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.
Lucie Parsons, a ten-year old girl from the small village of Walkington, in England, is on a personal mission to save the environment from plastic pollution. After seeing on the BBC Blue Planet II documentary how litter in the ocean is damaging ecosystems, she decided to take action. Now she gives talks and is co-researcher in her mother’s PhD on climate change and the youth voice. Lucie has come to the European Geosciences Union General Assembly in Vienna with her …
The annual division meeting for Hydrological Sciences is the place to get updated on the latest developments of our division. It was great to see that hundreds of you attended. For those that did not attend (or for those that appreciate a reminder of what happened), here are some of the highlights: The Hydrological Sciences Division has a new president: Maria-Helena Ramos will serve as the president for (at least) the coming two years. We thank outgoing president Elena Toth …
Establishing a human presence on Mars is increasingly seen by space agencies and private organizations as the horizon frontier in human space exploration. These long-duration missions however, impose a high degree of technological, operational, physical and psychological challenges. Mars analog habitats, such as the Mars Desert Research Station (MDRS) in Utah (U.S.) are established to conduct field experiments, test new hardware, new operational concepts and study the social and crew teamwork dynamics in support to these future manned missions to …
