Kerry Leith from the Engineering Geology Department at the ETH Zürich set up a post on their latest publication and the backstory behind it. As they announced on their own website (www.stressdriven.com) review comments ranged from “mediocre or poor” to “[…] provocative, potentially revolutionary (if correct) analysis”. It surely contains interesting thoughts. – ...[Read More]
If you didn't find what you was looking for try searching again.
GeoLog
Imaggeo on Mondays: Snow folded by advancing lava
The photograph shows the interaction of the first snow and an active lava flow during the 2014 / 2015 Holuhraun eruption in Iceland. The first snow fell onto a ground covered by fine black ash on 26 September 2014. While the meter thick lava flow advanced a few meters per day, it neither melted the snow nor flowed on top of it. Instead, it pushed a layer of centimetre-thick snow and millimetre-thi ...[Read More]
Geodynamics
From hot to cold – 7 peculiar planets around the star TRAPPIST-1
Apart from Earth, there are a lot of Peculiar Planets out there! Every 8 weeks, give or take, we look at a planetary body or system worthy of our geodynamic attention. When the discovery of additional Earth-sized planets within the TRAPPIST-1 system was revealed last year, bringing the total to 7 planets, it captured the minds of audiences far and wide. This week, two of the authors from a 2017 Na ...[Read More]
GeoLog
Imaggeo on Mondays: The best of imaggeo in 2017
Imaggeo, our open access image repository, is packed with beautiful images showcasing the best of the Earth, space and planetary sciences. Throughout the year we use the photographs submitted to the repository to illustrate our social media and blog posts. For the past few years we’ve celebrated the end of the year by rounding-up some of the best Imaggeo images. But it’s no easy task to pick which ...[Read More]
GeoLog
MinCup: Elevating humble minerals to new heights
Throughout October and November, the world of (Earth science) Twitter was taken by storm: Day after day, Eddie Dempsey (a lecturer at the University of Hull, and @Tectonictweets for those of you more familair with his Twitter handle) pitted minerals against each other, in a knock out style popular contest. The aim? To see which mineral would eventually be crowned the best of 2017. Who knew fiery ( ...[Read More]
Cryospheric Sciences
Image of the Week – Understanding Antarctic Sea Ice Expansion
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]
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]