 10, 2024

We are excited to introduce Peter van der Beek, the new President of the European Geosciences Union (EGU). To learn more about Peter and his vision for the future of EGU, our Media and Communications Officer conducted an interview with him. In this conversation, Peter shares insights about his background, his journey to becoming EGU President, and his goals for the organization during his term.

Hello Peter, thank you for taking the time to speak with us and welcome to your new role as President of EGU! Can you tell us a little about yourself and what led you to this role? I am a professor of General Geology at the University of Potsdam in Germany. Originally from the Netherlands, I consider myself European. After completing my PhD at the Free University in Amsterdam, I did a postdoc in A ...[Read More]

The EGU Science-Media Toolkit: your guide to overcoming science communication limbo!

Asmae Ourkiya May 17, 2024

Your research deserves recognition beyond your peer-reviewed paper. While academia is often considered the hallmark for knowledge generation, the dissemination of your work should take further steps so that your scientific research can reach the people it is meant to help. Because your audience may not always be experts in your field and may require simplified explanations of your science, EGU are ...[Read More]

Predators or gardeners: how penguins fertilise Antarctica’s biodiversity

Anna Katsigera April 19, 2024

Sea birds contribute importantly to biogeochemical cycles in coastal ecosystems and on islands. Feeding on the marine food chain and nesting on land, they carry large amounts of marine nutrients into terrestrial ecosystems. This might be of particular importance for the nitrogen (N) cycle of terrestrial ecosystems in the antarctic. Credit: Daniel Wasner (distributed via imaggeo.egu.eu)

On the desolate Antarctic peninsula, a colony of penguins creates a hub of biodiversity. One may ask, how exactly do those aquatic birds help maintain and enrich the variety of different kinds of organisms from plants and animals, to a wide range of insects and micro-organisms that live on our planet? The answer is quite intriguing. Scientists from the University of Science and Technology of China ...[Read More]

Looking for answers towards the stars: stone tools and nuclides unveil the earliest solid evidence of humans in Europe

Anna Katsigera April 18, 2024

This false-color image from three of NASA's Great Observatories provides one example of a star that died in a fiery supernova blast. Called Cassiopeia A, this supernova remnant is located 10,000 light-years away in the constellation Cassiopeia. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/STScI/CXC/SA

When stars explode, supernova-style, the explosion sets off streams of high energy particles across the universe, mainly protons and alpha particles, that after millions of years reach us here on Earth. Secondary cosmic rays pass through our bodies and almost everything around us, and they penetrate a few meters into the ground where they interact with atoms in soil and rock. This produces new iso ...[Read More]