Although more commonly associated with the west coast of the United States, if you visit Cabezón de la Sal in Spain you may come across a stand of giant redwood trees or Sequoia. Around 800 trees were brought to Spain in the 1940s, so are still very young, but even at their young age they are still around 40 meters high! Sequoia groves, as well as being awe-inspiring to look at, provide a uniquely ...[Read More]
A wide variety of webinar sessions were streamed during EGU 2020’s Sharing Geoscience Online, including all of the Great Debates and Union Symposia. The sessions were very well attended, with some sessions having over 700 participants. An extremely high level of engagement meant that in many cases not all of the participants’ questions could be answered in the available time. Union Symposium ...[Read More]
Biochar is a carbon rich product of biomass pyrolysis, a process where biological material is exposed to high temperatures, in the absence of oxygen, to cause the decomposition of that material into various chemical and physical components. By going through this process, biochar can be a valuable soil additive and a carbon sink with a high potential to take up a wide variety of contaminants (throu ...[Read More]
Today marks the centennial of the birth of Marie Tharp, the person responsible for creating the first map of our planet’s ocean floors. Though her work was underappreciated at the time of its publication – mainly because she faced many significant barriers due to her gender – her maps ended up being instrumental evidence in support of the theory of plate tectonics. Marie herself ...[Read More]
Each month we feature specific Divisions of EGU and during the monthly GeoRoundup we will be putting the journals that publish science from those Divisions at the top of the Highlights roundup. For July, the Divisions we are featuring are: Geodesy (G), Ocean Science (OS) and Tectonics and Structural Geology (TS). They are served by the journals: Geoscientific Model Development (GMD), Ocean Science ...[Read More]
We know the topography of the moon better than the Earth’s seafloor, so we need to keep studying the ocean, and, for me, going to sea is the best way. Only twenty percent of the seafloor is already mapped (see the Seabed 2030 Project), leaving eighty percent of our ocean unmapped, unobserved, and unexplored. This is why ocean going research is fundamental, not only for seabed mapping, ...[Read More]
This month for GeoTalk, as we approach the centennial of Marie Tharp’s birth next week, we were lucky enough to speak with the author of her biography ‘Soundings: The Story of the Remarkable Woman Who Mapped the Ocean Floor‘; Hali Felt. Hali has a Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Iowa and has completed residencies at MacDowell, the Sitka Center for Art and Ecolog ...[Read More]
The photo was taken from the International Space Station (ISS), approx. 400 km above the Earth, in the educational project administered by NASA: Sally Ride EarthKAM, Mission 59, November 2017. The image was requested by a team of students from my college, coordinated by me. Even though we weren’t there, on ISS, to trigger the camera, all the locations in which the photographs were taken are ...[Read More]
The world shut down due to COVID-19, but PhDs did not. During these unfamiliar times, most PhD students have found themselves working from home trying more than ever to write as much as possible. Over the past few of months, I have led several online writing retreats in collaboration with doctoral research schools and universities in Norway. They seem to have been very successful to help PhD’s wi ...[Read More]
650 metres below the chilly waves of the North Atlantic Arctic Ocean, equidistant between Norway, Iceland and Greenland, are the Jan Mayen Vent Fields. Home to a series of hydrothermal vents strung along a set of normal faults and fissures that run parallel to the seafloor ridge, this is a strange and fascinating place. Hydrothermal vents are places where tectonic activity provides a way for the h ...[Read More]