The last decade has been inundated with reports of environmental disasters impacting the lives of billions of people around the world. While news coverage of floods, hurricanes, earthquakes or wild fires are always accompanied with spectacular images of destruction that emphasise the speed at which they strike, a myriad of slow and latent hazards have …[Read More]
Forest fires have once again seized the public consciousness in both Europe and North America. Extreme drought and temperatures contributed to a tinderbox in many forests, and have led to deadly fires across Europe and record-breaking, highly disruptive fires in the USA and Canada, from where I’m currently writing. A simple way to understand fire …[Read More]
This month’s GeoPolicy post is a guest post from Sarah Connors, a Science Officer in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Working Group 1 Technical Support Unit (and former EGU Science Policy Officer). The IPCC is starting its sixth cycle, in which hundreds of scientists take stock of the world’s climate change knowledge by …[Read More]
Extracurricular activities for current and former geosciences students provide great value to early career scientists in terms of networking and broadening their scientific horizon. PhD student Maximilian Döhmann, who studies rock deformation with numerical models based on high temperature and pressure torsion experiments in the Geodynamic Modelling group of GFZ Potsdam, shares his experiences with …[Read More]
Covering a total area of 298 km², the idylic natural atolls and reefs of the Maldives stretch across the Indian Ocean. The tropical nation is famous for it’s crystal clear waters and picture perfect white sand beaches, but how did the 26 ring-shaped atolls and over 1000 coral islands form? Coral reefs commonly form immediately …[Read More]
Post by Anne Van Loon, Lecturer in Physical Geography (Water sciences) at the University of Birmingham, in the United Kingdom. __________________________________________________ In recent years the human dimension of hydrology has become increasingly important. Major flood and drought events have shown how strongly water and society are intertwined (see here and here). The hydro(geo)logical research community is increasingly including this human …[Read More]
Over the past seven months I’ve had the opportunity to visit four growing cities in eastern Africa: Kampala (Uganda), Nairobi (Kenya), Lusaka (Zambia) and Dar es Salaam (Tanzania). The importance of geoscience in delivering SDG 11 (Sustainable Cities and Communities) was evident. “More than half of the world’s population now live in urban areas. By …[Read More]
Volcanic Ash as an Active Agent in the Earth System (VA3): Combining Models and Experiments; Hamburg, Germany, 12–13 September 2016 Volcanic ash is a spectacular companion of volcanic activity that carries valuable information about the subsurface processes. It also poses a range of severe hazards to public health, infrastructure, aviation, and agriculture, and it plays …[Read More]
In an earlier post, we talked briefly about below-ground ice and the consequences of its disappearing. However, to estimate the consequences of disappearing ground ice, one has to know that there actually is ice in the area of study. How much ice is there – and where is it? As the name suggests, below-ground …[Read More]
Off the coast of Germany, a male northern gannet (for ease, we’ll call him Pete) soars above the cold waters of the North Sea. He’s on the hunt for a shoal of fish. Some 40km due south east, Pete’s mate and chick await, patiently, for him to return to the nest with a belly full …[Read More]
