GeoLog

soil

Can our oases outlast the dry spell of desertification?

June 28, 2024
Can our oases outlast the dry spell of desertification?
Turpan Oasis in China. Credit: Fang Dong (distributed via imaggeo.egu.eu)

Ever wondered how fast our planet is losing its footing? Imagine this: every time you blink, four football fields’ worth of fertile soil vanish into thin air. According to the UN, that’s a mind-boggling 100 million hectares gobbled up by land degradation each year! But when this happens in dry regions, it morphs into something even more sinister: desertification. Karina Lima, a climate ...[Read More]

Soil bacteria that hunt like a wolfpack? Myxobacteria and their role in the food web

April 16, 2024
A photo of a wolf in the middle and four microscopic images of colourful bacterial cultures around it.
Fig. 1 The resemblance between bacteria and a hunting wolf might not be obvious, but come take a dive into the weird ecology of Myxobacteria (Collage with photo credit Garcia et al. 2010 and Julien Riedel via pexels.com).

Picture this: bacteria that can slime their way around the soil, finding their prey, circling it, closing in on it and lysing it (or making their cell pop), just to feed on their prey. It sounds like a far stretch from a wolf to a bacteria, but even other soil predators, the comparably huge nematode worms ( up to 100 times bigger!), are afraid of these bacterial “wolves”. I went to the Soil System ...[Read More]

Don’t leaf it to the trees: Amazonian soils also work to store carbon.

August 26, 2020
Don’t leaf it to the trees: Amazonian soils also work to store carbon.
'Yasuní National Park' by Jose Schreckinger (distributed via imaggeo.egu.eu)

The Amazon rainforest covers an area of 5.5 million km² and is well known for being an invaluable global resource for carbon storage. But it’s not just the trees and vegetation of the Amazonian rainforest that lock in and store carbon – the very soil in these forests can do the same thing, according to research published in EGU’s journal SOIL earlier this year. In this study Carlos Alberto Quesada ...[Read More]

Epic Journeys: New insights into wildlife and human migrations

May 9, 2020
Epic Journeys: New insights into wildlife and human migrations
Photo by Antoine Baglan (reproduced by permission of Mercator Ocean)

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]