This image, captured in Chile by Lilli Freda from Italy’s Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia, depicts a cloudless sky, a calm blue lake (Llanquihué), and a picture-perfect mountain with a snow-covered top. But the serenity of the landscape is only apparent: the triangular structure in the background is in fact the very active and explosive Osorno volcano. “Osorno is a 2652-m-high strat ...[Read More]
Imaggeo on Mondays: Orange anvils
The anvils in this picture are not heavy steel or iron blocks but rather soft clouds coloured orange by the setting sun. The term is used to describe the upper part of a cumulonimbus or thunderstorm cloud that tends to spread out in an anvil shape as warm air bumps up against the bottom of the stratosphere (the atmospheric layer between 15-50 kilometres height). Katja Weigel, a researcher at the I ...[Read More]
Geosciences Column: Life in the aftermath of hydrothermal vents
Pioneering new study explores the structure and function of microbial communities at expired hydrothermal vent sites Undiscovered lifeforms abound in Earth’s most seemingly inhospitable environments, as demonstrated by the recent discovery of bacteria living deep underneath the seafloor. An equally extreme environment can be found in the vicinity of hydrothermal vents, where water is expelled from ...[Read More]
Our next door neighbours
The EGU Executive Office is housed in one of the buildings of the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences of the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Germany. The building also hosts the Palaeontological Museum Munich, the public part of the Bavarian State Collection for Palaeontology and Geology, which is dedicated to the history of life and the Earth, and displays fossils from all eras ...[Read More]