Category Archives: Geophysics

PLOS ONE at AGU 2013

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PLOS ONE is excited to participate in the American Geophysical Union’s (AGU) Fall Meeting 2013, held this week in San Francisco’s Moscone Center. Conveniently, Moscone is just down the street from our San Francisco office, so several members of PLOS staff will be in attendance and available to chat with you about the journal. We’re looking forward to meeting both current and potential Academic Editors, reviewers, and of course authors! Please stop by Booth #301 to say hello.

Last week was a very geophysics-oriented one for us, with both the publication of Hansen et al.’s work “Assessing “Dangerous Climate Change”: Required Reduction of Carbon Emissions to Protect Young People, Future Generations and Nature” and with the announcement of our call for papers in a new collection entitled “Responding to Climate Change.” What’s more exciting is that James Hansen will be in attendance at AGU and will be giving a talk today (December 10th) on this topic, in support of taking significant, active measures to reduce fossil fuel emissions.

Last year, at AGU 2012, we were a little bit of an unfamiliar face to many. This year, we hope to continue our conversation with the physical sciences community about our commitment to open access and the publication of sound scientific research in all areas of science and medicine, including geoscience, space science, chemistry, and physics.

After AGU, look out for the PLOS booth again in just a few days at the American Society for Cell Biology!

Image Credit: Detailed view of Arctic Sea Ice in 2007, from NASA Visible Earth.

A rockin’ good time at AGU

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Last week the American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall Meeting was held just down the road from our San Francisco office, and PLOS staff could not pass up the opportunity to make an appearance.

If you were an exhibition hall attendee and could manage to tear yourself away from all the talks, poster sessions, and workshops long enough to pay us a visit, you would have been met with friendly staff from both PLOS ONE and PLOS Currents Disasters, all on a mission to inform as many geophysicists as possible about open access and our various journals. We thoroughly enjoyed spending the week there and meeting any PLOS readers, authors, editors, and reviewers that stopped by to say hello. In particular, our publications manager Krista Hoff was excited to meet and have a chat with one of our longstanding Academic Editors, Ben Bond-Lamberty.

In an little bit of contrast to our recent visit to the Annual Meeting of the American Society of Human Genetics, many passersby did not immediately recognize the PLOS name. They were similarly unaware of our status as a nonprofit, our commitment to open access, and our relatively unique publication criteria. These conversations led to an exciting opportunity for us to explain that we publish in all areas of science, and especially to show our love to the worlds of geology, physics, chemistry, and environmental science.

While free pens were flying off the table, we had stimulating conversations with seismologists, planetary scientists, climatologists, geologists, and environmental scientists. Our rapid-peer-review journal PLOS Currents Disasters was extremely well-received among researchers associated with earthquakes or other chemical and geological hazards (including potential meteor disasters!).

Many scientists found our printed Open Access guide “How Open Is It?” both helpful and informative, and several were big proponents of open-access journals, excited to find that we accept submissions in geophysics research.

Long-time PLOS supporters were thrilled to inform us that they intended to submit at least one paper within the next year, and we definitely piqued the interest of at least a few potential reviewers and academic editors. We had some great discussions about barriers to scientific publishing in general and received insightful suggestions for improving the overall publication experience. We appreciated hearing everyone’s feedback and will be sure to incorporate your suggestions into our future discussions.

Look out for the PLOS booth again in just a few days at the American Society for Cell Biology, where we hope to see yet another side of our growing and diverse PLOS community!

Photo credits: U.S. Geological Survey Photographic Library

Geophysics for All: PLOS ONE at AGU

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The American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting has arrived in San Francisco, and PLOS ONE is excited to be there at booth 1137 from Tuesday through Friday.

Geophysics is quite a broad field, including earth science, climate science, space science, and more. For this post, instead of trying to cover the whole spectrum, we decided to highlight one particularly explosive topic: volcanoes.

For ten days in August 2006, a submarine volcano in Tonga erupted after 22 years of dormancy, producing a temporary volcanic island. The eruption also created a pumice raft, which is exactly what it sounds like: a floating raft made of pumice, a volcanic rock. In a paper published this July, researchers reported that this pumice raft helped disperse more than 80 species, including barnacles, sponges, and corals, over 3,000 miles in 7-8 months. The authors conclude that such pumice rafting facilitates “massive transport of genetic material” and provides “lines of internal communication” between distant ocean regions, which may have implications for conservation and the spread of invasive pest species.

The end results of volcanic eruptions may be the most obviously noticeable part of the process, but the events preceding an eruption are also an active area of research. For example, the researchers behind a study published in May investigated how long huge pools of molten rock, or giant magma bodies, remain buried under the earth’s crust before they cause volcanic superuptions. Previous work indicated that one particular giant magma body, which was responsible for the Long Valley caldera in California, was long-lived and slow-evolving. The new work describes analysis of quartz samples from this area and suggests that the giant magma body was in fact relatively short-lived. The authors conclude that giant magma bodies are “rather ephemeral features, which quickly and effectively destroy themselves during supereruptions.”

These two studies provide just a small taste of the highly varied research in geophysics, and we’re excited to hear more at the meeting. We’re also excited to have representatives from PLOS Currents Disasters there to meet you. We hope you come visit us at booth 1137, and look forward to seeing you there.

Citations:

Bryan SE, Cook AG, Evans JP, Hebden K, Hurrey L, et al. (2012) Rapid, Long-Distance Dispersal by Pumice Rafting. PLoS ONE 7(7): e40583. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0040583

Gualda GAR, Pamukcu AS, Ghiorso MS, Anderson AT Jr, Sutton SR, et al. (2012) Timescales of Quartz Crystallization and the Longevity of the Bishop Giant Magma Body. PLoS ONE 7(5): e37492. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0037492