European Geosciences Union
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The Earth, planetary and space science community affirms its commitment to support and promote scientific knowledge and research for the benefit of humanity.
The June 2020 edition of the EGU newsletter is now available.
EGU invites applications for training schools and conferences in the Earth, planetary or space sciences. The deadline is 14 August 2020.
The Union is committed to improving equality of opportunity, diversity and inclusion both within and beyond the geosciences and condemns racism or any other form of discrimination anywhere in the world.
The EGU Outreach Committee has named three grant winners this year: Purls of Wisdom, a project in which participants will create yarn-based crafts to help raise local awareness of Earth’s changing climate; Earth Arcade’s Ocean Acidification, an online, research-based game that will highlight the impacts of ocean acidification; and Reclaiming the rocks: ukuthetha ngezifundo zomhlaba ngesiXhosa, a project to translate stories from South Africa’s rich geological history into indigenous languages.
Industrial-scale mining of deep-sea polymetallic nodules will remove nodules in large areas of the sea floor. We describe community composition of microbes associated with nodules of the Peru Basin. Our results show that nodules provide a unique ecological niche, playing an important role in shaping the diversity of the benthic deep-sea microbiome and potentially in element fluxes. We believe that our findings are highly relevant to expanding our knowledge of the impact associated with mining.
Sulfuric acid is a major atmospheric vapour for aerosol formation. If new particles grow fast enough, they can act as cloud droplet seeds or affect air quality. In a controlled laboratory set-up, we demonstrate that van der Waals forces enhance growth from sulfuric acid. We disentangle the effects of ammonia, ions and particle hydration, presenting a complete picture of sulfuric acid growth from molecular clusters onwards. In a climate model, we show its influence on the global aerosol budget.
Levels of future temperature change are often used interchangeably with carbon budget allowances in climate policy, a relatively robust relationship on the timescale of this century. However, recent advances in understanding underline that continued warming after net-zero emissions have been achieved cannot be ruled out by observations of warming to date. We consider here how such behavior could be constrained and how policy can be framed in the context of these uncertainties.
To assess snow avalanche mapping with radar satellites in Switzerland, we compare 2 m resolution TerraSAR-X images, 10 m resolution Sentinel-1 images, and optical 1.5 m resolution SPOT-6 images. We found that radar satellites provide a valuable option to map at least larger avalanches, though avalanches are mapped only partially. By combining multiple orbits and polarizations from S1, we achieved mapping results of quality almost comparable to single high-resolution TerraSAR-X images.
One of the basic tenets of plate tectonics states that deformation occurs along plate boundaries while plate interiors remain almost undeformed. Intraplate earthquakes defy this principle and hence are quite enigmatic. In this week’s News and Views, Prof. Attreyee Ghosh from the Centre for Earth Sciences, Indian Institute of Science, tries to explain the reasons behind intraplate earthquakes in central and eastern US. Most major earthquakes are associated with plate boundaries (Figure 1). The 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake as well …
By Carole Dalin The coronavirus outbreak is a global shock that has affected labour supply, productivity and aggregate demand around the world. However, less is known about what impact this shock will have on global water resources. Disruptions of global food systems caused by the Covid-19 pandemic are, at least for now, more linked with the supply chain than with food production or food stocks. Indeed, early on in the crisis, the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and …
This is an aerial image taken from a balloon at around 150m height, at the eastern shoreline of the Dead Sea. Such “selfies” are scientifically valuable, providing important data that help researchers to analyze the morphology of the retreating lake and investigate associated hazards like sinkholes, subsidence and landslides. The older shorelines, visible as lines on the shore stand for a period of one year, and form fascinating structures along the salt rich, and hence whitish in colour, coast. The …
