This week’s Imaggeo on Mondays is brought to you by the photographer himself, Antonio Jordán (Univerity of Sevilla, Spain), who describes the impact of forest fires on soil properties. This photo was taken while planning some field experiments: in the image, several water drops are resting on a surface soil layer without infiltrating. This process is known as water repellency. Water repellency is ...[Read More]
Imaggeo on Mondays: Kalalau Valley
At over 5 million years old, the island of Kauai is the oldest island in the Hawaiian Achipelago. Hawaii, Maui and Oahu are all younger and lie further to the southeast. This island chronology is no coincidence – the Archipelago formed as a result of intra-plate volcanic activity. Intra-plate volcanism occurs where an upwelling magma plume or ‘hot spot’ lies beneath a continental plate. In this ca ...[Read More]
Geosciences Column: The contribution of climate change to water scarcity in the MENA region
In this month’s Geoscience’s column, Alex Stubbings discusses the water scarcity problems in the Middle East and North Africa region and the recent developments in modelling water resources here. The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region is considered the most water-scarce region in the world. As such, the region faces a multitude of challenges in the 21st century including population growt ...[Read More]
Geosciences Column: Hazard perception – how great is the risk of a rockfall?
In this month’s Geoscience’s column, Sara Mynott discusses the geological hazards associated with climate warming and how recent research sheds new light on our understanding of rockfall frequency. Rockfalls are the free-falling movement of bedrock material from a rock face, a phenomenon also encompassed by the terms ‘landslide’, ‘rockslide’ and ‘rock avalanche’. They range from small debris falls ...[Read More]
Imaggeo on Mondays: Rainbow in stone
Nothing better characterises the wild US West than endless landscapes of red hoodoos, spires of rock protruding from the bottom of an arid drainage basin or badland. Found mainly in desert and dry, hot areas, hoodoos are distinctive from similarly-shaped formations, such as spires or pinnacles, because their profiles vary in thickness throughout their length. Their distinctive colour bands are the ...[Read More]
Imaggeo on Mondays: Amazonian floodplain
After the Nile, the Amazon River is the second longest river in the world and, by releasing up to 300,000 cubic metres per second into the Atlantic Ocean, accounts for approximately one-fifth of the planet’s total river flow. The river and its tributaries are characterised by extensive annual flooding of over 350,000 square kilometres of forested areas. Floodplain water levels may exceed 9m. Not a ...[Read More]
Imaggeo on Mondays: Storm in Mount Waddington
This week’s Imaggeo on Mondays is brought to you by the photographer herself, Marion Bisiaux (now at Stendhal University, Grenoble, France), who tells us about her exciting field trip to the British Columbia’s Coast Range. This picture was taken during the Waddington Range Ice Core Project in which I participated during my PhD at the University of Nevada, Reno, US and at the Desert Research Instit ...[Read More]
Geosciences Column: Spotting signs of sea-quakes
A French and Algerian study team seeks markers of underwater earthquakes off the Algerian coast. The team also matched the site’s paleoseismic history to land-based historical reports. Wayne Deeker reports. The Mediterranean Sea represents the boundary between the African and Eurasian plates. Yet the fault segment off the Algerian coast is one of the most active in the western Mediterranean. It is ...[Read More]
Imaggeo on Mondays: Irish coast
Among geoscientists, the beautiful island of Ireland is best known for its Giant’s Causeway, an area with some 40,000 polygonal columns of layered basalt that formed 60 million years ago as a result of a volcanic eruption. But another recognisable feature of the Emerald Isle, is its lush green vegetation, a product of the island’s mild climate and frequent rainfall. It was on a rare sunny day of a ...[Read More]
Imaggeo on Mondays: Melting ice
The speed and extent of Greenland’s ice sheet melt dominated the media over the summer, and for good reason. Dramatic satellite images showed that, in just a few days, 97% of the island’s ice sheet surface thawed, melting over a larger area than at any time in more than 30 years of satellite observations. Usually, during the summer only around half of the surface of Greenland’s ice sheet melts and ...[Read More]