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The Geodynamics 101 series serves to showcase the diversity of research topics and methods in the geodynamics community in an understandable manner. We welcome all researchers – PhD students to Professors – to introduce their area of expertise in a lighthearted, entertaining manner and touch upon some of the outstanding questions and problems related to their fields. Our latest entry for the serie ...[Read More]
“Summer break is over, which means we will continue with our Minds over Methods blogs! For this edition we invited Andrew Cross to write about his experiments with a new rock deformation device – the Large Volume Torsion (LVT) apparatus. Andrew is currently working as a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Washington University in St. Louis, USA. ...[Read More]
Most of the energy that drives glacier melting comes directly from sunlight, with the amount of melting critically dependent on the amount of solar energy absorbed compared to that reflected back into the atmosphere. The amount of solar energy that is reflected by a surface without being absorbed is called the albedo. A low albedo surface absorbs more of the energy that hits it compared to a high ...[Read More]
A large majority of igneous rocks on Earth are formed by a process known as fractional crystallization (summarized in the diagram below). To understand this process, start by imagining a large liquid magma (melt) body. As we cool the magma, mineral phases become stable and crystals start to form. The newly formed minerals are likely to have a very different density from the magma causing them to f ...[Read More]
This week’s “Wit and Wisdom” post is a guest entry by researcher Fabio Crameri from the Centre for Earth Evolution of Dynamics (CEED), University of Oslo. Many of us are guilty of creating figures using the colours of the rainbow in their full glory – it’s bold, exciting, and justifies the golden data contained within, right? Wrong! As Fabio explains, the rainbow scheme is misleading and should be ...[Read More]
Applied mathematics is often seen as an obscure field, which the general public has no hope of ever understanding. In the context of climate science, this is far from the truth. In fact, many mathematical concepts and ideas applied to the study of the climate system stem from intuitive arguments. While their implementation can be very complex, understanding the basic ideas behind them does not req ...[Read More]
In a departure from the usual posts we feature on the blog, today Conor Purcell (a freelance science writer) brings you a thought provoking science fiction piece. Grab a drink and dive into this geology inspired adventure! “It’s typical geology for a rocky planet” K reported. “Captured beneath the ocean at its northern pole, the core is a mix of metamorphic and sedimentary rock, with sand an ...[Read More]
Brekkuselslækur, a small river, carves its way across Iceland’s ancient volcanic landscape. At Hengifoss, Iceland’s third-highest waterfall, it tumbles fiercely down thick, dark layers of lavas erupted from volcanoes some 18 to 2.58 million years ago, during a period of geological time known as the Tertiary. Eruptions are rarely continuous; during hiatuses in the extrusion of lavas, ash is able to ...[Read More]
The Greenland ice sheet flows from the interior out to the margins, forming fast flowing, channelized rivers of ice that end in fjords along the coast. Glaciologists call these “outlet glaciers” and a large portion of the mass loss from the Greenland ice sheet is occurring because of changes to these glaciers. The end of the glacier that sits in the fjord is exposed to warm ocean water that can me ...[Read More]
John G. Ramsay1 wrote his seminal textbook on the folding and fracturing of rocks in 1957, almost 20 years before I was born (and I don’t count myself as young!). So why did I co-convene a session at EGU in 2017 to celebrate the book? Because the book, in many ways, expresses the legacy that John has given to structural geology. He followed it with a series of books of the same ilk – Ramsay ...[Read More]
