The Athabasca Glacier is located in Jasper National Park, in the Canadian Rockies. It is the largest of seven named distributary glaciers carrying ice away from the Columbia Icefield, the largest icefield in the Rocky Mountains. This picture shows a summer meltwater stream running on the surface of the ice disappear in a moulin – a vertical shaft forming part of the glacier’s internal plumbing sys ...[Read More]
GeoTalk: Talking about ‘ocean burps’ with James Rae
Meet James Rae, a research fellow at the Earth & Environmental Sciences Department at the Universty of St. Andrews and this year’s recipient of the Biogeosciences Division Outstanding Young Scientists Award.
Trying to understand the reasons behind the global warming of our climate is a never ending quest for scientists across the geosciences. Scientists often rely on deciphering past change to help us understand, and perhaps predict, what might happen in the future. Many will be familiar with the common saying ‘the past is the key to the future’. This is exactly what James Rae, a research fellow at th ...[Read More]
Imaggeo on Mondays: The organisation of a river system
The nature organization of the river system . Credit: Tatiana Feskova (distributed via imaggeo.egu.eu)
The picture shows the Elbe Rivervalley, one of the major rivers of Central Europe. It was taken from the Bastei Bridge close to Rathen, which towers 194 meters above the Elbe River in the state of Saxony in the south-eastern Germany. This region belongs to the national park known as Saxon Switzerland. Together with the Bohemian Switzerland in the Czech Republic, the Saxon Switzerland National Park ...[Read More]
Geosciences Column: Soil in art
Soil profiles and associated vegetation represented as paintings in Walter Kubiena’s textbook (1953) Bestimmungsbuch und Systematik
der Böden Europas (The Soils of Europe). Taken from Feller et al., 2015 .
When you think of soil, what is the first thing that comes to mind? The answer will depend on your perception of soil: to some it has a patriotic meaning (“soil of Britain”, for example), while to others it has a strong agricultural connection and to an Earth scientist, well, it’ll depend on their field of expertise. A geotechnical engineer’s perception of soil is different to how it might be view ...[Read More]