GeoLog

EGU’s Science Communications Fellow, Edvard Glücksman, continues to share his thoughts as he takes part in a study tour with other members of the Emerging Leaders in Environmental and Energy Policy Network (ELEEP), a joint project of the Atlantic Council of the United States and the Ecologic Institute. If you have any questions or comments, please contact Ed by email.

On our first site visit we traveled to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in Golden, Colorado, the only US facility entirely dedicated to researching and developing renewable energy and energy efficiency technology.

The NREL is the only facility in the US entirely dedicated to research and development of renewables. It is located in Golden, Colorado, at the foot of the Rockies. (Credit: Edvard Glücksman)

Housed across a large campus of buildings equipped with state-of-the-art energy efficiency technology, the NREL, established in 1974, is in the unique position of being government-owned, funded by the US Department of Energy (DOE), yet operated by privately contracted staff who remain removed from the policy-making environment. The importance of this arrangement was highlighted by our hosts, who offered us a detailed historical background of the facility and an overview of the broad range of topics covered at NREL, including renewable electricity and end-use systems, renewable fuels and vehicle systems, as well as pure research in the energy sciences.

ELEEP members pose at the main entrance of NREL.

Transmission and distribution challenges

I was particularly struck by the complexity of energy transmission operations; that is, the transport of energy from its source to consumers. Although around 6.5% of electricity is lost annually across the US during transmission and distribution, the challenges of providing more efficient ways of moving energy often do not get as much attention as the process by which it is initially generated. As a European it is difficult to grasp the sheer volume of hardware needed to link American consumers with their energy source (though we are starting to think about it more now, with the prospect of solar transmission from North Africa looming), a factor that places grid design front-and-center in the North American energy efficiency debate and lends credence to the idea that energy is best distributed through networks of local hubs rather than across a centralised nationwide system.  Environmental factors, such as the intense heat often found near solar sites, also influence transmission efficiency and further highlight the need to continue developing transmission and distribution research.

ELEEP members tour the extensive NREL campus and its state-of-the-art energy efficient buildings. (Credit: Edvard Glücksman)

Improved solar efficiency the ‘holy grail’

We were told that making solar power more accessible within the NREL’s work was the ‘holy grail’ of NREL’s research effort. Their photovoltaic research focuses on boosting solar-cell efficiency and lowering the cost of solar equipment with the hope of achieving the US DOE’s SunShot Initiative goal of making large-scale solar energy systems cost-competitive with other domestic energy sources by 2020.

The NREL also contributes to international research, in particular with developing countries as they try to expand their renewable energy facilities. By helping nations such as Vietnam, the Philippines, and Bangladesh manage natural-hazard risks, or by consulting with the Indian government about potential coal-reduction strategies, NREL serves as a global voice for the adoption of renewables and the proliferation of renewable energy production companies. However, we noted the conflict of interest inherent in such an approach: by offering developing nations a chance to become more attractive to renewable energy market stakeholders, would they not be simultaneously pushing business away from US shores?

NREL serves as a testing facility for renewable energy prototypes, such as this wind turbine. (Credit: Edvard Glücksman)

Our discussion ended with a virtual tour of OpenEI.org, NREL’s open-access energy data sharing platform. The site includes policy information, country profile pages, an energy-related app store, and freely accessible energy-related datasets uploaded from around the world (“the world is our audience”) using the universal Linked Data format, machine-readable and searchable using reegle, a search engine dedicated to renewable energy. Despite the potential scientific shortcomings inherent in working with crowdsourced data, the information featured on OpenEI is a welcome step in improving the public understanding of renewable energy, if only because it increases awareness and provides a platform for cross-cultural collaboration.

Maintaining the NREL and its 1,700 staff costs around €262 million annually, a healthy sign that the US remains committed to developing its renewable energy portfolio. However, with the increasing influence of cheaper, domestically available shale gas, will the DOE continue to push for a greener energy future? Anyone concerned with the effect of hydrocarbons on global climate sure hopes so.

By Edvard Glücksman

EGU’s Science Communications Fellow, Edvard Glücksman, is blogging live from the United States as he takes part in a week-long study tour with other members of the Emerging Leaders in Environmental and Energy Policy Network (ELEEP), a joint project of the Atlantic Council of the United States and the Ecologic Institute. Check out below for his first post from overseas and, if you have any questions or comments, please contact Ed by email.

Hello everyone and greetings from the United States! Fortunate enough to be one of the first arrivals, I spent the first full day here hiking with some of my colleagues in the beautiful Colorado wilderness around the unique Red Rocks Amphitheatre.

Local residents exercise up and down the Red Rocks amphitheatre’s seats. Apart from on concert nights, the area is usually entirely open to the public. Downtown Denver can be seen on the horizon just left of center. (Credit: Edvard Glücksman)

Located to the west of Denver in the small town of Morrison, Red Rocks is a geological wonder. Featuring three large rocks perfectly arranged for optimal acoustic conditions, this stunning location has been used for open-air concerts since the early 20th century, and perhaps even earlier by Native Americans from the Ute tribe. Legendary artists such as Sting, U2, or even The Beatles have performed at Red Rocks and consider it a highlight of their careers.

Our group hikes next to a boulder bearing the distinctively red colour found throughout exposed areas of the Fountain Formation across Colorado and Wyoming. (Credit: Edvard Glücksman)

The area around the amphitheatre, Red Rocks Park, is equally beautiful, replete with exposed red sandstone rocks distinctive of the wider Fountain Formation, a bedrock unit from the Pennsylvanian age, between 290-296 million years old, consisting primarily of conglometarte, sandstone, or arkose.

Garden of the Gods near Colorado Springs, also part of the Fountain Formation. Photo taken last year. (Credit: Edvard Glücksman)

After watching the fitness-crazy locals exercise up and down the amphitheatre’s seating area, which can take up to 9,450 people on concert nights, we walked into the wilderness of the surrounding park, taking in the breathtaking landscape and the view of downtown Denver from a distance. The day before our rigorous study tour begins, at 1,966 m above sea level our hike was definitely the perfect ‘altitude training’ for the week ahead!

The ELEEP early arrivals. From left to right – yours truly, Mihaela Carstei, Kathryn Sparks, Janis Brizga, Agata Hinc, and Gerald Franz. (Credit: Edvard Glücksman)

By Edvard Glücksman

EGU’s Science Communications Fellow, Edvard Glücksman, will be blogging live from the United States next week as he takes part in a week-long study tour with other members of the Emerging Leaders in Environmental and Energy Policy Network (ELEEP), a joint project of the Atlantic Council of the United States and the Ecologic Institute. Check out below for a blog introduction to the tour and, if you have any questions or comments, please contact Ed by email.

Hi everyone!

I am leaving for the US this weekend to take part in a study trip under the theme Transformation of the Energy Economy: The US Experience, which includes visits to a range of energy- and environment-related institutions in Colorado and northern California.

Both states are experiencing pivotal moments in their history, not least California, the eighth largest economy in the world. The Californian economy has struggled over the past decade but has recently begun to show signs of recovery, partly because of a surge in sustainable energy production; its future energy policies and their wider economic effect will serve as powerful indicators of national economic health.

Colorado, a long-time epicentre of the US energy industry, has recently been thrust into the spotlight as an important swing state in the upcoming presidential election; that is, it is a state where no single candidate or party has overwhelming support. As the campaign heats up between President Obama and Mitt Romney, energy questions and their relationship to the job market, are sure to feature prominently.

Colorado Springs from above. Colorado’s future role within the US energy industry will have important consequences on the nation’s political landscape. (Credit: Edvard Glücksman)

An example of the political and socioeconomic importance of the energy market in Colorado is the recent announcement that Vestas, the largest wind turbine maker in the world, is cutting 20% of its jobs at its tower factory in the southern city of Pueblo. The Danish company cites the weakening market for the job cuts, blaming US Congress in Washington DC for not renewing the federal wind-production tax credit, set to expire at the end of this year. Vestas employs 1,700 people in four plants across Colorado.

I am hoping that my trip will build on work I carried out last summer, when I spent five weeks with the El Pomar Foundation, a Colorado-based non-profit organisation. After receiving a thorough introduction to the US culture of philanthropy, leadership practices, and the nation’s complex state and federal political landscape, I am now ready to apply these basic principles to better understand the US energy economy and make more informed comparisons with the European energy market.

Stay tuned for my first impressions from Denver early next week!

By Edvard Glücksman

This week, we are excited to introduce a new monthly blog column called Geotalk, featuring short interviews with geoscientists about their research. To kick-start this regular Q&A series, we talked to Dr Guillermo Rein of Imperial College London about “the largest fires on Earth” and how they can contribute to greenhouse gas emissions.

Dr Rein next to a water vapour vent on top of the 30m-high Bogside bing, near Glasgow, Scotland. This bing is a man-made hill of mining waste, and started to smoulder in 2009, approximately 80 years after the closure of the pit. The spread of the combustion is accompanied by the development of vents ahead of the front. (Image by Dr Ricky Carvel and Dr Guillermo Rein, distributed under a CC BY-SA Creative Commons licence)

First, could you introduce yourself and let us know a bit about your research topic(s)?

I was born in Madrid, and studied engineering at ICAI (Ingeniero Industrial 1999). I then moved to the University of California at Berkeley to study combustion science where I got an MSc (2003) and PhD (2005), both in Mechanical Engineering. After six years at the University of Edinburgh, I am now a Senior Lecturer at Imperial College London. I research on fire dynamics, both in the built and the natural environments. At the EGU General Assembly, I usually talk at the Soil System Sciences sessions about my work on smouldering wildfires of peat and coal, which I claim are the largest fires on Earth. As a scientist and engineer, I want to understand these fires so that I can then solve the problems they pose.

A particular interesting area of your research is that of smouldering fires and related burning of fossil fuels. To start, could you explain to us what the difference is between smouldering fires and the more familiar flaming fires?

In wildfires, there are two types of combustion, smouldering and flaming, and depending on what is burning one dominates over the other. Pyrolysis of biomass always takes place due to the heat released by the wildfire, and it leads to the formation of two chemical products: pyrolysate (gas) and char (solid). In flames, the fuel oxidising is the gaseous pyrolysate so the reaction is airborne. In smouldering, the fuel is the char and the reaction is on the pores of the biomass, not airborne but on the solid itself (thus on the ground and under the ground as well). Smouldering is slow, low-temperature, flameless, and represents the most persistent type of combustion phenomena (easier to ignite and more difficult to suppress than flaming).

My true expertise is smouldering combustion, a rare topic, really. There are very few people who work on that but this might change in the incoming decade. I have coined the term “accidental burning of fossil fuels” referring to the wide spread of smouldering megafires of ancient carbon stored in natural coal and peat deposits, and burning for decades in six continents. It is a rather novel topic quickly attracting scientific attention.

On a video on your website you mention a smouldering fire that has been burning for the last 6,000 years. How is this possible, and how could such fires be extinguished?

That is a talk I gave at UC Berkeley. I always mention the case of the Burning Mountain, Australia. It is remarkable. It is a large coal seam partially exposed to the atmosphere and partially underground. It is now a National Park that one can visit, and it is also a sacred ground for natives. There are very few papers in the scientific literature where it has been studied. One of them from 1974 roughly estimated that, given the current burning rate and the burnt pattern left behind, it had been burning for six millennia. I always add at this point that at least the British cannot be blamed for it.

It is very difficult to suppress large smouldering fires like this one because it requires total flooding, fuel removal, or smothering. You can imagine that flooding or removing a massive portion of soil in a remote location is not always viable or desirable. Smothering is often attempted but it requires very long holding times (several years of continuous application) and is prone to sealing failures. However, more advanced techniques can be developed in the near future by combining technologies already used in seismic and petroleum engineering.

Is it possible to reduce the atmospheric carbon emissions related to smouldering fires? If so, how?

The problem with smouldering fires is that peat and coal are made of ancient carbon stored in the soil. This massive amount of carbon is slowly released to the atmosphere during fires creating pollution, haze episodes, and climate change. Moreover, it destroys accidentally valuable energy and ecological resources without any benefit to anyone whatsoever. The best way to avoid this is prevention: avoid smouldering fires from igniting to begin with (mainly via keeping organic soils moist, avoiding drainage, and keeping ignition sources away). When prevention fails, monitoring and suppression are the next tasks. But current monitoring and suppression technologies for smouldering fires are costly, rudimentary and rather inefficient. We need something better, and advanced science can feed and develop the needed technology.

Last but not the least, can you tell us a bit about your future research plans?

My research aim in the long term is to develop detection, monitoring and suppression technologies. Current knowhow comes 90% from flaming wildfires and unfortunately it does not work well for smouldering. However, before that happens, the science that allows us to understand these fires and provides a larger framework of knowledge must be developed first. My immediate plans are to contribute to this framework. With my team, I study peat and coal fires in the laboratory and in the field, including the chemistry of smouldering, the required ignition conditions, the spread patterns, the emissions, and so on.

One of my most pressing current objectives is to convince the scientific community that smouldering creates a positive feedback mechanism to climate change. This is because warmer organic soils and moisture deficiency create and accelerate smouldering hotspots, thus leading to the burning of more ancient carbon, closing the loop when the climate warms up and dries more organic soils. The theory and laboratory results are clear. I am now working on a paper putting everything together.

A lone tree destroyed by the 2006 Rothiemurchus peat fire in Scotland, UK. The trunk and lower branches have been charred by flames but the soil has been destroyed by a smouldering fire, exposing the trees roots and ultimately leading to the death of the tree. (Image by Dr Guillermo Rein and Dr Claire Belcher, distributed by EGU under a Creative Commons licence.)

International Innovation is a global dissemination publication that provides access to interviews, content and presentations for the wider scientific, technology and research communities. The magazine has, on various occasions, interviewed EGU personalities such as Ulrich Pöschl (Publications Committee Chair), a few division presidents and, most recently, EGU’s Executive Secretary, Philippe Courtial. Some of these EGU-related interviews are now available online.

• Interview with Gert-Jan Reichard: “Biogeology has emerged over the past decade as one of the most important fields within the geosciences. Dr Gert-Jan Reichart, Division President of Biogeosciences at the European Geosciences Union offers his insight into the environmental challenges we face and how this research area is striving to address them”
• Interview with Philippe Courtial: “Executive Secretary of the EGU, Dr Philippe Courtial, details the work of the Union in assisting scientists and improving the availability of accurate scientific data”
• Interview with Michael Kühn: “Boldly trying to push science for solutions to solve the energy problems of tomorrow, Michael Kühn [EGU Division President of Energy, Resources and the Environment] is studying new approaches where renewables play a vital role”
• Interview with Ulrich Pöschl: “The European Geosciences Union (EGU) is the world leader in interactive open access publishing and public peer review. We speak exclusively to Dr Ulrich Pöschl, the EGU Chair of Publication Committee, about the important work being done in the pursuit of knowledge sharing in the geosciences”
• Interview with Denis-Didier Rousseau: “President of the European Geosciences Union, Division on Climate: Past, Present and Future, provides an insight into the ever expanding remit of this branch of the EGU”

(A few of these texts have also been reproduced with permission in GeoQ, the quarterly newsletter of the European Geosciences Union.)

Burst by Melissa S. Bukovsky, distributed by EGU under a Creative Commons license.

This photo won 2nd Prize at the 2012 General Assembly photo competition and, according to the photographer, Melissa S. Bukovsky, epitomises the idea that an expensive camera is not a necessity for taking great photos. “You just need to know how to use what you have. I travel with a point and shoot that fits in my back pocket,” she explains.

Currently a Project Scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), Bukovsky snapped this shot on one of her many work related trips. “This picture of a bursting mud bubble in a boiling pool of mud was taken just outside of the Wai-O-Tapu geothermal area near Rotorua, New Zealand.  The area is part of New Zealand’s Taupo volcanic zone. I stayed in this area for a few days of holiday before traveling back to the US after working in Melbourne for the summer.  Aside from all of the fantastic geothermal phenomena to see in that area, there are numerous hot springs that are great for relaxing in.”

Mud pools, hot springs of bubbling mud, form in high-temperature geothermal areas where water is in short supply. The little water that is available rises to the surface at a spot where the soil is rich in volcanic ash, clay, and other fine particulates. The viscosity of the mud varies, from fluid during the rainy season to viscous in drier months.

The Wai-O-Tapu geothermal complex has been protected as a scenic reserve since 1931 and it remains a major tourist attraction.

Imaggeo is the online open access geosciences image repository of the European Geosciences Union. Every geoscientist who is an amateur photographer (but also other people) can submit their images to this repository. Being open access, it can be used by scientists for their presentations or publications as well as by the press. If you submit your images to imaggeo, you retain full rights of use, since they are licenced and distributed by EGU under a Creative Commons licence.

The EGU is responsible for 14 Open Access journals, all freely available online

Since 2001, the EGU and Open Access publishing house Copernicus Publications has published a growing number of successful geoscientific journals. These include 14 peer-reviewed Open Access journals, of which 11 have a Thomson Reuters Impact Factor, placing them in the top echelon of their respective discipline. EGU also publishes a host of other materials available in paper and online. As a signatory of the Berlin Open Access Declaration (2003), the EGU is committed to making all their publications freely available.

The EGU’s Open Access scientific journals are:

• Annales Geophysicae (ANGEO), Impact Factor 1.62
• Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics (ACP) & Discussions (ACPD), IF 5.309
• Atmospheric Measurement Techniques (AMT) & Discussions (AMTD), IF 2.623
• Biogeosciences (BG) & Discussions (BGD), IF 3.587
• Climate of the Past (CP) & Discussions (CPD), IF 2.821
• Earth System Dynamics (ESD) & Discussions (ESDD)
• Geoscientific Instrumentation, Methods and Data Systems (GI) & Discussions (GID)
• Geoscientific Model Development (GMD) & Discussions (GMDD), IF 1.591
• Hydrology and Earth System Sciences (HESS) & Discussions (HESSD), IF 2.463
• Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences (NHESS), IF 1.792
• Nonlinear Processes in Geophysics (NPG), IF 1.300
• Ocean Science (OS) & Discussions (OSD), IF 1.443
• Solid Earth (SE) & Discussions (SED)
• The Cryosphere (TC) & Discussions (TCD), IF 3.641

Today’s guest post is the second written at the 2012 General Assembly by Michelle Cain, postdoctoral researcher at the University of Cambridge, United Kingdom. Her first covered megacities.

It seems the global economic downturn is so pervasive that it has even hit the Earth sciences! I’ve been to a few talks now that have mentioned the downturn/recession/crisis/apocalypse (delete as appropriate), mainly with reference to emissions of pollutant species or greenhouse gases. I guess this is one of the few good-news stories to come from the bottom falling out of the world’s economy. With no money to burn, production and therefore emissions decreased, thus slowing emissions – ever so slightly.

On Tuesday, Jintai Lin presented some work on NO2 columns measured from space, which he used to back out the NO2 emissions coming from China. (NO2 is itself toxic, and a precursor for ozone, which is a greenhouse gas and is harmful for animal and plant health.) His analysis of the seasonal variation in NO2 showed that the emissions were dominated by anthropogenic sources. Presenting a time series of NO2 columns from satellites, he showed the unmistakable signal from the Chinese economic downturn in 2008-9 (see Lin and McElroy 2011, ACP), and he showed the same signal in aerosol optical depth (a marker for PM2.5 – see my previous blog post for a definition). But this was not to last, as the NO2 caught up again after about a year and a half.

Is recession good for the environment? English Landscape by Norbert Krupp. Distributed on Imaggeo.net by EGU under a Creative Commons license.

Then on Wednesday, Patricia Castellanos showed a similarly striking graph of a stock index (I didn’t catch which one) on the same axes as measures of European industrial activity and road transport. As you might have guessed, they correlated perfectly, all dropping off the edge of a cliff over the space of a few months in 2008. By dropping off a cliff, I mean a 20% decrease in industrial activity and 15% decrease in commercial road transport. Castellanos summarised this effect with what I found to be a surprising finding: NOx is 10-50% lower now than it was in 2004 (that’s not the surprising bit), and at least half of this reduction was due to the recession.

So, for all the EU’s hard work in making policies and targets for air quality, in regulating vehicle emissions and all the other things they are doing to improve the air we breathe, it has at most been as “good” as the recession for reducing NO2 levels. If they are really serious about air quality, policy makers would be wise to reconsider their attitude to economic growth…

By Michelle Cain, University of Cambridge

Today’s guest post comes from Michelle Cain, postdoctoral researcher at the University of Cambridge, United Kingdom.

Almost a whole day’s worth of sessions on megacities – where to begin? I certainly couldn’t pick just one talk to write about, so here’s a mish-mash of the session in general and a few talks in particular.

First things first: what is a megacity? Officially defined (by who, I don’t know) as a city of 5 million people or more, there are only two of them in Europe (London and Paris), and both are among the most polluted cities in Europe. There are other European places that embody megacity characteristics without adhering to the strict definition, so the MEGAPOLI project has focused on two of these alongside the two bona-fide megacities. The Po Valley in Italy, surrounded by mountains on three sides, is populated by 16 million people and contains 37% of the country’s industry. The mountains disrupt the large-scale meteorology so that local winds are often slack, which combines with the high levels of industrial, agricultural and residential emissions to cause worse air quality than in either Paris or London.

Loss in life expectancy (months) attributable to exposure to anthropogenic PM2.5 for year 2000 emissions (Source: EC, IIASA)

The air quality is similarly poor in the Rhine-Ruhr valley in Germany, an industrial region with about 10 million inhabitants. This region suffers not only from local emissions, but often from pollution transported from London, Paris and the Netherlands in the prevailing winds. (Thanks to the MEGAPOLI website for the info about these locations).

The reasons why these non-megacities have been brought into the fold highlight the complexities of trying to understand what might happen in the coming years as the world becomes increasingly urbanised. It’s not only the amount of stuff being pumped into the atmosphere that causes air quality issues. It’s equally how much stuff gets vented out of the boundary layer (the lowest layer of the atmosphere, where people live), and how much gets washed out in rain. And what happens to the stuff before it gets removed? And this is not even considering the climate impacts of all this stuff is getting higher up into the atmosphere, where it has a longer lifetime and can be transported long distances, potentially also affecting air quality downwind. All these interactions could be broadly categorised into: emissions, boundary layer meteorology, deposition, chemistry, global transport, and climate.

Several talks in the session were related to emissions evaluations, as how can we hope to understand anything if we’re putting the wrong amount of stuff into the atmosphere? Any by “stuff”, I mean NOx (the sum of NO and NO2, which are pollutants emitted from both anthropogenic and natural sources, and can react to produce ozone, which has adverse health effects) and particulates (the shorthand for particulate matter is PM2.5/PM10 for those with a radius less than 2.5/10 microns, also bad for health), as these were the main topics in the session.

Generating emissions inventories is no trivial task, as is evidenced by the continual work going in to this area. In his talk, S Sahu described the development of an emissions inventory for Delhi and the surrounding areas, which is home to a staggering 30 million people in an area of 70 km x 65 km. For 6 months, an army of 250 students surveyed the residents and businesses to determine a sample of the emission-generating activity in the region. They combined this new data with the existing literature and government statistics to develop a GIS-based emissions inventory. Their results showed that there are 5.7 million vehicles on the roads, and 1.5 million living in slums and cooking with wood, kerosene or LPG (in order of decreasing precedence). The PM2.5 emissions total was 68.1 Gg/year, the largest portion of which was from transport at 30.25 Gg/year. Wind-blown dust and residential emissions were also large contributors. The inventory was used to forecast for the Commonwealth games in 2010 and is currently available for both science and policy uses.

Policy issues were the driver behind R Friedrich’s talk, which directly addressed questions of whether air quality policies could result in the desired policy outcome – surely an important factor in decision-making. As part of the EU MEGAPOLI project, his work took a “full chain approach”, whereby the scenario with and without the policy measure was modeled to determine the effectiveness of a policy. The reference scenario assumes the current EU energy and climate package was taken forward. Then each policy was added to the model, and the difference can be described in monetary terms or by DALYs (disability adjusted life years).

The study generated some surprising results. Twenty four policy measures were ranked in terms of avoided DALYs for Paris, and the best measure by this metric was to change to efficient combustion of gaseous fuels (which generate less PM than wood), followed by biomass fuels. However, different metrics paint a different picture. Calculating the efficiency of each measure in monetary terms put coke dry quenching (as opposed to wet quenching which generates PM) in the top spot, followed by use of biofuels, use of district-wide heating networks, an aviation kerosene tax and a switch to electric vehicles. The least efficient measure was a passenger car toll (which, for example, London has had since 2003). Interestingly, the implementation of a low emissions zone was shown to have a negative or neutral effect. On the other hand, the speaker recommended the improvement of traffic management as an efficient measure.

Another EU project, CityZEN, also linked the science with policy needs by producing some 2 page policy briefs on ozone, PM, observations and the East Mediterranean air pollution hotspot, and was discussed by several speakers. Other talks and poster covered the links between meteorology and chemistry, observations and models, but I’m afraid this is all I have time for… See you next time, on the GeoLog.

By Michelle Cain, University of Cambridge

'My way' by Amirhossein Mojtahedzadeh, distributed by EGU under a Creative Commons license

Rocks within the Earth are constantly being subjected to forces that bend, twist, and fracture them, causing them to change shape and size. This process is known as deformation. Polyphase deformation occurs over time when rocks are affected, or stressed, by more than one phase of deformation.

Geomorphologist Amirhossein Mojtahedzadeh captured this stunning scene whilst on field work. “This photo was taken near Qom in central Iran. These formations are contained by sedimentary rocks, which underwent polyphase deformation and metamorphism – clearly visible in areas at this location,” he says.

Iran covers an area of 1 648 000 square kilometres. The central plateau, located between the bounding mountain ranges, is a major feature of the country’s diverse morphology.

Imaggeo is the online open access geosciences image repository of the European Geosciences Union. Every geoscientist who is an amateur photographer (but also other people) can submit their images to this repository. Being open access, it can be used by scientists for their presentations or publications as well as by the press. If you submit your images to imaggeo, you retain full rights of use, since they are licenced and distributed by EGU under a Creative Commons licence.