Geobulletin alpha

Imaggeo on Mondays: Mother Tree 

Landlocked, home to mountains, deserts and the southernmost permafrost territories, Mongolia’s climate is harsh.  Warm, often humid summers, give way to freezing winters where temperatures dip as low as -25°C. Rainfall is restricted to a short period in the summer months of June and August. These climatic factors, combined with the lack of a strong forest management strategy and anthropogenic influences, mean that only 11% of the vast 1567 million km²  of the Mongolian territory (that is [...]

Imaggeo on Mondays: Three coloured pools 

With the Imaggeo Photo Contest opening last week, what better than feature one of the 2015 competition finalists as this week’s Imaggeo on Mondays image. In this post, Irene Angeluccetti, author of the photograph, writes about the threatened ecosystem of Mono Lake. If you’ve been inspired by Irene’s photograph, why not entre the photo contest for your chance to win a free registration to the General Assembly in 2017? You can find out more by reading this blog post. On a brief stop on the [...]

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 [...]

Imaggeo on Mondays: Mola de Lord 

From the easterly Atlantic waters of the Bay of Biscay to the Catalan wild coast (Costa Brava) in the west, the Spanish Pyrenees stretch 430 km across the north of the country. At the foothills of the Catalan Pyrenees you’ll find the Pre-Pyrenees. Despite not reaching the soaring heights of the peaks of the Pyrenees, they nonetheless offer important insights into the geology of the range and stunning panoramas, such as the one featured as today’s Imaggeo on Mondays image. In today’s post, [...]

Imaggeo on Mondays: Mountains, rivers and agriculture 

This week’s Imaggeo on Mondays image blends a range of geoscience disciplines. The post, by Irenen Mazoff, a researcher at Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universitaet, explores how the mountains, rivers and soils of the High Atlas in Morocco are intrinsically linked to the agriculture of the region. The image was taken in the southern slopes of the Western High Atlas, north of the city of Taroudannt. The snow of these mountains, which in April is still prevailing on the highest ranges in the [...]

Imaggeo on Mondays: Scales of fluvial dissection 

High peaks, winding river channels and a barren landscape all feature in today’s Imaggeo on Mondays image, brought to you by Katja Laute, a geomorphologist from Norway.  This photo was taken from an airplane flying over the Zagros Mountains in Iran. The Zagros Mountain range stretches south and west from the borders of Turkey and Russia to the Persian Gulf, and is Iran’s largest mountain range. The mountain range has a total length of 1500 km and stretches from north eastern Iraq, to [...]

Imaggeo on Mondays: A thermal inversion 

This week’s Imaggeo on Mondays image is brought to you by Cyril Mayaud, from the University of Graz (Austria), who writes about an impressive hike and layers of cold and warm air. Thermal inversion is a meteorological phenomenon which occurs when a layer of cold air is trapped near the Earth’s surface by an overlying layer of warmer air. This can happen frequently at the boundary between mountainous and lowland regions such as in Slovenia and last for weeks, obscuring the sun from view to [...]

Imaggeo on Mondays: Foehn clouds 

This week’s post is brought to you by Stefan Winkler, a Senior Lecturer in Quaternary Geology & Palaeoclimatology, who explains how the mountain tops of the Southern Alps become decorated by beautiful blanket-like cloud formations. The Sothern Alps of New Zealand are a geoscientifically dynamic environment in all aspects. They are arguably one of the youngest high mountain ranges in the world formed at the plate tectonic boundary between the Australian and the Pacific Plate. Their [...]

Imaggeo on Mondays: Mirror Image 

This week’s Imaggeo on Mondays image is brought to you by Fabien Darrouzet, who visited the icy landscapes of Svalbard back in 2012. Whilst the aim of his trip was not to better understand the geology of the landscapes, his eyes were very much focused on goings on up, up in the sky, it didn’t stop him taking this still of the snow covered peaks. This picture was taken in Svalbard (78° lat.) in June 2012. I was there for one week in order to observe the transit of the planet Venus in front [...]

Imaggeo on Mondays: Lusi from the sky with drones 

The picture shows a spectacular aerial view of a sunset over the Lusi mud eruption in East Java, Indonesia. Here thousands of cubic meters of mud, are spewed out every day from a 100 m sized central crater. Since the initial eruption of the volcano in 2006, following a 6.3 M earthquake, a surface of about 7 km2 has been covered by boiling mud, which has buried more than 12 villages and resulted in the displacement of 40,000 people. Monitoring Lusi is part of multidisciplinary project called [...]

Imaggeo on Mondays: An ancient landscape and the never setting sun. 

This week’s Imaggeo on Mondays image is brought to you by Florian Heinlein, a meteorologist by training now working on his PhD modelling water transport in agricultural plants. This image was taken even before he started his bachelor’s degree and studying the Earth’s atmosphere and climate change was still a pipeline dream. This picture was taken during a holiday trip through the Baltics in July 2006 during the search of Purekkari, the northernmost point of Estonia which lies in Lahemaa [...]

Imaggeo on Mondays: Salted Moon 

The eerie landscape depicted in our Imaggeo on Mondays image, is brought to you by Donatella Spano (University of Sassari, Italy). This picture was taken at Mammoth Hot Springs, one of the largest hot spring areas at Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming, United States on August 10, 2010. Mammoth Hot Springs is divided into two sections,

Imaggeo on Mondays: The perfect overnight stop. 

Being an Earth scientist has its perks and camping overnight in a cave under an absolutely stunning unpolluted night sky has to be up there with one of the best! Our Imaggeo on Mondays image is brought to you by Simon Virgo who took the photograph in 2008 during an advanced mapping field course in

Imaggeo on Mondays: A mysterious shrinking lake 

From this week’s Imaggeo on Mondays image it’s easy to see why Iceland is the setting of so many books, films and TV shows, inspiring and inciting writers and film crews alike. The picture was taken on the shores of Lake Kleifarvatn, in Reykjanes peninsula, approximately 30 km to the west of the country’s capital,

Imaggeo on Mondays: Marble outcrops 

This week’s Imaggeo on Mondays image was taken by Prof. Konstantinos Kourtidis, in Alykes, along the southern coast of Thassos island, where he photographed the beautifully white marbles that outcrop along the coastline. The Greek Island of Thassos is located in northeastern Greece, close to the coast of Thrace in the Aegean Sea, although geographically

Imaggeo on Mondays: The Final Effort 

We’ve all been there: long hours in the field, a task that seems never ending but which has to be finished today. This week’s Imaggeo on Mondays image is brought to you by Patrick Klenk who highlights the importance of how ‘getting the job done’ relies on good team work! Two years ago I posted