Geobulletin alpha

GeoTalk: A smart way to map earthquake impact 

Last week at the 2016 General Assembly Sara, one of the EGU’s press assistants, had the opportunity to speak to Koen Van Noten about his research into how crowdsourcing can be used to find out more about where earthquakes have the biggest impact at the surface. Firstly, can you tell me a little about yourself? I did a PhD in structural geology at KULeuven and, after I finished, I started to work at the Royal Observatory of Belgium. What I do now is try to understand when people feel an [...]

Methane seeps – oases in the deep Arctic Ocean 

The deep Arctic Ocean is not known for its wildlife. 1200 metres from the surface, well beyond where light penetrates the water and at temperatures below zero, it it’s a desolate, hostile environment. There are, however, exceptions to this, most notably around seeps in the seafloor that leak methane into the water above. Here, methane is the fuel for life, not sunlight, creating oases in an otherwise barren landscape. On the Vestnesa Ridge, just off Svalbard, great plumes of methane stretch [...]

Vlogging 101: A beginners guide to video blogging 

Ensuring research outputs and findings have an impact in society is becoming an increasingly important part of successfully securing research funding. Perhaps even more importantly, some might argue that it is the responsibility of all geoscientists to communicate their science and research. Whatever your motivations for choosing to engage colleagues and non-scientific audiences with your research, finding the best way to do so can prove tricky. Vlogging – video blogging – is an [...]

PhD opportunity: Chilean sea level 

The Department of Geography, Northumbria University, seeks to appoint a PhD student to work on reconstructing Chilean relative sea-level change over the Holocene. Read on for more details about the position.  www.findaphd.com/search/ProjectDetails.aspx?PJID=72944&LID=2712Project description:There is a paucity of relative sea-level data from Chile, and where data does exist there is a discrepancy between observations and models. Glacial isostatic adjustment models suggest relative [...]

Imaggeo on Mondays: Emerald Moss 

The high peaks of the Tien Shan Range, one of the biggest and largest mountain ranges of Central Asia, conjure up images of snowcapped peaks, rugged terrains and inhospitable conditions. Yet, if you are prepared to look a little further, the foothills of these towering peaks are a safe haven for life. Bulat Zubairov, a researcher at Humboldt University, takes us on a journey of discovery to the Ile-Alatau National Park in today’s Imaggeo on Mondays post. This photo was taken in the Ile-Alatau [...]

GeoTalk: Meet Zakaria Ghazoui, winner of the Communicate your Science Video Competition in 2015! 

If you’ve not heard about our Communicate Your Science Video Competition before it gives early career scientists the chance to produce a video up-to-three-minutes long to share their research with the general public. The winning entry receives a free registration to the General Assembly the following year. In this GeoTalk interview, Laura Roberts talks to Zakaria Ghazoiu, a PhD student whose video following his journey to the Himalayas to collect core samples from lakes was voted as the [...]

Imaggeo on Mondays: Man-made landscape 

The landscape of the Mersey Estuary in Liverpool Bay is ever changing; it offers the opportunity to observe the changing geomorphology of a river estuary which is closely linked to a very urban and man-made landscape. For more on this unique setting, read today’s Imaggeo on Mondays post brought to you by Maria Burguet Marimon. This picture was taken at Crosby beach, which is located just at the beginning of the Mersey Estuary in the Liverpool Bay. The current Crosby beach dates back in [...]

How to write to your MEPs about European Copyright reform 

This was originally posted here. I mentioned in a previous post how important it is for researchers to equip themselves with knowledge about copyright issues (like this), and to become active in the struggle against publishers in retaining fair re-use rights for research. In the European Commission, this has been quite a high-profile debate this year (see here for example), with some preliminary results being released already. Recently, Peter Murray-Rust of ContentMine and the University of [...]

Imaggeo on Mondays: Flying Rocks 

The picture was taken at a hillslope close to the glacier tongue of the Great Aletsch Glacier, the largest glacier in the Alps. With a length of 23 km it is located in the eastern Bernese Alps of Switzerland and composed of the three smaller glaciers Aletschfirn, Jungfraufirn and Eternal snow field converging at Concordia where the ice thickness was measured to be around 900m. The whole area was declared a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2001. Alpine slopes in the region have been exposed to [...]

Imaggeo on Mondays: Annapurna snow avalanche 

The Annapurna massif, is located in an imposing 55 km long collection of peaks in the Himalayas which behave as a single structural block. Composed of one peak (Annapurna I Main) in excess of 8000 m, a further thirteen peaks over 7000 m and sixteen more of over 6000 m, the massif forms a striking structure within the Himalayas. Annapurna I Main, the tenth highest peak in the world, is towering at an impressive 8,091 m. Renowned for its difficult climbing conditions, it holds one of the highest [...]

Imaggeo on Mondays: Drilling a landslide 

That landslides are hazardous goes without saying; the risk posed by them will largely depend on where they occur and their exact characteristics, which makes understanding the mechanisms which trigger them, as well as predicting when they might happen, extremely difficult. Today’s Imaggeo on Mondays image, brought to you by Ekrem Canli, a PhD student at the University of Vienna, is an example of how scientists are trying to get a better handle on landslide mechanics. The Salcher landslide is [...]

Crusing the Mediterranean: a first-hand account of a month at sea – Part 3 

This is the final instalment of the adventures of Simona Aracri, a PhD student at University of Southampton, and her colleagues, who spent a month aboard a research vessel, cruising the Mediterranean Sea. Simona and the team of scientists aboard the boat documented their experiences via a blog and we’ve been sharing some highlights over the past few weeks. As we wave goodbye to the research cruise we discover that the fascinating world of sea microbes is still a conundrum to scientists [...]

Crusing the Mediterranean: a first-hand account of a month at sea – Part 2 

This week we feature the second instalment in this series, which follows the adventures of Simona Aracri, a PhD student at University of Southampton, and her colleagues. as they spent a month aboard a research vessel, cruising the Mediterranean Sea. Simona and the team of scientists aboard the boat documented their experiences via a blog. This time we discover that chemists are always kept busy on a ship and learn more about mega heatwaves! For more details on the research cruise and its aims, [...]

Cruising the Mediterranean: a first-hand account of a month at sea – Part 1 

Simona Aracri, a PhD student at University of Southampton, spent a month aboard the research vessel, R/V Minerva Uno, cruising the Mediterranean Sea. Simona and the team of scientists aboard the boat documented their experiences via blog. Over the coming weeks we’ll feature a few of the posts the team shared over the one month voyage: you can expect to find out what life aboard a large research vessel is like, what scientists do when studying the ocean depths and how the whole team has been [...]

So, what happens when a giant tsunami inundates coastal lakes? 

This blog post is by Philipp Kempf, PhD student at the University of Ghent, who writes about his recently published Sedimentary Geology paper on tsunami deposits in coastal lakes in south central Chile. Philipp is now on twitter too, tweeting as @TsunamiPhil.Earlier this month, we, a group of geoscientists from Belgium, England, France, Switzerland and Chile, published a paper showing what happened in two coastal lakes, while a giant tsunami flowed into their basins.The tsunami in question was [...]

Stuff we linked to on Twitter last week 

(Actually, the last two weeks, because we got busy and didn't post last week. But we have good excuses, as Chris had his first PhD student pass his oral exams and proceed to candidacy and Anne had two papers accepted. Even better, we've got twice the Twitter-y goodness for you this week.) Continue reading

Join the EGU Blog Network! 

After announcing earlier this week that we are sadly saying goodbye to the EGU network blog Between a Rock and Hard Place, the time has come to find a new blog to take their place. If you are an Earth, planetary or space researcher (a PhD student, an early career scientist, or a more established one) with a passion for communicating your work, we’d like to hear from you! We currently feature blogs in palaeontology (Green Tea and Velociraptors), international development (Geology for Global [...]

Drinkable rocks! 

When water is scarce, you’ve gotta save it, or come up with an ingenious way to get more. Some Spanish shrubs do just that, quenching their thirst with water from rocks. Sara Mynott explains where they source it… Often, in areas where water is sparse, plants use a suite of techniques to harness what limited resources are available in their environment, from hairs that trap moisture in the air to deep roots that tap into water sources deep underground. Some, though, use a rather unusual [...]

Communicate Your Science Competition Winner Announced! 

Congratulations to Zakaria Ghazoui, the winner of the first ever Communicate Your Science Video Competition 2015. Zakaria is a PhD student at the Institute des Sciences de le Terre (ISTerre) in France, and has been investigating Himalayan lakes using sediment cores. Here is his video, Inside Himalayan

Tutorial 4b: Saurischian vertebral laminae and fossae redux, by Adam Marsh 

[Hi folks, Matt here. I’m just popping in to introduce this guest post by Adam Marsh (UT Austin page, LinkedIn, ResearchGate). Adam is a PhD student at UT Austin’s Jackson School of Geosciences, currently working for a semester as a Visiting Student Researcher at my old stomping ground, Berkeley’s UCMP.  Adam’s been working at Petrified Forest