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Glaciers worldwide are shrinking at alarming rates, with dramatic implications for sea-level rise, water availability, biodiversity, and the stability of natural ecosystems.

A new study published in Nature Geoscience by an international team of scientists provides new insights into the natural mechanisms behind century-scale increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2), known as CO2 jumps. The study, led by Etienne Legrain, paleoclimatologist at the Department of Water and Climate at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, the Glaciology Laboratory of the Université Libre de Bruxelles and the Environmental Geosciences Institute of Université Grenoble-Alpes provides findings based on high-resolution measurements from Antarctic ice cores.

In early 2024, geophysicist Corentin Caudron plans to travel to Costa Rica to study the activities of the Poás volcano, by measuring sound emissions in the lake that fills its crater. He was to join a 20-strong team and bring back crucial data for volcano monitoring. But nature decided otherwise. An article published in The Conversation.

What exactly happens during and immediately after the impact of a meteorite? That was the question posed by a team of geologists from the research group Archaeology, Environmental Changes & Geo-Chemistry (AMGC) at Vrije Universiteit Brussel. The Chicxulub crater in Mexico is best known because of the extinction of the dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous period 66 million years ago.

Affordable, effective and sustainable "fog nets" to capture droplets and combat water scarcity in deserts. An article by Denis Terwagne, Professor and Chairman of the Centre de Recherche en Physique, Faculty of Science, in The Conversation. In 2022, 2.2 billion people still have no access to drinking water services.

Sediments taken from beneath an ancient ice core reveal that at least 20% of Greenland was green 416,000 years ago, corresponding to a recent past on the geological scale. The study, published in the journal Science, was carried out by an international team of scientists, including the Laboratoire de Glaciologie of the Université Libre de Bruxelles.

In a few weeks, Belgian researchers, led by Professor Bruno Danis (Laboratory of Marine Biology, Faculty of Science, ULB), will set sail for Antarctica. Their objective is to contribute to our understanding of the responses of ecosystems to the environmental changes underway in the Southern Ocean. Originality: the mission will take place on..

Research from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel and UC Louvain warns of the effects of global warming on the fragile ecosystems of one of Africa's largest lakes. A rise of a few degrees in the water temperature can unbalance the ecosystem, with a major impact on local habitats as a result. "For our research, we combined a 3D hydrodynamic model of Lake Tanganyika made using SLIM-3D by Professor Eric Deleersnijder's research group at UC Louvain, with our own VUB expertise on climate modelling," says lead author Kevin Sterckx of VUB's Department of Hydrology and Hydraulic Engineering.

An international research led the VUB Biology Department examined 21 st century changes in ocean-surface temperature, salinity, and density, across mangrove forests worldwide. The study suggests that changes in surface-ocean density may impact the dispersal patterns of widely distributed mangroves species, and more likely so in the Indo-West Pacific region, the primary hotspot of mangrove diversity.

Researchers use new techniques to determine when limestone layers and fossils were formed during dinosaur age, 66 to 73 million years ago Wednesday, March 30, 2022 — Geologists from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel and KU Leuven, in collaboration with Maastricht Natural History Museum and Dutch conservation organisation Natuurmonumenten, have mapped the million-year-old rocks in the quarries near Maastricht.

VUB research uncovers factors that prevent mangroves from spreading in South America Mangrove ecosystems are distributed around the world, along tropical and subtropical coastlines. However, they do not extend beyond certain latitudes, even though the sites seem suitable for them. VUB researcher Ari Ximenes, with researchers from ULB and UCLouvain, has now cracked this question among mangrove bio-geographers, by studying sites off the eastern coast of South America.

Wednesday, May 5, 2021 — New research from a large international group of scientists, including the Physical Geography research group at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel led by Prof Philippe Huybrechts, suggests that sea level rise due to the melting of land ice could be halved this century if we meet the Paris targets to limit global warming to 1.5°C.

Thursday, April 1, 2021 — An international research team of planetary scientists, led by Dr Matthias van Ginneken of the School of Physical Sciences at the University of Kent, a former researcher at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, the Université libre de Bruxelles and the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences, has found new evidence for a meteorite airburst just above the Antarctic ice cap 430,000 years ago.

Researchers find asteroid dust in impact crater that signalled end of dinosaurs VUB professor Steven Goderis and his team have published unique evidence linking the extinction of dinosaurs to the impact of an asteroid 66 million years ago. For the first time, the scientists found evidence of dust remnants from an asteroid in the Chicxulub impact crater itself in Mexico.

Evolution seems to be a story of continual progress. The weak will perish, according to Darwin's law. Nevertheless, genetic defects that at first glance might make an organism weaker can increase its long-term chances of survival. At first sight, evolution seems to be a story of continual, step-by-step progress.

A researcher at Ghent University has identified a lost Silk Road city larger than medieval Ghent, London or Venice. Historians and archaeologists have been searching for nearly 200 years for the city of Magas, capital of the ninth to twelfth century kingdom of Alania. This Kingdom, located in the North Caucasus mountains of modern Russia, controlled a critical section of the Silk Roads: a trade route which connected East Asia and the Mediterranean centuries before the era of European expansion.

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.