I grew up watching my dad come home covered in soot. For most of his life, he worked as a firefighter in a natural reserve in Galicia, in northern Spain, a region of green mountains and steep terrain, almost Lord of the Rings in its landscape, but also a place where fire moves quickly and is notoriously difficult to control. Firefighting crews there are used to the fact that, to even begin work, t ...[Read More]
Findings supporting the urgency of climate change are coming ever-so-fast. Yet, so it seems that various economic, political, and ideological groups are stepping up their denial game. The complexity of the current state was reflected during the EGU25 press conference “Hot takes & policy quakes: When geoscience meets social science.” The speakers, Florian Ulrich Jehn [a], Chris Smit ...[Read More]
Did you know that some of the scientists of each General Assembly get invited to a press conference to face a group of curious journalists? I did not – but as press assistant for the #EGU24, I had the unique chance to attend the press conference “Unveiling Antarctica’s secrets: new research brings us one step closer to predicting the future of the icy continent”. Prominent scientists (Fig.1) ...[Read More]
A few weeks ago, at the European Geosciences Union General Assembly EGU23, a group of researchers from different disciplines briefed the media about the impact of war on the oceans, sands, and people. Among them, Florian Ulrich Jehn’s presentation stood out for its rather unlikely proposition: that seaweed appeared to be a promising candidate as a resilient food solution in nuclear winter. I ...[Read More]
Around the world, societies have many different ways to define the seasons, but for most people a season is identified by a set of culturally specified events, such as the arrival of migratory birds, certain anticipated weather patterns, or a range of expected temperatures. Over recent years many studies have examined the various ways that anthropogenic climate change has affected the way that our ...[Read More]
Many wild animals make extraordinary long-distance journeys, whether by land, by air or even by sea. Ancestral, and even some modern, humans have likewise undertaken equally impressive odysseys across and between continents. In order to highlight these “epic journeys,” four different research projects were presented during an EGU press conference held on Wednesday. During the virtual presentations ...[Read More]
The seafloor mapping pioneered by Marie Tharp, an American geologist and cartographer, though originally underappreciated, ended up playing a key role in the acceptance of the theory of plate tectonics. This week the EGU is highlighting Tharp’s groundbreaking contributions by hosting both a press conference and a session in her honour at the Union’s virtual annual meeting, Sharing Geoscience Onlin ...[Read More]
This year, as you know, EGU’s annual meeting is taking place online, which means that there is even more to communicate to our members than usual! So we recruited three Virtual Press Assistants in order to help the communications team out. These amazing volunteers include two master’s students from Switzerland: Laura Endres and Bjorn Bauhofer, as well as Margot Courtillat, who just earned her doct ...[Read More]
Earlier this month we shared a post on how you can keep up to date with all the science being presented at the General Assembly via our social media channels. This week we share with you how you can tune into the conference action, live! Many of the EGU General Assembly highlights will be streamed live, so if you can’t make it to Vienna this year, you can still watch sessions like the Union Sympos ...[Read More]
NASA scientists have revealed surprising new information about Jupiter’s magnetic field from data gathered by their space probe, Juno. Unlike earth’s magnetic field, which is symmetrical in the North and South Poles, Jupiter’s magnetic field has startlingly different magnetic signatures at the two poles. The information has been collected as part of the Juno program, NASA’s latest mission to unrav ...[Read More]