Sea ice is an extremely sensitive indicator of climate change. Arctic sea ice has been dubbed ‘the canary in the coal mine’, due to the observed steady decline in the summer sea ice extent in response to global warming over recent decades (see this and this previous posts). However, the story has not been mirrored at the other pole. As shown in our image of the week (blue line in Fig. 1), Antarcti ...[Read More]
If you didn't find what you was looking for try searching again.
Tectonics and Structural Geology
How Rome and its geology are strongly connected
Walking through an ancient and fascinating city like Rome, there are signs of history everywhere. The whole city forms an open-air museum, full of remnants of many different times the city has known, from the Imperial to the Medieval times, the Renaissance, the Fascist period, and finally the present day version of Rome. For historians and archaeologists, unravelling the exact history of the city ...[Read More]
Geochemistry, Mineralogy, Petrology & Volcanology
A little fracture can go a long way: How experiments illuminate our understanding of volcanic eruptions
What controls how violently a volcano erupts? Stratovolcanoes like Mount St Helens (USA), Gunung Merapi (Indonesia), or Volcán de Colima (Mexico) tend to erupt in two distinct ways: effusively and/or explosively. Effusive eruptions are eruptions where lava is extruded without any major explosions. Although effusive eruptions can be dangerous, at stratovolcanoes they tend to be restricted to volcan ...[Read More]
Climate: Past, Present & Future
Forams, the sea thermometers of the past!
Name of proxy Mg/Ca-SST on planktonic foraminifera shell Type of record Sea Surface Temperature (SST) Paleoenvironment Marine environments Period of time investigated 55 Million years ago to recent times How does it work ? Foraminifera (or Forams) are single-celled organisms varying from less than 1 mm to several cm in size. They are very abundant in the ocean floor (benthic species) or floating a ...[Read More]
Geodynamics
Alaska: a gold rush of along strike variations
Every 8 weeks we turn our attention to a Remarkable Region that deserves a spot in the scientific limelight. After exploring the Mediterranean and the ancient Tethys realm, we now move further north and across the Pacific to the Aleutian-Alaska subduction zone. This post was contributed by Kirstie Haynie who is a PhD candidate at the department of geology at the University at Buffalo, State Univer ...[Read More]
GeoLog
Imaggeo on Mondays: A spectacular view of moss-covered rocks
Geology has shaped the rugged landscape of the Isle of Skye – the largest island of Scotland’s Inner Hebrides archipelago. From the very old Precambrian rocks (approximately 2.8 billion years old) in the south of the island, through to the mighty glaciers which covered much of Scotland as recently as 14,700 years ago, the modestly-sized island provides a snap-shot through Earth’s dynamic his ...[Read More]
WaterUnderground
Western water wells are going dry
Post by Scott Jasechko, Assistant Professor of Water Resources at the University of Calgary, in Canada, and by Debra Perrone, Postdoctoral Research Scholar at Stanford University, in the United States of America. __________________________________________________ Wells are excavated structures, dug, drilled or driven into the ground to access groundwater for drinking, cleaning, irrigating, and coo ...[Read More]
GeoLog
GeoPolicy: IPCC decides on fresh approach for next major report
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 assessing the current scientific literature and then summa ...[Read More]
GeoLog
GeoTalk: The anomaly in the Earth’s magnetic field which has geophysicists abuzz
Geotalk is a regular feature highlighting early career researchers and their work. In this interview we speak to Jay Shah, a PhD student at Imperial College London, who is investigating the South Atlantic Anomaly, a patch over the South Atlantic where the Earth’s magnetic field is weaker than elsewhere on the globe. He presented some of his recent findings at the 2017 General Assembly. First, coul ...[Read More]
GeoLog
Mapping Ancient Oceans
This guest post is by Dr Grace Shephard, a postdoctoral researcher in tectonics and geodynamics at the Centre of Earth Evolution and Dynamics (CEED) at the University of Oslo, Norway. This blog entry describes the latest findings of a study that maps deep remnants of past oceans. Her open access study, in collaboration with colleagues at CEED and the University of Oxford, was published this week i ...[Read More]