Scale matters

zafojones: Petrified wood fossil with opal formed in the growth rings. This looks amazing However, if you look closely, you realize, why scale is important in pictures like this. Can you spot the human fingers in the background? from Tumblr

Snow in Cairo – First in 112 years

If you look at that picture you see the magnificent view of palms in the middle of snow. That is egypt and it’s snowing for the first time in 112 years. Of course didn’t take long for people to wonder if this has anything to do with climate change. http://instagram.com/p/h26ZA0l3DY Is it about climate change? […]

The state of science on climate change

Reading about climate change can be overwhelming. There are many questions asked and many implications for humans. The typhoon on the Philippines shows once again that Earth is changing. But the data alone isn’t very telling. No one I know has actually read those reports or has understood them very well. What does it mean […]

Fourier and Space – The FX Domain

Geophysics can get a little fancy. You have probably heard the geophysicists tend to hang around some mathematicians. When it comes to the topic of math most of my friends like to state: “I was good at math until they started mixing in the alphabet!” I hear ya. Complex numbers and pi and variables are […]

Mama Etna is back!

One big reason to go into geophysics is pretty obvious: Volcanoes! I got to know Boris Behncke during my high school years. He’s a geophysicist situated in Sicily, Italy. And to our fortune he’s quite keen on photography and shares these gems on various platforms. The latest paroxysm produced a very special event: That moment, […]

Under Pressure – Multi-component seismic acquisition

Imaging the subsurface has become more and more complex. If we want to get a state-of-the-art image we might consider a slanted multi-component streamer acquisition and process it with a full waveform inversion to finish it off with a nice pre-stack Gaussian beam migration. Yeah… Even as a geophysics master student this is some tough […]

Is working in Oil & Gas immoral?

We often look at the Oil & Gas industry and wonder how anyone would be willing to work there. All the environmental catastrophes, the carbon footprint of cars powered by oil and lately the fracking business, they’re all deemed to be the devil institutionalized. So on Reddit, the question was asked: Is working in Oil […]

How to see the earth rumbling.

The Earth starts to shake. All the tension that was built up at the fault was released. An earthquake just happened somehow the ground starts moving. If you think about it, it’s fascinating how this energy can affect us several miles away from the actual earthquake. But how exactly does this work? At the fault […]