GeoLog

fieldwork

Imaggeo On Mondays: Contrasting Colors of Pinnacles and Mountains

Imaggeo On Mondays: Contrasting Colors of Pinnacles and Mountains

Despite its rugged appearance of sandstone pinnacles and arches, the ecosystem of Arches National Park in Utah, U.S.A. is very fragile. Beyond the normal ‘high desert’ environment, this beautiful landscape is home to microbial communities in the soil called cryptobiotic crusts. These biological soil crusts are very vulnerable to damage and when harmed they can take years to grow back. These barren ...[Read More]

Weathering the storm from a research vessel

Weathering the storm from a research vessel

Fieldwork can take geoscientists to some of the most remote corners of the Earth in some of the harshest conditions imaginable, but stories from the field hardly make it into a published paper. In this blog post, Raffaele Bonadio, a PhD student in seismology at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies in Ireland, shares a particularly formidable experience in the field while aboard a research ves ...[Read More]

Imaggeo on Mondays: Air samples from afar

Imaggeo on Mondays: Air samples from afar

I’ve taken many photos on fieldwork, everywhere from Malaysia to Antarctica but this particular photo was taken in my ‘home’ lab at the University of East Anglia (UEA) in Norwich, UK. Atmospheric scientists collect air samples canisters such as these from around the world: from high altitude research aircraft (such as the Geophysica), long-term measurement time series (such as Ca ...[Read More]