Featured in this blog post is a collection of images that gives a picture-perfect example of life imitating art. The photos in the left column are three consecutive still frames of a breaking wave that scientists generated in a lab environment at the University of Edinburgh in the UK. The pictures in the centre and …[Read More]
This picture was taken in the Arctic in May 2018. It shows the unmanned marine vehicle Proteus in front of the tidewater glacier Conwaybreen in the Kongsfjorden in Spitsbergen in the Svalbard Archipelago. The front of tidewater glaciers is an almost vertical wall of ice standing over the sea where direct measurements are very critical …[Read More]
This side view of Half Dome at Yosemite National Park (California, USA) was taken from Washburn Point, a less frequented overlook a few hundred meters away from the popular Glacier Point outlook. The sun just on the right side behind the camera, which gave the orange tint to the back side of Half Dome. At …[Read More]
This picture was taken at Bandon beach, Oregon. Bandon is well-known for its memorable seascape of stacks of all shapes and sizes. These rock formations are known to geologists as ‘knockers’ and carry nicknames like ‘the Wizards hat’. They date from the Jurassic period – about 200 to 145 million years ago – and are …[Read More]
The photo shown here shows typical sampling work underground. You can see Ola Kwiecien and Cinthya Nava Fernandez, researchers at Ruhr University Bochum in Germany, collecting dripwater in New Zealand’s Waipuna Cave as part of a four-year EU-funded monitoring programme. Our research aims at developing innovative geochemical indicators that we can use to quantify changes …[Read More]
Roughly 50 million years ago, the Eurasian and Indian continental plates began to crash into each other, dramatically changing the landscape of modern-day Asia. The force of the collision caused the Earth to scrunch together at the zone of impact, subsequently forming the Himalayan mountain range. However, to the north of the crash, a stretch …[Read More]
This week’s featured image may appear to be a painted landscape, but the picture is in fact a photo, taken ten years ago by Victoria Arcenegui, an associate professor at Miguel Hernández University in Spain, during a controlled forest fire in northern Portugal. The blaze is actually hot enough to distort the image, making some …[Read More]
Dust devils are like miniature tornadoes, they form when a pocket of hot air near the surface moves fast upward and meets cooler air above it. As the air rapidly rises, the column of hot air is stretched vertically, thereby moving mass closer to the axis of rotation, which causes intensification of the spinning effect …[Read More]
Pictured here is a solitary mangrove tree, rooted off the northern coast of the Indonesian island Flores. While this tree has the shallow sandy reef to itself, mangroves are often found clumped together in large forests covering tropical and subtropical coastlines. The propped-up roots of mangrove trees often tangle together, creating a dense natural barrier …[Read More]
A couple of Chinstrap penguins (Pygoscelis antarctica) at their nesting site on Deception Island, maritime Antarctica. 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 …[Read More]
