EGU Blogs

5556 search results for "6"

CL
Climate: Past, Present & Future

How glowing sediment can help to decipher the Earth’s past climate !

September 3, 2018
How glowing sediment can help to decipher the Earth’s past climate !

The last 2.5 Million years of the Earth’s history (termed Quaternary) are characterised by climatic cycles oscillating between warm (interglacial) and cold (glacial) periods. To be able to fully understand and interpret past climate variations the development of accurate and precise chronological techniques is crucial. Optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) dating is a strong geochronological too ...[Read More]

SSP
Stratigraphy, Sedimentology and Palaeontology

The microworld of the past

September 1, 2018

In my last blog, I described the diverse world of pollen and how palynology – the study pollen, is used in geosciences. Today, I turn to another microcosmos: that of finest layers deposited at the bottom of a lake. A large majority of geoscientists would tell you the best part of their job is field work. Despite sometimes harsh weather conditions, long hikes in wind, rain or merciless sun, many ge ...[Read More]

AS
Atmospheric Sciences

The perfect ice floe

August 28, 2018
The perfect ice floe

Current position: 89°31.85 N, 62°0.45 E, drifting with a multi-year ice floe (24th August 2018) With a little more than three weeks into the Arctic Ocean 2018 Expedition, the team has found the right ice floe and settled down to routine operations. Finding the perfect ice floe for an interdisciplinary science cruise is not an easy task. The Arctic Ocean 2018 Expedition aims to understand the linka ...[Read More]

GeoLog

Imaggeo on Mondays: Antarctic winds make honeycomb ice

August 27, 2018
Imaggeo on Mondays: Antarctic winds make honeycomb ice

These delicate ice structures may look like frozen honeycombs from another world, but the crystalline patterns can be found 80 degrees south, in Antarctica, where they are shaped by the white continent’s windy conditions. In Western Antarctica is a 9-kilometre line of rocky ridges, called Patriot Hills. Often cold wind furiously descends from the hills across Horseshoe Valley glacier, sculpting do ...[Read More]

GeoLog

An overnight train view of China’s Anthropocene – Part 2

August 22, 2018
An overnight train view of China’s Anthropocene – Part 2

Science fiction is no match for industrial non-stop China. Electric bikes zip across the cities of Shanghai and Beijing, and soundtrack the neon nights with their passing whirr. Here, some kind of two-wheeled revolution has taken place which are we completely unaware of in the West. It’s Blade Runner meets Total Recall in a future which has already come to pass. The very existence of our ele ...[Read More]

CL
Climate: Past, Present & Future

What can the Cretaceous tell us about our climate?

August 20, 2018
What can the Cretaceous tell us about our climate?

The Cretaceous The Cretaceous period features a particularly interesting climatic episode in the Earth’s geological history. It follows the Jurassic Period, better known as the time the dinosaurs inhabited Earth and spanned the period between 145.5 and 65.5 million years ago. The Cretaceous is the last period of the Mesozoic Era, which ends with a well-known mass extinction event. At the end of th ...[Read More]

GeoLog

Imaggeo on Mondays: Fairy chimneys in Love Valley

August 20, 2018
Imaggeo on Mondays: Fairy chimneys in Love Valley

Every year tourists from around the world flock to Love Valley in Göreme National Park in the Cappadocia region of central Turkey to marvel at the region’s peculiarly pointy geological features. These cone-shaped formations, known as ‘fairy chimneys’ or hoodoos, dominate the park’s skyline, with some rocky spires extending up to 40 metres towards the sky. While the name ‘fairy chimney’ suggests my ...[Read More]

GeoLog

GeoTalk: To understand how ice sheets flow, look at the bedrock below

August 17, 2018
GeoTalk: To understand how ice sheets flow, look at the bedrock below

Geotalk is a regular feature highlighting early career researchers and their work. In this interview we speak to Mathieu Morlighem, an associate professor of Earth System Science at the University of California, Irvine who uses models to better understand ongoing changes in the Cryosphere. At the General Assembly he was the recipient of a 2018 Arne Richter Award for Outstanding Early Career Scient ...[Read More]

ST
Solar-Terrestrial Sciences

SunPy: a Python solar data analysis environment

August 16, 2018
SunPy: a Python solar data analysis environment

Introduction For many years now we know that our star the Sun influences the Earth in many different ways, via the total solar irradiance, solar energetic particles and coronal mass ejections. Understanding the influence of the Sun on the Earth requires many different types of measurements. For example, NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) spacecraft, produces over 1 terabyte of data per day (P ...[Read More]

SSP
Stratigraphy, Sedimentology and Palaeontology

Slimy Landscapes

August 16, 2018

When we think about how our landscapes evolve and change we probably tend to go straight for the big stuff, things like the climate, tectonics or geology, and in my previous blog I looked at how rainfall contributes to changing the planet’s surface. However, it is not just the big stuff which controls these changes, smaller things do as well, for example changes in land cover (ie, from grasses to ...[Read More]