Happy International Soil Day (5 December)! Today, we’re celebrating the incredible capacity of soil organic carbon (SOC) to fight climate change. But hold the celebratory cake! A paper in the journal SOIL by Raza et al. (2025) has exposed an unexpected scientific blind spot, and it’s a bit surprising! The paper, titled “Missing the input: the underrepresentation of plant physiology in ...[Read More]
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]
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]
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]
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]
Iceland is a country of dramatically rugged landscapes. The region is home to sweeping valleys and mountain ranges, dotted with lava fields, large glaciers, hot springs and impressive waterfalls. The territory is also notoriously treeless. As of 2016, forests only made up 1.9 percent of Iceland, according to the Icelandic Forest Service. However, about a thousand years ago the country’s landscape ...[Read More]
When you think of soil, what is the first thing that comes to mind? The answer will depend on your perception of soil: to some it has a patriotic meaning (“soil of Britain”, for example), while to others it has a strong agricultural connection and to an Earth scientist, well, it’ll depend on their field of expertise. A geotechnical engineer’s perception of soil is different to how it might be view ...[Read More]
Since it started, the EGU Blog Network has had great coverage of geochemistry, palaeontology and geoscience in global development, but what about the other fields in the geosciences? Well, over the past couple of months we’ve been seeking out some fantastic Earth science bloggers who are keen to share their knowledge, experiences and the latest research in their fields with you. They’ve put togeth ...[Read More]