Hi Marisa. Thank you for joining us today! Could you tell our readers a bit about yourself and your research? Hi, I am a geologist and organic geochemist, currently working as a postdoc at the NIOZ Netherlands Institute for Sea Research based on the island Texel. After my geology-focused undergraduate and master studies in Germany at the RWTH Aachen and Heidelberg University, I graduated wi ...[Read More]
A dramatic evening sky puts the frame to a photo taken during the Brazilian Antarctic expedition to James Ross Island in 2016. Brazilian palaeontologists and soil scientists together with German soil scientists spent over 40 days on the island to search for fossils and sample soils at various locations of the northern part of the island. The island was named after Sir James Clark Ross who led the ...[Read More]
A couple of Chinstrap penguins (Pygoscelis antarctica) at their nesting site on Deception Island, maritime Antarctica. Sea birds contribute importantly to biogeochemical cycles in coastal ecosystems and on islands. Feeding on the marine food chain and nesting on land, they carry large amounts of marine nutrients into terrestrial ecosystems. This might be of particular importance for the nitrogen ( ...[Read More]
There are plenty of hostile habitats across the globe but some flora and fauna species are resourceful enough to adapt and make extreme environments their home. From heat-loving ants of the Sahara to microbes living in the light-deprived ocean depths, through to beatles who brave the bitterly cold Alaskan winter, there are numerous examples of plants, animals and bugs who strive in environments of ...[Read More]
That soils are vital to secure our future supplies of water, food, as well as aiding adaptation to climate change and sustaining the planet’s biosphere is a subject we’ve featured on the blog as recently as the summer. That’s because never have humans been more out of touch with the vital importance of this natural resource. Inhabiting among soil particles thrives an even less familiar, but equall ...[Read More]
With the Imaggeo Photo Contest opening last week, what better than feature one of the 2015 competition finalists as this week’s Imaggeo on Mondays image. In this post, Irene Angeluccetti, author of the photograph, writes about the threatened ecosystem of Mono Lake. If you’ve been inspired by Irene’s photograph, why not entre the photo contest for your chance to win a free registration to the Gener ...[Read More]
What are the most interesting, cutting-edge and compelling research topics within the scientific areas represented in the EGU divisions? Ground-breaking and innovative research features yearly at our annual General Assembly, but what are the overarching ideas and big research questions that still remain unanswered? We spoke to some of our division presidents and canvased their thoughts on what the ...[Read More]
The biosphere is an incredible thing – whether you’re looking at it through the eye of a satellite and admiring the Amazon’s vast green landscape, or looking at Earth’s surface much more closely and watching the life that blossoms on scales the naked eye might never see, you are sure to be inspired. Geochemist, Antonina Lisa Gagliano has been working on the slopes of Pantelleria Island in an effor ...[Read More]
Some aspects of Earth Science are truly interdisciplinary and this week’s Imaggeo on Mondays photograph is testament to that. The maiden voyage of the research cruise SA Agulhas II offered the perfect opportunity to combine oceanographic research, as well as climate science studies. Raissa Philibert, a biogeochemistry PhD student, took this picture of the daily release of a weather balloon by mete ...[Read More]