Ruminations

    The term 'helicopter research' refers to the tendency of well-resourced scientists to conduct research in less-affluent parts of the world with little or no involvement of, or credit to, local scientists or communities. In her column in Nature this week, Fernanda Adame makes an articulate appeal to end this practice, an appeal that I support fully.  As a master's student in India, I experienced the powerlessness and frustration that 'helicopter research' brings to those who have the ideas and the hypotheses but not the resources to test them. In fact, I felt immense pressure to publish findings as quickly as possible to avoid being beaten to the post. Unfortunately, this meant that I did not always wait to test my hypotheses as comprehensively as possible. Some Indian geoscientists did get to work with western scientists and teams and were even invited to do so. But I have always felt that they were treated more as drivers or guides than equal intellectual part

  A screenshot of the volcano from footage provided by RUV. The volcano in Geldingadalir, Iceland, is still going strong after almost three months since the eruption began. During this time,  it has changed both its form and character. After a few weeks of eruption along multiple vents, the activity is now centred on a single vent, which has grown in size progressively and now dwarfs its neighbouring, extinct ones. Eruption at this vent has varied from the occasionally explosive jets of fragmented lava to relatively quiescent effusion witnessed at present. Last week, Hannah Jane Cohen provided us with a nice, easy-to-understand summary of what the Geldingadalir volcano is telling us about volcanic processes. Eruption duration As Cohen notes, the volcano has not met the initial expectations of some of a relatively short-lived eruption. Those expectations were reasonable but probably based as much on gut feeling as scientific evidence. Yes, volcanoes such as the one in Geldingadalir ar

                                     "This is the story of how one species changed the planet.” So begins ‘Welcome to the Anthropoceneʼ (1), a short movie that inaugurated the Rio Conference on Sustainable Development last year. The movieʼs narrative captures the essence of a rapidly emerging discourse that implicates humanity as a whole in the precipitation of a new epoch. The Anthropocene concept – formally introduced over a decade ago (2) – has captivated both academics and journalists of late. The conceptʼs renaissance accompanies the broad recognition that the domains of nature and culture are far more entangled than traditionally conceived (3,4). The Anthropocene is helping to frame the range of human-environment interactions more comprehensively than, say, climate change, species loss, deforestation or other narratives of environmental change. The wider world is not waiting for the geologic community to formally recognize a new epoch: unlike plate tectonics or biological ev