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On 1 December, a team of glaciologists and climate researchers from ULB , UCLouvain and the University of Colorado will head for the Antarctic. On the agenda is the second field campaign for the Mass2Ant project being coordinated by UCLouvain , which also includes partners from the IRM (the Royal Meteorological Institute of Belgium) and Delft University of Technology.

Introduction: Dutch and Flemish researchers studied the colonisation by coastal vegetation Coastal vegetation interacts with water flow and the transport of sand and sediment: this interaction plays a key role in the rise of characteristic landscape forms in coastal habitats. Scientists from the University of Utrecht, the Netherlands Institute for Sea Research and University of Antwerp ( Global Change Ecology Centre , Research Group Ecosystem Management ) provide more insight in this interaction in their new paper that appeared recently.

Geologists have discovered that some magmas split into two separate liquids, one of which is very rich in iron. Their findings can help to discover new iron ore deposits for mining. Iron ore is mined in about 50 countries, with Australia, Brazil and China as the largest producers. It is mostly used to produce the steel objects that are all around us - from paper clips to kitchen appliances and the supporting beams in skyscrapers.

Scientists discovered that giant earthquakes reoccur with relatively regular intervals. When also taking into account smaller earthquakes, the repeat interval becomes increasingly more irregular to a level where earthquakes happen randomly in time. In their recent paper in Earth and Planetary Science Letters , Moernaut`s team of Belgian, Chilean and Swiss researchers presented a new approach to tackle the problem of large earthquake recurrence.

A stellar core that challenges predictions: here is the result of the first cartography of the interior of a white-dwarf star performed by an international team that includes  Valérie Van Grootel and Marc-Antoine Dupret , two researchers belonging to the STAR Institute at Université de Liège. This discovery will provide insights on the different physical mechanisms involved in the evolution of stars and our Sun.