13 November 2011

Archival Gold: Imaggeo

Posted by Jessica Ball

I’ve run through quite a few of my royalty-free geoscience photo resources, but Erik Klemetti and Matt Hall mentioned a new one this week: Imaggeo, an open-access collection maintained by the European Geosciences Union. Here’s what their information section has to say:

Every geoscientist who is an amateur photographer (but also other people) can submit their images to this repository.
Being open access (see copyright/terms and conditions), it can be used by scientists for their presentations or publications as well as by the press. If you submit your images to imaggeo, you retain full rights of use, since they are licenced and distributed by EGU under a Creative Commons licence.

The photo collection is currently small, but the photo quality is top-notch. It’s organized in several ways – by research area, by “Category” (Field, Historical, Laboratory, Mixed, Other, and Persons), by region, by exact location (noted on a Google Map), by keyword, and by photographer. There’s also a search feature that filters by all of these categories. Each photo’s page has its location, a description by the photographer, date the photo was taken, and information about the camera used. Anyone can use or submit a photo, but you need to register an email on the site first.

*Update* The EGU Official Blog has an “Imaggeo on Mondays” feature which highlights a new photo in the collection at the beginning of the week. Check it out!

One other link on the site is to the yearly EGU Photo Contest (a source of some of these photos). You have to be registered for the EGU General Assembly, but contest winners get a free registration to the next year’s assembly.

Here are a few of my favorite photos:

"Flow" (Folded Cretaceous calcarenite layers) by Jose Julian Esteban , University of the Basque Country, Leioa - Vizcaya (Spain) - link

"En echelon crack seal vein pavement" (Oman) by Max Arndt , RWTH-Aachen University Geologie Endogene Dynamik, Aachen - Germany - link

"Radar observations on Stromboli Volcano, Italy" by Klemen Zakšek , Uni. Hamburg - Germany - link

 

"Lengai and Masai" (Ol Doinyo Lengai, Tanzania) by Julie Albaric , Domaines Oceaniques/CNRS - France - link