topography

Travels in Geology: A World Turned Upside Down

Terri Cook March 27, 2020

North Table Mountain in Golden, Colorado (Photo credit: Terri Cook).

Last weekend, with a strict, stay-at-home coronavirus order looming on the horizon, I decided to practice social distancing by escaping on one last hike. Since I’m currently in Colorado, I chose to climb North Table Mountain, the remnant of an ancient basalt lava flow located on the outskirts of Denver. Locally this mesa, along with its twin located a short distance to the south, are popula ...[Read More]

GeoTalk: To understand how ice sheets flow, look at the bedrock below

Olivia Trani August 17, 2018

A glacier in the Sukkertoppen ice cap, southwest Greenland, flows down a rocky canyon like those mapped in Mathieu's recent work (Credit: Michael Studinger/NASA)

Geotalk is a regular feature highlighting early career researchers and their work. In this interview we speak to Mathieu Morlighem, an associate professor of Earth System Science at the University of California, Irvine who uses models to better understand ongoing changes in the Cryosphere. At the General Assembly he was the recipient of a 2018 Arne Richter Award for Outstanding Early Career Scient ...[Read More]

Imaggeo on Mondays: recreating geological processes in the lab

Laura Roberts-Artal April 11, 2016

Geomorphic analog experiment (Normal Fault) . Credit: Stephane Dominguez (distributed via imaggeo.egu.eu)

Many of the processes which take place on Earth happen over very long time scales, certainly when compared to the life span of a person. The same is true for geographical scale. Many of the processes which dominate how our planet behaves are difficult to visualise given the vast distances (and depths) over which they occur. To overcome this difficulty, scientists have developed and resorted to a n ...[Read More]

The known unknowns – the outstanding 49 questions in Earth Sciences (Part IV)

Laura Roberts-Artal October 17, 2014

We are coming to the end of the known unknowns series and so far we have explored issues which mainly affect the inner workings of our planet. Today we’ll take a look at the surface expression of the geological processes which shape the Earth. Topography significantly affects our daily life and is formed via an interplay between primarily tectonics and climate, but it also affected by biological, ...[Read More]