Highlights
Oliver Higgins won an Early Career Researcher award for the best presentation at the VoiLA workshop in Trinidad
October 9, 2019
Oliver Higgins won an Early Career Researcher Award from Nature Communications for giving the best talk at the Volatiles in the Lesser Antilles workshop (Trinidad) in September 2019. This was presenting his PhD study which focusses on the magmatic system on St Kitts, Lesser Antilles.
Marion Grosjean was awarded the prize for best poster presentation at the SGA 2019 Meeting
September 4, 2019
Marion Grosjean was awarded the prize for best poster presentation at the 2019 biannual SGA meeting in Glasgow
Bertrand Rottier receives the SGA 2019 Award for Best Paper in Mineralium Deposita
September 3, 2019
Bertrand Rottier received at the SGA 2019 Meeting in Glasgow the Mineralium Deposita Best Paper Award for the period 2017-2018. The article derives from his PhD thesis, completed in the Mineral Resources and Geofluids Group. Bertrand Rottier has been recently appointed Assistant Tenure-Track Profes…
Earthquakes trigger rockfalls at very large epicenter distances in Patagonia
September 2, 2019
Earthquakes can trigger large landslides and rockfalls at epicenter distances of several hundreds of kilometers. In a study recently published in Nature Scientific Reports, Markus Stoffel and co-authors used tree-ring series of Nothofagus trees to develop a calendar-dated record of rockfall events o…
On plate tectonics and ocean temperatures
August 29, 2019
Plate tectonics, the principal vehicle for dissipation of planetary energy, is believed to buffer the δ18O of seawater at its near-modern value of 0‰ SMOW because the hot/cold cells of hydrothermal circulation at oceanic ridges cancel each other. The persistence of plate tectonics over Eons apparent…
Hydrocarbons may also form zinc and lead deposits
June 13, 2019
Base metals such as zinc (Zn) and lead (Pb) are essential elements for our economy. They are mainly used for the galvanization of steel and large battery installations, respectively. These metals are often mined together from deposits hosted in ancient sedimentary rock formations. A new study is pub…
The Terrascope at the Nuit des Musées 2019: The geologists reveal the secrets of the gold diggers
May 8, 2019
Join us from 6pm to 11pm at the Musée d’histoire des Sciences with the UNIGE Scienscope!
Formation of diagenetic siderite in modern ferruginous sediments
April 29, 2019
Ferruginous conditions prevailed in the world’s deep oceans during the Archean and Proterozoic Eons. Sedimentary iron formations deposited at that time may provide an important record of environmental conditions, yet linking the chemistry and mineralogy of these sedimentary rocks to depositional con…
The climate was controlled by Milankovitch cycles 2.5 billion years ago
April 10, 2019
The climate of our planet is controlled by the orbital parameters of the solar system, leading to the Milankovitch cycles. Researchers from the universities of Utrecht and Geneva demonstrated that the layering in 2.5 billion years old “Banded Iron Formations” is due to oscillations of Earth’s orbit …
The struggle for life in the Dead Sea sediments: necrophagy as a survival mechanism
March 27, 2019
Camille Thomas, Daniel Ariztegui and a team of colleagues from the University of Lyon (France) have evidenced unprecedented molecular fossils from the hypersaline sediments of the Dead Sea. Their structure reveals the recycling of cell fragments from halophilic archaea, extremophiles adapted to the …