During my PhD I was working at the German Neumayer III station in Antarctica for my research on polar atmospheric chemistry. Since my instrument was set up on an observatory south of the main station, every day I would walk past a Scott pyramid tent to go and do my research. One day, in the midst of an Antarctic storm, I caught sight of the tent deep in the drifting snow, and took this picture. Th ...[Read More]
Imaggeo on Mondays: Tertiary Flying Saucers
Besides for the purposes of documenting my research, I like to take photos of rocks under the microscope also because of their aesthetic appeal. It’s an hidden, marvelous world. These flying-saucer-looking objects are in fact the fossil skeletons of a Nummulites (the larger) and a Discocyclina (the one on top left), both belong to the phylum of Foraminifera. These single-celled organisms occupyied ...[Read More]
Imaggeo on Mondays: The Tempest
Measuring the aurora. This picture was taken while doing an optical/radar coordinated campaign in Svalbard, Norway, near the settlement of Longyearbyen. In this campaign, we were measuring for the first time the polarisation of the auroral ‘red line’ of atomic oxygen with a photopolarimeter and were running the radars in order to have a better understanding of the state of the ionosphe ...[Read More]
Imaggeo on Mondays: The sun rises also in the middle of nowhere
Uluru in Australia is one of the most visibly recognisable geological features in the world. This sandstone formation covers an area of 3.3 kilometres and stands 345 metres above the plains around it. According to geoscientists, the rocks that form Uluru were deposited in an inland sea during the Cambrian Period approximately 500 million years ago. The arkose sandstones were then uplifted and fold ...[Read More]