The earth system provides many crucial services essential to the wealth and health of human society. It provides both the climate and the platform on which we live, the mineral, energy and groundwater resources on which we depend and increasingly a repository for our wastes.
As the children of the plate tectonic revolution, today’s geoscientists have grown up with a zeal to understand the basic workings of our planet. There are many remarkable testimonies to the success of plate tectonics including declining discovery rates of large mineral resources.
Katrin Frisch In class we were reading John Milton’s ‘On Education’, a treatise in which the poet laid out his ideas on an ideal education. After many years of theoretical learning, the students – so Milton argued – should head into the world to learn about different cultures, but ultimately to realise the superiority of their own.
About 13,000 years ago, as their land was drowning, the last Vicmanians were confronted a terrible choice. Through human induced climate change we are now committing a similar fate. Unlike the Vicmanians, in foreseeing the future we can do something about it [1].
Unlike Sirens, who drew sailors to the rocks by their enchanted singing, causing their ships to sink, Nereids – the daughters of Doris and Nereus, the old man of the sea – were helping sailors through rough seas.
When you are pressed for time, the only thing you hope for is for things to go as smoothly as possible so that you can move on.
... probably the most challenging feature in the global ocean on which to deploy ocean bottom seismometers, which need to land onto a relatively flat surface ...
Kyle Manley, Tristan Salles Dietmar Müller Since roughly 1880 the Earth has warmed by 1 deg C, many times faster than any warming episode in the past 65 million years of Earth’s geological history. We will need to remove hundreds of gigatons of carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere by the end of the twenty-first century to keep global warming below 2°C within the constraints of the global carbon budget.
Three and a half days after our departure from Hobart, we arrived in just northeast of the Macquarie island and instantly proceeded with swathing – mapping the ocean floor in the north-eastern quadrant, in lines parallel to the Macquarie ridge.
A violent earthquake roared and rumbled through the underworld of a distant corner of the planet covered by the restless ocean, far enough from any soul to be felt or heard.