» What’s up? The Friday links (61)

2014-12-05 | Andreas Rudersdorf in The Friday Links | one response

Quite a lot happened this week. We have news on the world’s most abundant mineral, Nature going open access, a new blog on geomorphology, and more! So, Welcome back! Today is Friday and here are your links!

Nature goes Open Access! To some extent. Macmillan Science and Education announced on Tuesday the launch of a initiative that shall make it easy for scientists to share Nature articles instantly. Subscribers to nature.com journals can now legitimately share full-text articles with colleagues who do not have a subscription via a shareable web link! It will be possible to share a unique URL to a full text, read-only version of publications using ReadCube, which can be distributed for scientific research and for personal, non-commercial use. Selected news websites and blogs will also be able to provide their own readers with a link to a full text, read-only view of the original scientific paper, so even the wider public audience can be reached easily. To my opinion this heads into a right direction!

Steven Inchcoombe, CEO of Nature Publishing Group:
“Scientists have always shared their work, it is essential to advancing progress. Nature was established in 1869 to help scientists share, and to bring science to the public. In today’s global, internet-enabled world, we think we can meet the needs of science and society better. We know researchers are already sharing content, but not always optimally. We’re committed to adapting to meet the needs of the community, and to basing our decisions on an evidence-based approach. We are conducting our own “experiment” to understand how best to help sharing of knowledge in a sustainable way. Working with authors, readers, libraries and journalists, we hope to learn a lot.”

To follow updates throughout the pilot launch, just follow #scishare.

The most abundant mineral of the Earth has finally been named: Welcome, Bridgmanite! Wait, the most abundant mineral on earth had no name so far? Well, no. A lot has been known about Silicate-perovskite (orthorhombic, (Mg,Fe)SiO₃), which makes up some 93 % of the lower mantle, but nobody had a grip on it until now. It was finally found as submicrometer-sized crystals in the Tenham chondrite and the name got approved earlier this year. Now the naming article was published in Science.

Chondrite meteorite found in Queensland, Australia in 1879. | CC BY-SA Chemical Engineer

A new paper on Seismicity, structure and tectonics in the Arctic region was published by Kanao et al. in Geoscience Frontiers open access. The paper deals with the crustal structure and seismicity in the Arctic region based on seismic approaches, and focuses on the Siberian Arctic, the Baikal Rift Zone and the Far East. Also, the Arctic Ocean and Greenland are investigated in terms of past tectonics and recent global warming.

Scott Bennett invited to submit an abstract to the session How Reliable Are Reconstructions and Models of Surface-Rupturing Earthquakes? on the 2015 SSA Annual Meeting in Pasadena, California.

Historic surface-rupturing earthquakes have demonstrated a potential for complex, discontinuous rupture traces. […] How well do reconstructions and models of past ruptures […] realistically describe the complexity of surface ruptures? Are earthquake magnitudes and rupture lengths from empirically-based models consistent with individual field-based observations of past events? The goal of this session will be to consider ways to improve the documentation of past earthquakes and to advance our estimates of earthquake probabilities.

A new USGS Earthquake Hazards website section called Featured Research will highlight ongoing USGS hazards research. The Wasatch fault zone study is the first to be presented in this new monthly series. The study involves trenching, analysis of airborne LiDAR data, and modeling of ground rupture scenarios along the 350-km-long Wasatch fault zone. A feed of the recurring ‘Featured Research’ postings is also available here.

The EGU blogs website has been redesigned and offers a fully responsive layout now. Easily readable on all stationary and mobile devices (like paleoseismicity.org, of course), they combine the latest posts from the official EGU blog and all division blogs and bloglets into one showcase. They also established a new one: Geomorphology, edited by Sabine Kraushaar (Austria) and Jan Blöthe (Germany). They will keep us up to date on work of young geomorphologists, technological developments and geomorphic processes happening all around the planet. Also, don’t miss the active Seismology blog!

And right before you wander off: watch Wanderers – a short film by Erik Wernquist, it’s an amazing animated short film about a vision of humanity’s expansion into the Solar System. Interestingly, many scenes were built from real photographs and maps. Also see and read the gallery and learn which ESA, NASA, or ISS scenes were used as an inspiration (and how and why). If you’ve got some time on your commute this evening and want to dig deeper into some possible future in space, start here.