You’re standing on a mountain peak, with a fabulous field site before you. Wanting to capture the moment, you take out your iPhone, snap a dozen pictures and your mobile stitches them together beautifully – a nice record to show your colleagues back in the office. Unfortunately, not all field sites are so easy to capture – especially when you need to do a little science with the images. Seafloor p ...[Read More]
Imaggeo on Mondays: The perfect partnership
Pogonophores are deep sea worms that thrive in dark, deep sea conditions thanks to the presence of symbiotic bacteria. The bacteria are chemoautotrophic, that is, they fix carbon through oxidation processes, rather than using light to fix it, as is the case for photosynthesis. By utilising oxygen in the water, the bacteria can oxidise compounds such as hydrogen sulphide in order to fix carbon. The ...[Read More]
Geosciences Column: Dating a bivalve
Just as the rings on a tree can be used to determine its age, the bands on a bivalve’s shell can tell us the how long it’s been around for. Warm, food-filled waters lead to greater growth in the summer and low plankton abundance (the principle food source for filter-feeding molluscs) leads to limited growth during the winter months – hence the banding. But pinning down the age of a bivalve m ...[Read More]
Imaggeo on Mondays: A clash of hard and soft landscapes
This week’s Imaggeo on Mondays is brought to you by the photographer himself, who describes the striking scenery of the Conwy estuary in Wales… After a workshop with salt-marsh specialists in Conwy (Wales, UK), I stayed a couple of days to explore the surroundings. Living and working in The Netherlands, for me intertidal areas are typically wide, flat expanses of land, where the horizon is far awa ...[Read More]
GeoCinema Online: The extremes
In our final instalment of GeoCinema Online, we’ve put together a collection of climate and weather documentaries covering the incredibly hot and incredibly cold, together with the extreme events that shape our planet. Settle into your sofa and enjoy some scintillating science! Fennec: Into the Saharan Cauldron The central Sahara has one of the most extreme climates on Earth, but prior to th ...[Read More]
Imaggeo on Mondays: Curaçao’s coral coastline
Easterly trade winds can carry warm moist air to the island of Curaçao, having picked up moisture while crossing the Atlantic Ocean. Lying just south of the hurricane belt, Curaçao can still suffer the effects of these storms. For the most part, though, the coast has experienced little damage, leading to great preservation of the fossil reefs that fringe its coast. The northern coast of Curaçao, w ...[Read More]
GeoCinema Online: From evolution to extinction
Palaeontology spans many disciplines, bringing together aspects of geochemistry, sedimentology, zoology and many more to piece together the puzzles of ecosystems past. From evolution to extinction, these fantastic films take you through the science that lets us put the puzzle together – enjoy! A Foram’s Tale One way reconstructing past climates is to culture living planktonic Foraminifera an ...[Read More]
Geosciences Column: Following Fukushima: what happened to the iodine isotopes?
The March 2011 earthquake, 130 km off the coast of Japan, resulted in a 10-40 m high tsunami inundating Japan’s Pacific coast and caused the release of radionuclides from Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant (NPP). The demise of three of the reactors was widely covered in the media, with worldwide coverage of the potential effects of radiation release both close to the plant and further afield. ...[Read More]
Geosciences Column: Just a drop in the ocean – river nutrients and Arctic plankton
The oceans are a big contributor to the global carbon cycle, with phytoplankton taking up carbon through photosynthesis and incorporating it into their shells. When these organisms die their shells sink and make a calcareous contribution to seafloor sediments. Of course, with the formation of limestone, this carbon is locked out of the atmosphere for long periods of geological time. Until recently ...[Read More]
GeoCinema Online: Oceans
This week on GeoCinema Online, we’re taking a look at all things ocean, bringing what few people see straight to your desktop – or, for that matter, any other shiny viewing device you may posses! Take a dive and find out what plankton get up to in the microscopic world beyond our vision, what corals and communities lie in the cold deep and how oceanographers are working to better under ...[Read More]