European Geosciences Union
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Thanks to the enthusiastic efforts of our members and volunteers, EGU26 was another record breaking year with an amazing 22,497 people participating in the General Assembly, both in Vienna and online!
New research shows extreme heat and humidity are already pushing Hajj pilgrims beyond survivability limits, with the greatest danger during Arafat and future pilgrimages expected to become more hazardous.
Solar storms can quietly disrupt satellites, power grids, and communication systems across the globe. After a 2022 geomagnetic event knocked out dozens of Starlink satellites, the risks are no longer hypothetical. At EGU26, scientists unveil Swarm-AWARE, a new ESA project using satellite data and machine learning to distinguish space weather signals from natural hazards, paving the way for smarter forecasting and more resilient infrastructure.
For 350 million years, ammonites were the resilient masterpieces of the ancient seas. They survived the Great Dying of the Permian-Triassic, an event that wiped out 96% of marine life, only to vanish during the end-Cretaceous extinction that claimed the dinosaurs. Meanwhile, their less-diverse cousins, the nautiloids, sailed through the catastrophe and still inhabit our oceans today.
Why did the invincible ammonites fail while the nautiloids endured?
In one of the most water-stressed regions on Earth, Saudi Arabia is facing a critical paradox: its ancient aquifers are being depleted faster than they can recharge, yet a massive strategic asset is being flushed away. Every year, the country produces 1.6 billion cubic meters of treated wastewater that remains underutilized, an amount equivalent to roughly 60% of Saudi Arabia’s annual urban drinking water demand.
Hello Delphine! Thank you for agreeing to have this GeoTalk interview. Could you briefly introduce yourself and your background? Hello, and thank you for having me! My name is Delphine Urbah, and I am a French professional working at the intersection of space, policy, ethics, and the human dimensions of space exploration. I currently work as a project manager for the Académie Spatiale Île-de-France, where I coordinate research and training initiatives in the public space research sector. My previous experiences …
Imagine determining the position of a point on Earth with millimeter precision using radio signals from celestial objects billions of light-years away. This may sound like science fiction, but it is exactly what Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) allows scientists to do. What is VLBI? Long before satellites and digital maps, people looked to the sky and used celestial objects—most commonly the Sun during the day and selected stars at night—along with simple instruments to determine their position on Earth. …
Antarctic ice shelves melt from beneath where they contact the ocean, but how well do ocean models simulate this process? Building on several decades of model development, a recent model intercomparison study compared ice shelf-ocean models from modelling groups around the world with the same, idealised benchmark configuration. From this effort, we can learn how current models perform, and how we can still improve them in the future. Why do we need ice shelf-ocean models? The Antarctic ice sheet is …
