The EGU election for the role of President of the Soil System Sciences (SSS) Division was open for votes from all 2019 EGU members affiliated with the division from 9 April until 14 April 2019. Claudio Zaccone was elected as SSS Division President for a two-year term (2019–2021) starting today. He may stand for re-election for a further two years at the EGU Autumn Election 2019. Thank you to all EGU members who used their voting right and to the candidates!
The EGU Outreach Committee has named Philip Heron as a winner of the EGU Public Engagement Grants 2019 for his project ‘Think like a scientist’. Astrid Harjung and her colleagues Laura Coulson, Romana Hödl and Katrin Attermeyer have also won one of this year’s grants with their project ‘Biogeocaching – a scavenger hunt for the treasures of biology around Lake Lunz’.
The International Geoscience Education Organisation (IGEO) has published a new geoscience textbook, which is freely available for download. The book, supported by the EGU and the International Union of Geological Sciences, was written by EGU Committee on Education Chair Chris King.
The EGU will welcome Ilaria Capua and Mario Monti at the 2019 General Assembly during the high-level Science, Politics and European (dis)integration session on Wednesday 10 April. The session will focus on science and politics with a global perspective, and the impact of populism on European integrity and scientific research.
Glaciers in the European Alps play an important role in the hydrological cycle, act as a source for hydroelectricity and have a large touristic importance. We model the future evolution of all glaciers in the Alps with a novel model that combines both ice flow and melt processes. We find that under a limited warming scenario about one-third of the present-day ice volume will still be present by the end of the century, while under strong warming more than 90 % of the volume will be lost by 2100.
In this paper we present a new description of statistical probability density functions (pdfs) of polar mesospheric clouds (PMC). We derive a new class of pdfs that describes successfully the probability statistic of ALOMAR lidar observations of different ice parameters. As a main advantage the new method allows us to connect different observational PMC distributions of lidar and satellite data, and also to compare with distributions from ice model studies.
We studied the stability of ice wedges (massive bodies of ground ice in permafrost) under recent climatic conditions in the Lena River delta of northern Siberia. For this we used a novel modelling approach that takes into account lateral transport of heat, water, and snow and the subsidence of the ground surface due to melting of ground ice. We found that wetter conditions have a destabilizing effect on the ice wedges and associated our simulation results with observations from the study area.
Terrainbento 1.0 is a Python package for modeling the evolution of the surface of the Earth over geologic time (e.g., thousands to millions of years). Despite many decades of effort by the geomorphology community, there is no one established governing equation for the evolution of topography. Terrainbento 1.0 thus provides 28 alternative models that support hypothesis testing and multi-model analysis in landscape evolution.
A 10km-long, 4-km-wide and 350m-high cavity has recently been discovered under one of the fastest-flowing glaciers in Antarctica using different airborne and satellite techniques (see this press release and this study). This enormous cavity previously contained 14 billion tons of ice and formed between 2011 and 2016. This indicates that the bottom of the big glaciers on Earth can melt faster than expected, with the potential to raise sea level more quickly than we thought. Let’s see in further details …
We tend to think of glaciers as spotless pristine settings. But “if plastic is everywhere, why not on the surface of glaciers?” This occurred to Roberto Sergio Azzoni, a professor of environmental science and policy at the University of Milan in Italy, who decided to find the answer to this question for himself. At the European Geosciences Union General Assembly in Vienna, Azzoni and his team presented the first evidence ever of microplastic contamination on alpine glaciers. The study was …
This year Vienna was (for me) awfully cold. Sitting in the sun in the midst of happy conference attendees was definitively not an option at EGU this year. Due to the new EGU schedule with parallel sessions and longer oral sessions, making it until the lunch break was also a big challenge, at least for someone like me, who has more of a northern lifestyle. Luckily, this year posters were scheduled all day round, so we had a good reason …
