DeepEarthScience

The ice sheets and glaciers on our Earth are currently melting, which causes the global sea level to rise. This has of course major impacts on the 44 percent of the world’s population living in coastal areas. This melting is happening already since 24,000 years ago, during that time enormous ice sheets, up to 3-4 km thick, covered lands like Scandinavia and Canada. Scientists have done measurements of this rising sea level using the coral reefs at Barbados that show a sea level rise of 120-130 meters since the start of the de-glaciation. Imagine this for a moment; England was not an island at that time. Currently, we see a global sea-level rise of 3 mm/year, however locally the rate of sea-level change can vary significantly. For example, at the coastlines of the Netherlands we observe a 2.3 mm/yr sea-level rise, whereas the center of Sweden and Finland has a 7.8 mm/yr sea-level drop. The cause of these particular variations is that not only the sea-level changes, but also the so...

A few days ago, two workmen were fixing my sewer and plumbing system underneath my house (It was kinda smelly). During the coffee break (which is the theme in my blog, all good things come from a coffee break), I had to explain what I did at the university. So I explained that I was looking at the motion of the Earth's crust due to ice loading during the late-Pleistocene ice age (well not in those words, and I did not mention, that I was doing this with satellite data, because my experience tells me to leave this part out. If you use the word satellites, people just stop listening and laugh). They found it very interesting ;). I know, it is an abstract subject and difficult to grasp (it took me several months to fully understand the complexity of the problem, I am still working on how to solve it). Last week I needed to look at the ice sheet, that caused the motion of the crust that we observe today. People have made models on the growing and melting of this ice sheet, us...

Sorry, but I could not decide on the title of this blog post. So I tried a literature technique I learned from reading my first "real" dutch literature novel, "Tjeempie! of Liesje in luiletterland", by Remco Campert, which is a typical dutch novel, full of sex and without story (I hope I do not offend anybody now, but I was a teenage boy, just finding out about the two (sex and good stories) and I did not pay a lot of attention to the last). Remco Campert also had two titles so he put them both on the cover of the book. Just like him, I am now among the great dutch literature writers (literature is the art of writing, not the scientific kind, which is also great, but that is not what I want to talk about (In the next bit I will, just to make things complicated, hmmm lets continue)), writing in English, hmmm... Enough about the title bit (I just needed an introduction), I want to talk about this phenomenon we observe in Scandinavia, or even more accurately...

As a child, you think the Earth is solid. Heck, many adults still think the Earth you walk on is solid, motionless and has infinite strength(...and is flat, well some think this). But it is not. The Earth can behave like a liquid, it moves a lot (in all directions) and it can break. This only takes a lot of time and we humble humans don't have the time to stick around long enough. We know this only decades now (Ok, the not being flat part, maybe a bit longer). There are many scientists that are trying to figure out the dynamics, mechanics and materials of the Earth. And I am one of them. Well, I am learning to become one of them. My job at the TU is to find a structural density and viscosity model of the crust and upper mantle below Scandinavia using mainly satellite based gravity data and observations of post-glacial rebound. A lot of deep Earth words, but I will try to discuss them in this blog of mine. The idea for this blog was for me to put my ideas on paper, some of thos...