At the border between the Pacific and Australian plates, crossed by the Pacific Ring of Fire, New Zealand is one of the most geologically active countries in the world. Volcanoes abound in this island-country, which contains the “world’s strongest concentration of youthful rhyolotic volcanoes“, and earthquakes are a frequent presence. Mount Ruapehu, a stratovolcano located in the ...[Read More]
Competition: Design an EGU infographic!
Infographics, images containing graphics, text, and statistics, are increasingly being used to share complex scientific concepts with a wider audience. They are powerful communication tools because they can be spread virally across social networks, furthering the public understanding of important areas within the geosciences, including climate change, natural resources, and the solar system. To ce ...[Read More]
Submit your abstract to the 2013 EGU General Assembly!
The call for papers for the 2013 EGU General Assembly (7-12 April, Vienna, Austria) is now open. To submit your abstract, please browse through the sessions on the Programme and use the “Abstract Submission” link corresponding to the session you’d like to submit your paper to. You will be asked to log in to the Copernicus Office Meeting Organizer, for which you will need your Co ...[Read More]
EGU Outreach Committee meets in Tuscany, Italy
Members of the Munich-based Executive Office recently met with other members of the EGU Outreach Committee just outside Pisa, Italy, to brainstorm about the Union’s various outreach activities. The two-day meeting, led by Chairman of the EGU Outreach Committee Niels Hovius, was held primarily to establish a coherent long- and short-term outreach plan for the Union, some of which will be cove ...[Read More]
Imaggeo on Mondays: Trees of time
The Namib-Nauklufy National Park in Namibia is a stunning ecoregion that encompasses part of the Namib Desert and the Nauklufy mountain range. With an area of almost 50,000 square kilometres, the park covers a wide range of landscapes, including gravel plains, tall sand dunes, and an ephemeral river. The park also includes one of the main visitor attractions of Namibia, the Sossusvlei, a large dry ...[Read More]
Geosciences Column: Predicting glacial lake outburst floods
In this month’s Geosciences Column, Amanda Gläser-Bligh writes about SAR (synthetic aperture radar) satellites and how they can be used to map glacier lakes and mitigate related flood hazards. Glaciers are a natural storage system and provide a perennial source of fresh water to the surrounding low-lying areas, which can be used for drinking water, irrigation, or even hydroelectricity. But when gl ...[Read More]
Global Development, Geochemistry, and Velociraptors: Launching the EGU blog network!
Today we proudly launch the EGU’s official blog network, a project we hope will unite a diverse community of insightful bloggers in the Earth, planetary, and space sciences. The aim of our network is to offer blogging researchers an online platform to share their insights with other scientists and, importantly, to distill complex and often misunderstood concepts so they are easier to underst ...[Read More]
Imaggeo on Mondays: Volcano in the tropics
The text of this week’s Imaggeo on Mondays comes from the photographer himself, Brenner Silva. I took this picture from an airliner in September 2010 on my way to the Estación Científica San Francisco, South Ecuador, for field work. The flight route Quito-Loja goes through the two highest volcanoes, Chimborazo and Cotopaxi, of the so-called Avenue of the Volcanos in Ecuador. The pilot, attracted b ...[Read More]
Imaggeo on Mondays: Cloud sandwich
Lenticular clouds, also known as ‘flying saucer clouds’ or ‘cloudships’, have captured the imagination of humans since Biblical times. Normally aligned at right-angles to the direction of the wind, lenticular clouds are stationary, lens-shaped formations that form at high altitudes. Pilots of powered planes tend to avoid flying near lenticular clouds because of turbulence. Glider pilots, on the ot ...[Read More]
EGU Twitter Journal Club: Article 3 – Tree-height data and carbon storage
It’s time for the third edition of the EGU’s Twitter Journal Club, our interactive online discussion about a timely scientific article. If you have not yet taken part in one of these discussions, read more about it in our introductory post and make sure to participate on this third edition! This time, we will be discussing an article recently published in the EGU’s Open Access j ...[Read More]