I am very excited to be hosting the 60th Accretionary Wedge at GeoSphere! Sorry my own contribution is so slow in coming…it has been a busy month PhD wise. In fact, I expect it will be a busy year PhD wise since I am hoping to submit in the Fall of 2014 and I have got a LOT of writing to do. Anyway, in the call for posts I said: For this wedge the topic will be momentous discoveries in geolo ...[Read More]
When many people hear the word groundwater they imagine a raging underground torrent of water flowing along a pathway called an aquifer. Well, sorry to disappoint you, but you could not be more wrong about how groundwater exists and flows. In this post we will discuss the very basics of groundwater science (hydrogeology) and flow. What is groundwater? As the name implies groundwater is simply wate ...[Read More]
I am lucky enough to play host to the 60th edition of the Accretionary Wedge. First, I’d just like to highlight the fact that there have been 60 previous and excellent wedges and ! WOW. This has to be one of the best blog carnivals out there, and here is to another 60 great AW’s in the future. There are lots of sayings out there about how science is a journey with many steps and paths ...[Read More]
Here is my Goldschmidt summary part 3 comprising both day 3 and day 4. I had to prepare my own talk, that I gave on Thursday (day 4) so I had to put the blog on hold to practice. Here are a few of the most interesting talks that I went to: Fred Jourdan hailing all the way from Curtin University in South Australia gave a talk called – Volcanoes, asteroid impacts and mass extinctions (abstrac ...[Read More]
Day 2 of Goldschmidt 2013 is done and what a great day it was. Hectic, but conferences always are. There is just so much to see and do, so many people to talk to and so many people to meet for the first time that it can be a bit overwhelming. The best thing to do is grab a coffee, and dive right in. My first talk of the day was by J. Schmitt and was called CF4 and CO2 – Coupling Weathering and Car ...[Read More]
Wow! I have finally arrived at Goldschmidt 2013 and it is so, so great to be here! Day 1 was already a whirlwind. Unfortunately, I missed the icebreaker last night and arrived a bit late this morning due to scheduling conflicts so I missed a few talks, but I am here now and ready to listen, learn, discuss and blog! Talks I went to today: Sadly, I missed the first talk I wanted to see. My friend, E ...[Read More]
It isn’t long until the start of the annual V.M. Goldschmidt conference, the main international meeting for geochemists to share and discuss ideas. This year’s meeting in Florence, Italy, is set to be one of the largest yet with over 4000 abstracts submitted. The European Association of Geochemistry and the organisers of this 23rd Goldschmidt meeting have assembled a team of writers from the geobl ...[Read More]
The EGU blog network has been running for about 10 months and has been a great experience for me so far. The blog network has now expanded with 6 new blogs, covering a variety of topics, and I’d like to take this opportunity to welcome the new EGU bloggers! In no particular order they are: 1. Flo Bullough (@flo_dem) and Marion Ferrat (@mle_marion) will be writing about climate and environmen ...[Read More]
For this AW I had originally drawn a blank. I don’t have that many pictures of signs in my photo collection and most of them really aren’t that interesting anyways. However, I was struck by a flash of inspiration on a hike in Gatineau Park last night. My girlfriend and I were doing the beautiful King Mountain trail plus a nice add on loop that took us off the beaten path as well. While ...[Read More]
The 40th edition of the photo of the week highlights the mudlfow from a retrogressive thaw slump near Fort McPherson in the Northwest Territories, where I did field work for a few weeks in 2010 and 2011. The first photo in this series highlights the slump itself. I took this photo from a helicopter and the entire slump is approximately 1 kilometer wide and has 3 lobes. The mudflow starts where eve ...[Read More]