GeoQ, the EGU newsletter, has this month issued its ninth edition. GeoQ is a quarterly newsletter of the European Geosciences Union and it is published online. This issue is themed “The Face of the Earth” to match this year’s theme of the EGU General Assembly. More information about the focus of this year’s GA theme is explained …[Read More]
Latest posts
Geosciences Column: Shifting the O in H2O
Wherever you are in the world’s oceans, you can identify particular bodies of water (provided you have the right equipment) by how salty they are. You can get a feel for how productive that part of the ocean is by measuring a few chemical components in the water column. And, year on year, you will …[Read More]
Aerosols and the pause
There is a new commentary piece in Nature Geoscience by Gavin Schmidt and colleagues on ‘Reconciling warming trends’. The paper investigates several potential causes for the discrepancy between climate model projections and the recent ‘slowdown’ in global surface temperatures, which is nicely illustrated on Ed Hawkins’ Climate Lab Book blog. One of the aspects the paper looks at is the influence of aerosol particles …[Read More]
Friday Photo (117) – Volcan Agua, Guatemala
Volcan Agua, Guatemala Taken from the side of the Acatenango, another volcano, this image shows the stratovolcano Agua towering over the landscape. Agua was the location of a catastrophic debris flow/lahar in the mid 16th Century, destroying the then capital city of Guatemala. (Credit: Joel Gill, 2014) (This image, and others taken in Guatemala, is …[Read More]
Science Snap (#20): Sentinal-1A Dress Rehearsal
On the 3rd April 2014 the new satellite Sentinel-1 will be launched from French Guinea into space. It’s the satellite that has the InSAR community pretty excited as it will provide free Earth Observation data covering nearly all the world’s volcanoes. Once the satellite is launched and is sat in its correct orbit, it has to …[Read More]
London Event: ‘JUNGWA, THE BROKEN BALANCE’
GfGD are involved in a hazards education project in Ladakh, India, later this year. You can read more about this work on our website here. On Wednesday 26th March, King’s College London’s Intrepid Explorers team will be hosting a screening of ‘JUNGWA: The Broken Balance’ – a documentary about living with environmental change in this region of the western Himalaya. Living …[Read More]
Last chance to enter the EGU Photo Contest!
If you are pre-registered for the 2014 General Assembly (Vienna, 27 April – 2 May), you can take part in our annual photo competition! Winners receive a free registration to next year’s General Assembly! Every year we hold a photo competition and exhibit in association with our open access image repository, Imaggeo and our annual General …[Read More]
How do the chemical ghosts of dinosaurs help their preservation?
For some years now, Mary Schweitzer and her team have been researching the idea that organic molecules can be preserved for millions of years, specifically within dinosaurs. They have used a plethora of chemical and biotechnological techniques to demonstrate that, within animals like Tyrannosaurus rex, it is possible to find the residue of structures such …[Read More]
Fires in South East Asia
Smoke from a number of agricultural fires is currently blanketing Thailand and Cambodia. This is shown below in the satellite image from the MODIS instrument on the TERRA satellite. The red dots are classed as ‘thermal anomalies’ by the satellite instrument and are usually indicative of fires burning in these locations. The majority of the …[Read More]
Small volcanic eruptions and the global warming ‘pause’
A new paper in Nature Geoscience by Santer and colleagues revisits the volcanic scenarios used in modern climate model simulations. The authors consider the effects of including a ‘more realistic’ model for the influence of small volcanic eruptions on the climate system over the past two decades. Of course, more realistic means more difficult.. and one …[Read More]