On a small and isolated island in the Indian Ocean you’ll find an endemic population of Dragon Blood Trees (Dracaena cinnabari). Burly, with an interesting umbrella-shaped fractal canopy, these unique trees are a sight to behold. To see them for yourself, you’ll have to travel to the little known Socotra archipelago. Off the coast of Somalia, but belonging to Yemen, the group of islands boast an i ...[Read More]
Imaggeo on Mondays: Velociraptor in the Zagros Mountains
How many times have you turned your head up to the sky and spotted familiar shapes in the clouds? Viewing structures from afar can reveal interesting, common and, sometimes, funny patterns. Satellite images are often used to map geological terrains. They offer a bird’s eye view of the planet and the opportunity to see broad scale structures, the scale of which would be impossible to grasp from the ...[Read More]
The day the Earth trembled: A first-hand account of the 25 April Nepal earthquake
On the 25th April 2015, Viktor Bruckman, a researcher at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, and a team of his colleagues were a few hours into a hike between the settlements of Lamabagar, in a remote area of northeastern Nepal, and the Lapchi Monastery when a magnitude 7.8 earthquake struck Nepal. Their journey cut short by the trembling Earth, stranded in the heights of the Himalayas, this is thei ...[Read More]
Imaggeo on Mondays: Scales of fluvial dissection
High peaks, winding river channels and a barren landscape all feature in today’s Imaggeo on Mondays image, brought to you by Katja Laute, a geomorphologist from Norway. This photo was taken from an airplane flying over the Zagros Mountains in Iran. The Zagros Mountain range stretches south and west from the borders of Turkey and Russia to the Persian Gulf, and is Iran’s largest mountain ran ...[Read More]