The history of the Earth is rich with examples of local events with global impacts. Recent research has confirmed that the impact of a large asteroid or comet in the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico 66 million years ago, wiped out dinosaurs off the surface of our planet since it hit around a time sea level rise and active volcanism had made these animals more susceptible to extinction. More recently, some 74,000 years ago, the Toba super-eruption in the island of Sumatra, Indonesia, resulted in a noticeable decrease – even if short-lived – in global average temperatures.

Given the importance of local events with global consequences in the geosciences, we are dedicating the September 2014 issue of the quarterly newsletter of the European Geosciences Union (now published online) to this theme.

You can download the full newsletter as a single (interactive) PDF, or follow the Table of Contents links below for the PDFs of each individual section.

Table of Contents

• Editorial
• Articles
  
  • A small sea at large: Mediterranean controls on global climate – 5
  • Local flaring, global impacts: modelling Arctic black carbon – 6
  • Molecules and meteorites: big impacts for life on Earth – 8
  • Chasing ice: studying the stability of the Western Antarctica Ice Sheet – 10
• EGU Voice
  
  • Letter from the EGU President – 12
  • Division reports – 14
• EGU News
  
  • EGU journal news: new impact factors, h5-index and an anniversary – 17
  • EGU 2015 General Assembly: call for sessions – 17
  • New communications officer at the EGU – 18
  • Open geoscience – 18
• Press Releases
  
  • From Finding Nemo to minerals – what riches lie in the deep sea? – 20
  • Has Antarctic sea ice expansion been overestimated? – 21
• Journal Watch
  
  • Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics (ACP) – 22
  • Atmospheric Measurement Techniques (AMT) – 22
  • Climate of the Past (CP) – 23
  • Hydrology and Earth System Sciences (HESS) – 23
  • Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences (NHESS) – 24
  • Ocean Science (OS) – 24
  • Solid Earth (SE) – 25
  • The Cryosphere (TC) – 25
• External News
  
  • Earth scientists and Munich’s Rachel Carson Center – bridging the two cultures? – 26
• Education
  
  • Our Changing Planet – 28
• Young Scientists
  
  • Science into policy: taking local steps for global change – 30
• Books
  
  • Geodynamics – 32
  • Geophysics for the Mineral Exploration Geoscientist – 32
  • Electromagnetic Scattering by Particles and Particle Groups – 33
  • Coastal Wetlands of the World – 33
  • Formation, Detection, and Characterization of Extrasolar Habitable Planets (IAU S293) – 34
  • An Introduction to Ocean Remote Sensing – 34
  • Book review: Island on Fire – 35
  • Book review: Essentials of the Earth’s Climate System – 36
  • Book review: Seismic Stratigraphy and Depositional Facies Models – 37
• Events
  
  • Conferences, meetings and workshops – 38