Latest news

Published on August 25, 2022

An international collaboration of researchers from Europe and the United States have detected a dramatic retreat of a major glacier in North Greenland, long considered stable.

Published on August 23, 2022

Université Grenoble Alpes (UGA) has maintained its position in the top 150 of the Shanghai 2022 ranking of the world’s best universities, published on 15 August. It is now in the top 100 of the world’s best universities in 15 disciplines, including five in the top 50 and one in the top 20. It ranks 12th among the world’s top universities in remote sensing (2nd in France) and 24th (3rd in France) in Earth Sciences, two themes covered by the OSUG laboratories.

Published on August 22, 2022

Ice flowing from the interior to the lower elevated edges of Greenland exerts a key control on how much the Ice-Sheet will lose mass as temperatures rise. The faster the ice flows, the faster it reaches the edges where it can be discharged in the ocean or melt. Predicting ice flow, however, is a challenging task. In Greenland, ice flow is mainly controlled by the sliding of ice over its underlying bedrock and the modulation of it by surface melt water supplied to the base through vertical (…)

Published on June 07, 2022

For the first time ever recorded, in the late summer of 2021, rain fell on the high central region of the Greenland ice sheet. This extraordinary event was followed by the surface snow and ice melting rapidly. Researchers now understand exactly what went on in those fateful summer days and what we can learn from it.

Published on May 06, 2022
ESA News

While volcanic eruptions and earthquakes serve as immediate reminders that Earth’s insides are anything but tranquil, there are also other, more elusive, dynamic processes happening deep down below our feet. Using information from ESA’s Swarm satellite mission, scientists have discovered a completely new type of magnetic wave that sweeps across the outermost part of Earth’s outer core every seven years. This fascinating finding, presented today at ESA’s Living Planet Symposium, opens a new (…)

Published on April 07, 2022

In the 2022 edition of the QS World university rankings by subject, UGA is ranked in the top 50 for three disciplines in the major field of Natural Sciences, where it is placed 71st in the world. In these rankings, which evaluate the international standing and scientific quality of higher education institutions around the world, UGA comes in 33rd in Geology, 34th in Geophysics, and 41st in Earth and Marine Sciences.
UGA is therefore among the leading French universities: It is the 6th (…)

Published on February 22, 2022

Mercury being so close to the Sun, the environment of formation of the planet is considered to be depleted in oxygen, and thus very reducing, leading to the presence of significant quantities of silicon alloyed with iron in its core (Fe-Si alloy). However, the phase diagram of the Fe-FeSi system remained poorly constrained to the high pressure and high temperature conditions prevailing at the center of Mercury
A team of researchers, led mainly by members of IMPMC and ISTerre, have (…)

Published on February 07, 2022

Metropolitan France shows a strong structural heritage and a low deformation rate. However, destructive earthquakes can occur there. Active faults are therefore a priority research topic for our societies. In this article and as part of a national effort to identify the still largely fragmentary knowledge, the team of researchers involved in this study stresses that major efforts from the active tectonics and paleoseismology community are needed to generate robust data, especially on the (…)

Published on January 28, 2022

An international team, lead by researcher from Institut des géosciences et de l’environnement de Grenoble (IGE/OSUG – UGA/Grenoble-INP-UGA/CNRS/IRD), has studied lake sediments and reconstructed flood records during the cold and warm periods of the Industrial Era, the last millennium and the Holocene. The results of this paleohydrological study, which will be published in Nature Geosciences on 27 January 2022, show that regionally the flood hazard could globally decrease with climate (…)

Published on January 26, 2022

Liquid water previously detected under Mars’ ice-covered south pole is probably just a dusty mirage, according to a new study of the red planet led by researchers at The University of Texas at Austin.
Scientists in 2018 had thought they were looking at liquid water when they saw bright radar reflections under the polar cap. However, the new study published Jan. 24 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters found that the reflections matched those of volcanic plains found all over the red (…)