A new hydrological climate-impact study by Nina Köplin and colleagues, in the European Geosciences Union journal Hydrology and Earth System Sciences, investigates the impacts of climate change on forest expansion and glacier retreat in Switzerland. This study raises important questions as to whether or not land cover changes should be considered as climate change impacts on hydrological systems, N ...[Read More]
Geosciences Column: Stitching the seafloor together
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]
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]
Geosciences Column: Autofluorescence in polar regions – how and why?
Marine picoplankton, <2 µm, are one of the most ubiquitous fauna in the open ocean. These marine microorganisms are hugely important – being responsible for a significant proportion of oceanic net primary productivity. Researchers are able to track the evolution of their genomes and the transportation of these microorganisms by analysing ice cores, which offer the potential to study the evoluti ...[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: How curbing HFC emissions could reduce warming
Carbon dioxide is without a doubt the most famous of warming culprits. But would reducing emissions of this greenhouse gas be enough to mitigate climate change within this century? A recent paper published in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics focuses on a less known substance that, if phased out, could avoid as much as 0.5 °C of warming by 2100. Hydroflurocarbons (HFCs) have an interesting history ...[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]
Geosciences Column: Tracing Toba
Large volcanic eruptions have a significant impact on the Earth’s climate as aerosols (including sulphur dioxide and water vapour), together with ash are released into the atmosphere and increase the amount of sunlight reflected back into space (the albedo). This increase in reflectance (or decrease in energy absorption) can cause widespread climatic cooling, known as a ‘volcanic winter’. However, ...[Read More]
Geosciences Column: Rainfall and Climate – a Dynamic Problem
“Rain is grace; rain is the sky descending to the earth; without rain, there would be no life.” – John Updike Rain quenches the thirst of soils and vegetation, fuelling ecosystems and much of the world’s agriculture. Whether it ruins a day on the beach or destroys a season’s harvest, it makes humans deeply aware of their vulnerability to the vagaries of the atmosphere. It’s important to understand ...[Read More]
Geosciences Column: Larvae, Climate and Calcification
The absorption of atmospheric CO2 by the oceans results in a decline in ocean pH, hence ‘ocean acidification’, and reduces the availability of carbonate. This presents a problem to calcifying organisms (those that deposit calcium as either calcite or aragonite as hard parts) because they cannot produce their shells, valves (in the case of bivalves), or tests (in the case of diatoms) as readily. To ...[Read More]