février 2018

Didthisreallyhappen?!

The 30th of January, we launched our website didthisreallyhappen.net with the comics made by Alice Adenis and build on stories we collected on sexism in geosciences. We started few years ago, and the collective work focused on that project. Everyone pushed for it and worked hard to make it real. Now people can propose their stories too on the website, and can join the community.

On this day, we worked with the Equality department of Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1 and the communication office to organize a full day of discussions and testimonies around didthisreallyhappen.net. The morning, Claudia Jesus-Rydin, coordinator of the Earth System Science program at ERC came to talk about the actions she pushed. A round table followed, with Marie Bocher from the team, Muriel Salle who is an historian, and a well-known cartoonist and writer Diglee. Philippe Liotard animated very interesting debates on sexism in science, feminism, women and labor. Early in the afternoon, several people gave talks, in a TED-like format, on their experience as a scientist, worker of the music industry, YouTuber, teacher building up a program on equality in sports. The presentations were insightful and touching too. Outside, we made an exhibition of Alice’s drawings. We enjoyed our day very much, and were very happy to share our experience with a diversity of people.

You can find the videos in French (except for Claudia Jesus-Rydin’s talk which is in English) here:

New papers – early 2018

The paper of Marie Bocher on a data assimilation method to reconstruct mantle convection and tectonics jointly is out in Nonlinear Processes in Geophysics. You can download it here: Bocheretal2018. It presents the application of the Ensemble Kalman Filter methodology for the mantle convection problem, in which plate motions are not prescribed but a data to match. Marie developped a method often used for oceanography and weather prediction. Alexandre Fournier, a co-author here, used it to study the evolution of the geomagnetic field. Marie is now postdoc in ETH Zurich.

The paper of Nicolas Coltice and Grace Shephard (Oslo) on making tectonic predictions from global mantle convection models. They show that starting from a guessed initial conditions, the predicted tectonics for the Earth can be very good initially and diverge rapidly. The causes of these errors in these models are more coming from initial conditions than rheology unknowns. Therefore, the method described in Marie Bocher’s paper above could be used to solve the problem. The paper can be downloaded here: colticeshephard2018.

Our youngest AUGURY teammate

Milo, Sean Langemeyer (visiting from Toronto), Mike Tetley and Maëlis Arnould

Milo is 14 years old and studies in high school. He was an intern within the team for a week in November, and for another week in January. He came to see what it is to work as a scientist. So we proposed him a research project. A research project is one you don’t have a solution yet. So we asked him if there is or there was any plate tectonics on Mars. It was the occasion to work with the e-Mars team too.

Milo searched on maps, worked by himself and asked people around and found some interesting things. More news when the internship will be over 😉

A week in New Orleans

This year, the American Geophysical Union Fall meeting took place in New Orleans from the 11^th to the 17^th of December 2017. On Monday morning, Mélanie and Maëlis presented their posters about net rotation and dynamic topography in mantle convection models with StagYY, respectively.

Mélanie and Maëlis in front of one of our posters.

Mélanie also co-convened an afternoon oral session on the effects of mantle convection dynamics on surface observables.

Mélanie’s first time as a chair.

The AGU was also the perfect time to work with scientists from elsewhere and to discuss the group’s recent research progress: Mélanie met with collaborators to discuss her flat-slab subduction models and Maëlis presented her ongoing work on the lateral motion of mantle plumes.