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, […]

Feminine field work.

It doesn’t matter how you dress! Or does it? So I’m a white middle-class guy, which makes me pretty privileged as it is. Please feel free to check yourself on the Male Privilige Checklist. And I have had a lot of learning to do when it comes to sexism and feminism (and I still do). […]

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 […]

The Amplituhedron – Turning physics inside out.

I like the seismics. I just love the concept how recording a superposition of waves can transport information about the subsurface. We send out carefully engineered noise to record noise and apply statistics to these huge data sets and in the end get an image we can interpret in regard to its geologic formation. This […]

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 […]