After 3 years of blogging, (can you believe Jenga has been going for 3 years already?!), the time has come to wave goodbye to the EGU Blog network. Dan and I have very much enjoyed being part of this active, fun and engaging community of geoscience bloggers. However, our circumstances have changed signifiantly since we …[Read More]
This post is brought to you by Natasha Dowey, a dear friend and a volcanologist turned petroleum geologist. Just like us, Natasha has a passion for outreach. In this post she explains why it matters and a number of ways you can get involved. The importance of communication in geoscience is becoming ever more widely …[Read More]
I certainly don’t need to write at any length about the fact I think it is crucial that scientists communicate their research with the public. Over the summer we’ll be sharing a few posts on this very subject. To get the ball rolling I thought I’d focus on one aspect of science communication (#scicomm): how …[Read More]
It’s been a shamefully long time since I last posted, or carried out a 10 minute interview, for the blog. What better place to find willing recruits and interesting research to showcase than the largest annual gathering of geoscientists: the American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall Meeting? For those of you who’ve been before, there is …[Read More]
The severe flooding that has hit much of northern England during the last few weeks (and northeastern Scotland right now) has generated significant discussion and debate about why floods happen, how often they occur and what we can do about it. The fact is there’s no simple answer to any of these questions: the hydrometeorological …[Read More]
So it has been a while since I last blogged, attributed to various excuses – fieldwork, moving job, moving house – but moving forwards I intend to spend more time discussing the myriad aspects of geoscience I find fascinating. One good example is a recent paper from Janice Brahney (University of British Columbia) and colleagues …[Read More]
It’s not always easy visualising the complex processes which operate on planet Earth. Even more difficult, at least for me, is explaining them to others. That’s why I’m always on the look out for tools that might just help me with that and which I can share with others too. Enter the NASA Visualisation Explorer, …[Read More]
This week, my PhD supervisor, Andy Biggin, had a paper out in Nature. The findings of this new research point towards the Earth’s inner core being older than we’d previously thought. Recent estimates, suggest that the Earth’s solid inner core started forming between half a billion and one billion years ago. However, Andy’s (and co-workers) …[Read More]
As part of my PhD research, I spent quite a lot of time at the Fort Hoofddijk (informally known as The Fort) – the palaeomagnetic laboratory of the University of Utrecht (in the Netherlands). For a little insight into what carrying research out in a 19th Century bunker, housed within the grounds of the botanical …[Read More]
“The Ph.D. is an emotional roller coaster, and how well students react to these emotional pressures is crucial to their success, ” says Inger Mewburn, of The Thesis Whisperer fame and Director of research training at the Australian National University. With the emotional and personal strain a PhD can cause, I couldn’t agree with Inger more. …[Read More]
