Geo-Sports

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

The future of cycling is in the hands of the juniors and U23 riders racing against the clock today and tomorrow. But how can geology help with future-proof storing nuclear waste from Zurich's three nuclear power plants? Thomas Schouten of Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, ETH Zurich and ETH Zürich explains! https://lnkd.in/evv3nWu5

We stay close to Zurich for the time trials of the World Championships today. Zurich itself is very exciting but tectonically speaking it’s rather boring. And that’s a good thing! Thomas Schouten of Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, ETH Zurich at ETH Zürich explains this. The riders will go fast, very fast but the Alps were the slow poke of mountain ranges. They really took their time to form. The gorgeous peaks that currently stand up to 4000 meters above sea level were once located deep in the Earth’s crust, covered by 10 km of rock. Most of that missing rock cover ended up in the Alpine foreland near Zurich, or even as far as the Netherlands. We also learn how the creation of the Alps tens of millions of years ago now comes in very handy when dealing with a nuclear problem. And how a boring tectonic situation makes that all possible. https://lnkd.in/evv3nWu5

In case you wanted more evidence that the Ardennes were completely eroded flat, then uplifted (in the last million years or so), and were incised by rivers to make the famous climbs: look at this profile of the Tour of Luxembourg. You can place a ruler over the hill tops. Read all about it here: https://lnkd.in/ekHjqCsd

We have partnered with ETH Zürich, the UCI World Championships official science partner, to bring you the science of the cycling races! Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, ETH Zurich geologists prepared two awesome blogs for you, check our website to already get into the glacial mood: https://lnkd.in/eet7v6zK