There’s a lot of emphasis on outreach to older students, i.e. those who are contemplating further education and may well wish to pursue a career in science, but shouldn’t we also target our efforts at the younger generation? Sam Illingworth highlights the importance of outreach to primary school kids – and of catching them at an age when they’re most likely to be inspired… From my experiences work ...[Read More]
Imaggeo on Mondays: Shaken, not stirred – sediment shows signs of past earthquakes
Nore Praet, a PhD student from Ghent University in Belgium, brings us this week’s Imaggeo on Mondays. She sets the scene for an investigation into past earthquakes and explains how peering through a lake’s icy surface and its murky waters, and into the sediment below can help scientists find out more about the impact of earthquakes in the future… Early this year, I set off with a group of scientis ...[Read More]
Geosciences Column: Did Mediterranean salt change the global climate?
The latest Geosciences Column is brought to you by Annabel Slater, who describes a time of dramatic change in the Mediterranean. Slater shares the results of a recently published Climate of the Past study and sheds light on how – in the context of global climate – a little salt can go a long way… Many of us worry about the effects of too much salt on our health, not its effects on global climate. ...[Read More]
Finding funding: a rough guide to getting your research wishes granted
Finding funding to support your research is always a challenge, but never more so than when you’ve not done it before. During the EGU 2014 General Assembly, Grant Allen gave an excellent short course for early-career researchers on getting to grips with grant applications. His fantastically appropriate name aside, we couldn’t have asked for a better person to do the job: bursting with tips from st ...[Read More]
Imaggeo on Mondays: Plate it up – a recipe for sea ice errors
Last week, a team of cryospheric scientists published a paper in The Cryosphere that showed how tiny plates of ice can lead to spurious estimates of sea ice thickness. This week, we’re featuring their findings, as well as some spectacular sea ice images in the latest in our Imaggeo on Mondays series… Viewing the poles from above is a stunning sight – a seemingly endless expanse of bril ...[Read More]
Geosciences Column: Meshing models with the small-scale ocean
The latest Geosciences Column is brought to you by Nikita Marwaha, who explains how a new generation of marine models is letting scientists open up the oceans. The new technique, described in Ocean Science, reveals what’s happening to ocean chemistry and biology at scales that are often hard to model… Diving into the depths of the ocean without getting your feet wet is possible through biogeochemi ...[Read More]
Imaggeo on Mondays: Soil and water conservation in the Dogon Plateau, Mali
Velio Coviello, a scientist from the Research Institute for Hydrogeological Protection, Italy, and one of the winners of the EGU 2014 Photo Contest, brings us this week’s Imaggeo on Mondays. He sheds light on his winning image and the problems associated with conserving soils and water in Western Africa… This picture was taken on Mali’s Dogon plateau during the dry season, in the course of a late ...[Read More]
Real life Minesweeper
Reading GeoLog when you should be working? We are all guilty of a little procrastination, but, sometimes, the parallels between science and the games we play to postpone the next write-up are closer than you’d think. Victor Archambault, a scientist from US Radar, reveals how playing Minesweeper mimics the way geoscientists analyse data in the field… We have all played the infamous Minesweeper that ...[Read More]
GeoEd: Demonstrating geoscience in the classroom
Geosciences Information For Teachers (GIFT) aims to get teachers engaged with real research – and real researchers – through intensive three-day workshops held at the General Assembly. The workshops not only help teachers get to grips with up-to-date science, but also put them in the centre of an energetic scientific conference, even offering teachers the chance to present posters, alongside other ...[Read More]
Imaggeo on Mondays: Long-lived lakes have a lot to tell
The world’s oldest, deepest freshwater lake lies in southeast Siberia: Lake Baikal. Stretching some 600 kilometres across the Russian landscape, Baikal marks what the very early stages of a new ocean – an ancient rift that cleaved the centre of Asia apart throughout the Palaeozoic, Mesozoic and Cenozoic. Today, there are still signs of tectonic activity and the rift continues to diverge 4 mm furth ...[Read More]