GeoLog

natural hazards

Imaggeo on Mondays: Flying Rocks

Imaggeo on Mondays:  Flying Rocks

The picture was taken at a hillslope close to the glacier tongue of the Great Aletsch Glacier, the largest glacier in the Alps. With a length of 23 km it is located in the eastern Bernese Alps of Switzerland and composed of the three smaller glaciers Aletschfirn, Jungfraufirn and Eternal snow field converging at Concordia where the ice thickness was measured to be around 900m. The whole area was d ...[Read More]

Imaggeo on Mondays: Drilling a landslide

Imaggeo on Mondays: Drilling a landslide

That landslides are hazardous goes without saying; the risk posed by them will largely depend on where they occur and their exact characteristics, which makes understanding the mechanisms which trigger them, as well as predicting when they might happen, extremely difficult. Today’s Imaggeo on Mondays image, brought to you by Ekrem Canli, a PhD student at the University of Vienna, is an example of ...[Read More]

Studying an active volcano – in pictures

Studying an active volcano – in pictures

Santiaguito volcano in Guatemala is one of the most active volcanoes in Central America: currently erupting every 45-90 mintues, from its active lava dome Caliente, while at the same time sending a lava flow down its flanks. This makes it an ideal study object for volcanology. A group of volcanologists from the University of Liverpool, in the UK, installed a network of geophysical stations around ...[Read More]

The day the Earth trembled: A first-hand account of the 25 April Nepal earthquake

The day the Earth trembled: A first-hand account of the 25 April Nepal earthquake

On the 25th April 2015, Viktor Bruckman, a researcher at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, and a team of his colleagues were a few hours into a hike between the settlements of Lamabagar, in a remote area of northeastern Nepal, and the Lapchi Monastery when a magnitude 7.8 earthquake struck Nepal. Their journey cut short by the trembling Earth, stranded in the heights of the Himalayas, this is thei ...[Read More]