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Published on June 12, 2019

The formation of minerals from aqueous solutions is a widespread natural phenomenon that controls mass transfers within the lithosphere, impacting elemental cycling –mostly through interactions with living organisms. Crystallization phenomena have also a high industrial relevance, e.g., for the development of new anti-scaling agents or the synthesis of biomimetic materials.
The process of mineral formation usually involves two consecutive steps –nucleation and growth- that are controlled (…)

Published on May 28, 2019

Ile des Bermudes Lavas of Bermuda island likely present the first sample of the melt from the Earth mantle transition zone. A study involving the Institut des Sciences de la Terre] / OSUG.
The island of Bermuda is the surficial expression of a 1,500-km-long topographic swell, which rises 1 km above a 110–140-Myr-old oceanic crust of Atlantic Ocean. Like many ocean volcanic islands, Bermuda has been historically explained as being derived from a mantle plume- the jet of hot mantle (…)

Published on April 16, 2019

Peter van der Beek On 28 March, the European Research Council (ERC) published the list of awardees of its Advanced Grants 2019. Among the 222 projects selected (out of 2052 submitted), including 31 based in France and 10 in the Earth and Environmental Sciences, is the project COOLER (Climatic Controls on Erosion Rates and Relief of Mountain Belts) proposed by Peter van der Beek, professor at the ISTerre / OSUG laboratory.
The interactions between tectonics, erosion and climate play (…)

Published on March 21, 2019

By surveying the centre of our Galaxy, ESA’s XMM-Newton has discovered two colossal ‘chimneys’ funneling material from the vicinity of the Milky Way’s supermassive black hole into two huge cosmic bubbles.
The giant bubbles were discovered in 2010 by NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope: one stretches above the plane of the Milky Way galaxy and the other below, forming a shape akin to a colossal hourglass that spans about 50 000 light years – around half the diameter of the entire (…)

Published on January 23, 2019

The abundance of titanium dioxide nanoparticles in the environment originating from human activities could be a potential environmental problem. To identify and distinguish between titanium dioxide nanoparticles from natural and anthropogenic sources, synchrotron techniques were used to study the nanoparticles in sewage sludge and soil.
Titanium dioxide nanoparticles are one of the most commonly produced nanomaterials worldwide. They are present in many consumer products, such as (…)

Published on January 21, 2019

NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft flew past Ultima Thule in the early hours of New Year’s Day, ushering in the era of exploration from the enigmatic Kuiper Belt, a region of primordial objects that holds keys to understanding the origins of the solar system. In addition to being the first to explore Pluto, New Horizons flew by the most distant object ever visited by a spacecraft and became the first to directly explore an object that holds remnants from the birth of our solar system.
New (…)

Published on November 12, 2018

An international team of scientists including french researchers from the Institut des Géosciences de l’Environnement (IGE/OSUG, Université Grenoble Alpes/IRD/CNRS/Grenoble INP) have recently studied a particularly devastating flood caused by the sudden drainage of a pro-glacial lake in the Bhotekoshi / Sunkoshi Valley, Nepal. Using a particularly innovative seismic technique that consists in evaluating the ground shaking caused by the flood, the scientists are able to quantify flood (…)

Published on September 25, 2018

ESA’s star mapping mission, Gaia, has shown our Milky Way galaxy is still enduring the effects of a near collision that set millions of stars moving like ripples on a pond.

Published on September 11, 2018

The VOSICA project has been developed in the framework of Marielle Malfante’s thesis, supervised by Mauro Dalla Mura and Jérôme Mars of the Sigmaphy team of GIPSA-Lab (CNRS / UGA / Grenoble INP). Her work is supported by LabEx OSUG@2020 and DGA/MRIS. The aim of Marielle Malfante’s thesis is to develop automatic methods of classification in natural environments. She is currently implementing such tools in underwater acoustics and for the monitoring of volcanoes.
In situ volcano monitoring (…)

Published on August 23, 2018

The formation of planets and the origin of life are among the most intriguing questions for mankind. Using ALMA, an international group of astronomers, including researchers from the Institut de Planétologie et d’Astrophysique de Grenoble (IPAG/OSUG, UGA/CNRS) , have reported the first detection of formic acid towards the TW Hydrae protoplanetary disk, located at only 190 light years from our Sun. This result has been published the 16th july 2018 in Astrophysical journal letters.
Our (…)