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Lordsburg Playa, New Mexico, USA

Deadline for climate action – Act strongly before 2035 to keep warming below 2°C

  • Press release
  • 30 August 2018

If governments don’t act decisively by 2035 to fight climate change, humanity could cross a point of no return after which limiting global warming below 2°C in 2100 will be unlikely, according to a new study by scientists in the UK and the Netherlands. The research also shows the deadline to limit warming to 1.5°C has already passed, unless radical climate action is taken. The study is published today in the European Geosciences Union journal Earth System Dynamics.

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Kedarnath landslide

Landslides triggered by human activity on the rise

  • Press release
  • 23 August 2018

More than 50,000 people were killed by landslides around the world between 2004 and 2016, according to a new study by researchers at UK’s Sheffield University. The team, who compiled data on over 4800 fatal landslides during the 13-year period, also revealed for the first time that landslides resulting from human activity have increased over time. The research is published today in the European Geosciences Union journal Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences.

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George VI Sound

New study puts a figure on sea-level rise following Antarctic ice shelves’ collapse

  • Press release
  • 19 July 2018

An international team of scientists has shown how much sea level would rise if Larsen C and George VI, two Antarctic ice shelves at risk of collapse, were to break up. While Larsen C has received much attention due to the break-away of a trillion-tonne iceberg from it last summer, its collapse would contribute only a few millimetres to sea-level rise. The break-up of the smaller George VI Ice Shelf would have a much larger impact. The research is published today in the European Geosciences Union journal The Cryosphere.

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Highlight articles

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Earth System Dynamics

The climate of a retrograde rotating Earth

Model experiments show that changing the sense of Earth’s rotation has relatively little impact on the globally and zonally averaged energy budgets but leads to large shifts in continental climates and patterns of precipitation. The retrograde world is greener as the desert area shrinks. Deep water formation shifts from the North Atlantic to the North Pacific with subsequent changes in ocean overturning. Over large areas of the Indian Ocean, cyanobacteria dominate over bulk phytoplankton.

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Geoscience Communication

Building a Raspberry Pi school magnetometer network in the UK

As computing and geophysical sensor components have become increasingly affordable over the past decade, it is now possible to build a cost-effective system for monitoring the Earth’s natural magnetic field variations, in particular for space weather events, e.g. aurorae. Sensors available to the general public are ~ 100 times less sensitive than scientific instruments but only 1/100th of the price. We demonstrate a system that allows schools to contribute to a genuine scientific sensor network.

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Solid Earth

GHOST: Geoscientific Hollow Sphere Tessellation

I present the GHOST (Geoscientific Hollow Sphere Tessellation) software which allows for the fast generation of computational meshes in hollow sphere geometries counting up to a hundred million cells. Each mesh is composed of concentric spherical shells made of quadrilaterals or triangles. I focus here on three commonly used meshes used in the geodynamics/geophysics community and further benchmark the gravity and gravitational potential procedures in the simple case of a constant density.

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Biogeosciences

Reviews and syntheses: Carbon use efficiency from organisms to ecosystems – definitions, theories, and empirical evidence

Carbon fixed by plants and phytoplankton through photosynthesis is ultimately stored in soils and sediments or released to the atmosphere during decomposition of dead biomass. Carbon-use efficiency is a useful metric to quantify the fate of carbon – higher efficiency means higher storage and lower release to the atmosphere. Here we summarize many definitions of carbon-use efficiency and study how this metric changes from organisms to ecosystems and from terrestrial to aquatic environments.

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Latest posts from EGU blogs

Imaggeo on Mondays: Life between the arid mountains of Gansu, China

Even within Earth’s more arid environments, you can find life! This featured photo was taken near the Lanzhou Zhongchuan Airport, about 50 km away from Lanzhou city, the capital of Gansu province in Western China. The area lies in a region between the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau and the Loess Plateau, with an elevation ranging from 1,500 m to 2,200 m. The landscape is dominated by a network of ridges and valleys; the Loess Plateau in particular is known for its highly …

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Oceans on Mars: the geodynamic record

Apart from our own planet Earth, there are a lot of Peculiar Planets out there! In this series we take a look at a planetary body or system worthy of our geodynamic attention, and this week we are back to our own solar system, more precisely to our neighbour Mars. In this post, Robert Citron, PhD student at the University of California, Berkeley, writes about the links between oceans, shorelines, and volcanism on Mars. A David Bowie approved blog post! …

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Image of the Week -- Cryo Connect: connecting cryosphere scientists and information seekers

Image of the Week -- Cryo Connect: connecting cryosphere scientists and information seekers

Communicating scientific findings toward non-experts is a vital part of cryosphere science. However, when it comes to climate change and its impact, the gap between scientific knowledge and human action has never been so evident (see for instance, the publication of the latest IPCC special report). Today, our image of the week features an interview with Cryo Connect, a new initiative for more efficient flow of information between cryosphere scientists and information seekers. Why have you decided to come up …

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