Philippe Leloup brings us this week’s Imaggeo on Mondays, with tales from a mountain trail that show a geologist can never resist a good rock! This image is that of a polished slab of a rock composed of interlayered marbles and amphibolites. The sample was once part of a small dry-stone wall bordering an outdoor kitchen along a trail along the Ailao Mountain Range in China (or Ailao Shan in Chines ...[Read More]
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Soil System Sciences
Soil color never lies
Often, soil color is described using general terms such as “brown”, “red”, “dark”, etc. When I talk about this issue for the first time with my students of Soil Science, I use to ask them how to describe the color of a soil sample. Normally, in a few seconds, I get a list of color names ranging from dark brown to bright red, including “chocolate”, “coffee” and “ ...[Read More]
Seismology
A bibliography of seismic events
Search for previous scientific work is never an easy task. Thanks to the internet and good search engines such as Google Scholar this process has been made a bit more easier. (It makes young scientists wonder how searching was done in the pre-internet days!). Although searching nowadays seems to be a simple tasks, it still requires putting in the correct combination of search terms. Furthermore yo ...[Read More]
Polluting the Internet
Fire in Salford
My commute to work yesterday morning took an unexpected turn as my train pulled into my usual stop in Salford, Greater Manchester. To my right was a huge plume of smoke, which I would usually associate more with deforestation fires in Brazil! A plume of black smoke was rising up against the backdrop of beautifully clear skies, with the smoke gradually changing to a lighter shade of grey higher up. ...[Read More]
Polluting the Internet
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 pap ...[Read More]
GeoLog
Imaggeo on Mondays: Friends in the field
Out in the field you encounter all sorts of wildlife and while mosquitos are the most frequent (and most unwelcome), they generally don’t interfere with your equipment or your data. The same can’t be said for all animals though, and many scientists have to strap their equipment out of reach, barricade it with barbed fences or place it in a relatively indestructible black box. It’s a particular pro ...[Read More]
Polluting the Internet
What did the IPCC say about aerosols?
Aerosols dominate the uncertainty in the total anthropogenic radiative forcing. A complete understanding of past and future climate change requires a thorough assessment of aerosol-cloud-radiation interactions. This is one of the conclusions about aerosols and their impact on our climate from the the final report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) on the physical science bas ...[Read More]
VolcanicDegassing
A volcanic retrospective: eruptions of the Soufrière, St Vincent
The records, reports and testimonies of past volcanic eruptions and their consequences contain a wealth of information from which we can learn valuable lessons. This, in a nutshell, is the starting point of one strand of the STREVA project, ‘Strengthening Resilience in Volcanic Areas‘, which is a large programme funded by two British funding agencies (NERC and ESRC) and directed from t ...[Read More]
GeoLog
GeoTalk: Matt Herod on awesome outreach and education
Matt Herod has long been part of the EGU Blog Network, where he writes about all things geochemistry from his base in the University of Ottawa. In this week’s GeoTalk, we had the chance to talk to Matt about all the other science communication activities he’s been up to – from mentoring kids in Canada to speaking science in schools… This year GeoSphere had its first birthday as part of the EGU Blo ...[Read More]
VolcanicDegassing
Remote sensing of volcanoes and volcanic processes
A major goal of volcanological science is understand the processes that underlie volcanic activity, and to use this understanding to help to reduce volcanic risk. Advances in instruments and techniques mean that scientists can now measure many different aspects of the behaviour of restless or active volcanoes, including seismicity (to detect magma movement at depth, for example); deformation (oft ...[Read More]