GeoSciMeg

Rivers are at the forefront of research today – with climate change set to increase temperatures and in response alter precipitation patters estimating the consequence on river catchments is vitally important. Many aspects of rivers are still relatively unconstrained especially sediment patterns, geomorphology and the influence of tectonics. Hugh Sinclair focused in this seminar on the Himalayas – an area of great research interest which is tectonically active and a home for many of the world’s major rivers and 52.7 million people. Generally, it is accepted river catchments have a regularity and in mountain areas have a 2:1 geometry, so the average spacing of drainage outlets relative to the width of the mountain flank is highly uniform, seen in Figure 1. However, especially in areas like the Himalayas, seen in Figure 2, this regularity is affected by tectonics as discharge and gradients of the river change in response to faulting. The shape and distribution of the river catchment...

On 5/10/18 I attended a seminar hosted by James Lea from the University of Liverpool: ‘Insights into tidewater glacier behaviour from Greenland wide mapping and ‘novel’ stability analysis’. I really enjoyed how the seminar focused on simple and accessible science but with techniques that are still just as effective. I think it is so important to prove science is ready and available for all and hopefully more seminars like this will inspire people to give research a go! T he seminar focused on two new ways to map and analyse tidewater glacier behaviour, one focused on mapping ice margins and the other on recognising the stable and unstable areas of a glacier both techniques are applied to Greenland glaciers. Fig 1: Ice Calving at Helheim Glacier (https://timeforgeography.co.uk) Technique one is currently being tested by James’ PHD student Dominik Fahrner and in principle he is using an add on to the free source Google Earth Engine (GEE). James has created a Digitisation...

On Thursday 28 th of September 2018 I attended a seminar on Sediment Routing Systems in Extreme Climates taken by   Sébastien Castelltort from the University of Geneva. The seminar primarily focused on the response of sediment systems to climate change with a case study from the North of Spain, in the Pyrenees. Focusing on the Tremp-Graus basin near Aren and Roda situated in the South Pyrenean foreland basin. The seminar sought to highlight how powerful sediment supply and processes can be and how they can dominate stratigraphic signals. Also, the seminar demonstrates how sensitive climate is to temperature change and how future global warming may be affected by this. The sedimentology of the Tremp-Graus basin was focused on first by Sébastien – due to the presence of a thick conglomerate layer at the Palaeocene-Eocene boundary, known as the Claret Conglomerate. It was deposited during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum 'P ETM' – where warming of 5-8⁰C occurred so ...