Geo-Sports

Today is the day of the Dutch Championships Headwind Cycling, where pro riders get beaten by the mailman! It will be a mild edition, with only a 6-7 Bft westerly wind, but the race parcours is chosen such that there is zero protection: the 9 km long Oosterschelde dam! A dam with a history. The race will be held in Zeeland, a province in the SW of the Netherlands. Zeeland is an amalgamation of islands in an estuary, where the Meuse, Rhine, and Scheldt rivers meet the North Sea. And with the Dutch hobby of making polders, this land is especially vulnerable for floods. On February 1st, 1953, disaster struck. A storm surge led to multiple dike breaches, and an area of 150.000 hectare (370.000 acres) flooded. Nearly 2000 people drowned that night. 47000 cattle and 140000 poultry died. This was not the first flood, but it was the worst. Following this disaster, the 'deltaworks' started: the inlets of the Zeeland estuary were dammed, dykes were raised. The project took decades and shortened the Dutch coastline by 700 km. All but one inlet are now dammed: only the Westerschelde, that leads to the Antwerp harbor, is still open. While the project became an enormous engineering success, it had ecological downsides. The dammed inlets turned from brackish to fresh water, affecting biodiversity. The final dam, of the Oosterschelde, is therefore contains open partitions that only during storms are shut. For the riders today, this is bad news. When the partitions are up, they provide some shelter to the wind. But during today's storm, they'll be down. Perfect conditions for some suffering. The organization is well prepared: behind the finish line, there is a puke station with plenty of buckets 😂.

We kriehen sturm! 🌬️ Forget the Tour de France: the Dutch Headwind Cycling Championships will be held on Dec 7! An 8 Bft storm will blow on the 9 km long Oosterschelde dam, and 300 racers will battle it on city bikes. We'll be there with the Geology of Shit Weather! https://lnkd.in/emPg9rNi

Vandaag zat er wat leuks in de bus: mijn BKO! Ik ben gekwalificeerd om in het #hogeronderwijs les te geven. 😎 Net op tijd, want ik ben op zoek naar een leuke, nieuwe uitdaging in de #wetenschapscommunicatie en -educatie! Zoek jij een enthousiaste verteller/presentatrice? Heb jij een opening voor een #wetenschapsredacteur? Of ben je op zoek naar iemand om jouw docententeam te versterken? Stuur me dan een berichtje of reageer op deze post. Ook als je tips hebt zijn die van harte welkom! Meer weten? Ik heb onder meer ervaring in: - #onderwijsontwikkeling van zowel bètavakken als geovakken aan Utrecht University - #presenteren van kindertheatershow de Hoe?Zo! Show - presenteren van informatieve filmpjes voor Geo-Sports (uitgezonden door de NOS); zie hieronder 😊 https://lnkd.in/e_Ceh2r9

Look what we found on the world wide web! So, get into gear, and start your geo-race! (the maker's website: https://lnkd.in/ecaX5jaU)

Normandy, Brittany and Mont Ventoux...just as we ran out of funding for clips 😭. Ow man, there's so much to tell there!

What would the season's Grande Finale of @Il_Lombardia be without geology! (The answer probably is: a very flat spinter's race) You'll see the leaves falling over the folded and pushed up limestones - and dolomites of course, the name giver of the Italian Alps! And you'll see the beautiful shores of Europe's deepest lake outside of Scandinavia, Lake Como. This beauty was carved out by thick glaciers in the ice ages. Did you know the bottom of Lake Como lies 227 m below sea level? And there's so much more! Luckily, Bram Vaes and Martina Rocca of Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca wrote it all down for you in our blog! https://lnkd.in/ea9xpECt

Thanks Geological Society of South Africa for inviting us to write about Geo-Sports in your Geobulletin! And for all of you out there interested, you can find our editorial, by Marjolein Naudé and Douwe van Hinsbergen here: https://lnkd.in/egg4gS-U

Last day of the #Zurich2024 world championships, the men will have to show what they’re worth! And they’re lucky the race wasn’t 24000 years ago, because they’d had have to ski the entire thing back then 🥶 Stefan Heuberger at Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, ETH Zurich of ETH Zürich explored the route for you and took pictures. In his blog on our website, he explains where the riders climb the remains of the majestic glaciers of the last ice age! And fun fact: the maps with Swiss ice age geography come from a paper by Bini et al. Who would’ve thought Bini did a side job in glaciology ❄️🧊🗻🚵 https://lnkd.in/eKK83ijh

The road race takes us to beautiful geological sites along the route like drumlins, valleys, a tafelberg and gorgeous lakes. Stefan Heuberger of Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, ETH Zurich at ETH Zürich takes you on a tour to see but also shows you what you can’t see anymore. Ice ages and warmer periods shaped the landscape on our course. Most of it we can’t see anymore because time and erosion made them disappear under layers of sedimentation. Valleys that were once hundreds of meters deep are now filled in to form relatively flat roads for our riders. It was the Last Glacial Maximum, around 24,000 years ago, that shaped most of the course today. Geologically speaking that was basically yesterday. It does give us the opportunity though to make geology even more visible during the long road races. Why is that hill there? Why is it so steep? How was this valley created? Or why is there a lake here? We list the best features for you to recognize and enjoy during the race because as you know by now: there is just no cycling without geology. https://lnkd.in/eKK83ijh #Zurich2024 #geosports

Curious about the backgrounds of the Geo-Sports project? We wrote a little paper about it all, and it just came out in #Geology Today! with Douwe van Hinsbergen, Mark Carpenter, José Been, and Marjolein Naudé. Check it out: Geology of the Tour de France: taking a sports audience by surprise 👇 https://lnkd.in/e8C63DfK Utrecht University Faculty of Geosciences (Utrecht University) Naturalis Biodiversity Center