A tranquil crater lake, on top of a small cinder cone on the flanks of Sollipulli volcano, Chile. Location: 38.927 S, 71.516 W.
Retired blogs
A double-whammy of dinosaur awesomeness. Pun totally intended.
This is a post about pachycephalosaurs. It’s not a post about feathered dinosaurs, huge dinosaurs, or any of the ones which you may be more familiar with from popular media. Pachycephalosaurs were the dome-headed little scrappers of the Cretaceous, around 85 to 66 million years ago. Their name means ‘thick-skulled lizard’ (pachy: thick, cephalon: skull, …[Read More]
Geoscience Careers In International Development
Earlier this year I gave a presentation at the UCL IRDR Careers Forum – on working within international development. Today I will be joining many other sectors at a similar event organised by the Earth Science Department at the University of Cambridge. In this post we share some of the top tips, ideas and reflections …[Read More]
New study shows nitrate leaches to groundwater for over five decades
A new and very interesting study just came out in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) the other day titled “Long-term fate of nitrate fertilizer in agricultural soils”. This paper addresses some very interesting and extremely important questions using isotopic geochemical tools. The question central to this paper is what happens …[Read More]
Typhoon Haiyan
We were extremely saddened to hear at the end of last week and over the weekend about the destruction brought by Typhoon Haiyan, impacting the Philippines last week and (at the time of writing) moving towards Vietnam. The event caused widespread damage, with reports suggesting thousands of deaths and an order of magnitude more displaced. The impact …[Read More]
What’s up in Bolivia?
James Hickey is a PhD student in the School of Earth Sciences at the University of Bristol. A geophysicist and volcanologist by trade, his PhD project is focussed on attempting to place constraints on volcanic unrest using integrated geodetic modelling. To many, Bolivia is just an unassuming landlocked country in South America, perhaps most famous …[Read More]
Raising the Dead Sea
The Dead Sea is one of the planet’s truly otherworldly places: a peculiarity of water distribution, climate and altitude, it is even more extroadinary in that it is a site of religious, cultural and political significance. Viewed by many as a natural wonder, its characteristics and location within one of the most entrenched political …[Read More]
10 Minute Interview – Promoting Earthquake Education amongst Persian Communities
During the summer I took part in a fantastic public engagement activity, I’m a Scientist, Get me Out of Here! It’s an X-factor style competition where school students get to meet and interact with scientists. The students are the judges and vote for their favourite scientist to win a cash prize to communicate their work …[Read More]
Friday Photo (104): Blog Competition Prize Presentation
Earlier this year we announced the winners of our Blog Competition. We were very pleased to present the winners with their prizes and certificates at the recent GfGD Conference. From left to right… David Litchfield (Best Photograph), Philip Irwin (Best Blog), Robin Wylie (Best Blog), Rosalie Tostevin (GfGD National Committee) and Professor Alan Lord (Secretary …[Read More]
Chelyabinsk asteroid – crowdsourced science?
Croudsourced data from dash-cams, videos and photos reveal the secrets of the Chelyabinsk asteroid. Credit: Alexeya The asteroid impact that burst over Chelyabinsk, Russia, on the morning of February 15 has provided a huge collection of new data that scientists have been analysing since. This week, three papers, two in Nature and one in …[Read More]