Immersive virtual reality can potentially open up interesting geological sites to students, academics and others who may not have had the opportunity to visit such sites previously. We study how users perceive the usefulness of an immersive virtual reality approach applied to Earth Sciences teaching and communication. During nine immersive virtual reality-based events held in 2018 and 2019 in ...

Glacial meltwaters export substantial quantities of dissolved and dissolvable amorphous silicon (DSi and ASi), providing an essential nutrient for downstream diatoms. Evidence suggests that glacially exported DSi is isotopically light compared to DSi in non-glaciated rivers. However, the isotopic fractionation mechanisms are not well constrained, indicating an important gap in our understanding ...

In the Northern Hemisphere, an insolation driven Early to Middle Holocene Thermal Maximum was followed by a Neoglacial cooling that culminated during the Little Ice Age (LIA). Here, we review the glacier response to this Neoglacial cooling in Greenland. Changes in the ice margins of outlet glaciers from the Greenland Ice Sheet as well as local glaciers and ice caps are synthesized Greenland-wide. ...

Whilst there has been a recent appreciation for the role of open-system pingos in providing a fluid-flow conduit through continuous permafrost that enables methane release, the formation and internal structure of these ubiquitous permafrost-diagnostic landforms remains unclear. Here, we combine active-source seismic measurements with electrical resistivity tomography (ERT) to investigate the structural ...

The Fram Strait plays a crucial role in regulating the heat and sea-ice dynamics in the Arctic. In response to the ongoing global warming, the marine biota of this Arctic gateway is experiencing significant changes with increasing advection of Atlantic species. The footprint of this ‘Atlantification’ has been identified in isolated observations across the plankton community, but a systematic, ...

We describe the population density, biodiversity and vertical distribution in the sediment of benthic foraminifera, and their relationship to environmental parameters, in the Kveithola Trough (NW Barents Sea). Two staining methods, Cell Tracker Green (CTG) and Rose Bengal (RB), were used to distinguish between living and dead tests. CTG proved to be more effective than RB, and we therefore used this ...

Large rock slope failures are temporal processes which act to modify the landscape after glacial retreat. The slope failure process often shows a lag time of thousands of years after deglaciation, with multiple failure events possible. While global datasets constrain this lag time from extensive mapping and dating of paraglacial rock avalanches, the timeline is poorly refined in northern Norway. We ...

Mountain slopes in periglacial environments are affected by frost- and gravity-driven processes that shape the landscape. Both rock glaciers and rockslides have been intensively inventoried worldwide. Although most inventories are traditionally based on morphologic criteria, kinematic approaches based on satellite remote sensing have more recently been used to identify moving landforms at the regional ...

The grain-size distribution of sediment particles is an important aspect of the architecture of submarine fans and lobes. It governs depositional sand quality and reflects distribution of particulate organic carbon and pollutants. Documenting the grain-size distribution of these deep-marine sedimentary bodies can also offer us an insight into the flows that deposited them. Submarine lobes ...

The microbial key players at methane seeps are methanotrophic archaea and sulfate-reducing bacteria. They form spherical aggregates and jointly mediate the sulfate-dependent anaerobic oxidation of methane (SD–AOM: CH4 + SO42– → HCO3– + HS– + H2O), thereby inducing the precipitation of authigenic seep carbonates. While seep carbonates constitute valuable archives for molecular fossils of SD–AOM-mediating ...