soil science

GeoTalk: #BlackInTheMud panellists reflect on Black in Geoscience Week 2020

Tiara Moore October 16, 2020

Image credit: @BlkinGeoscience, Tiara Moore and Timnit Kefela.

After telling a personal and traumatizing field experience to my fellow colleagues of color, I found that we all had shared similar events! Shocked and outraged, I wanted to find a place to expose and highlight these events thus the #BlackInTheMud panel was created. This event was inspired by this picture. And it’s so funny because this photo has been used, until it’s almost like a stock photo on ...[Read More]

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

Hazel Gibson August 26, 2020

'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]

Could beavers be responsible for long-debated deposits?

Sara Mynott May 3, 2019

The evidence: a beaver dam and surrounding swamp in Lithuania. Credit: Jūsų darbas via Wikimedia Commons

Following her presentation at the European Geosciences Union General Assembly in Vienna, I caught up with geomorphologist and environmental detective Annegret Larsen from the University of Lausanne, Switzerland, about beavers, baffling sediments and a case she’s been solving for the past seven years. Back in 2012 the German geomorphology community was seriously debating the source of buried black ...[Read More]

Imaggeo on Mondays: Namibia’s mysterious fairy circles

Olivia Trani July 9, 2018

The mysterious fairy circles. Credit: Hezi Yizhaq (distributed via imaggeo.egu.eu)

The grassy Namibian desert is pock-marked with millions of circular patches of bare earth just like these shown in the picture between linear dunes. Viewed from a balloon, they make the ground look like a moonscape. Commonly known as fairy circles, the patches range from two to 12 metres across and appear in a 2000 kilometre strip that stretches from Angola to South Africa. For many decades, the f ...[Read More]