Research in Geosciences is done at a wide variety of scales, covering different orders of magnitude from grains to continents, from seconds to Millions of years, and from hardly noticeable processes to those with catastrophic behaviour.
Depending on the scale, results and interpretations might point in very different directions, and it is very challenging to connect, compare and predict observations across different spatiotemporal scales. Additional challenges arise from the likely increase of data scatter and the scale-dependency of geological and environmental processes. Comprehending how we relate observations to processes on a different scale is of crucial importance when applying these processes in e.g. hydrocarbon exploration, the study of magmatic systems, CO2 storage and analysing process of natural hazards. How can we overcome the gap between findings on very different spatiotemporal scales?
This session is dedicated to collect studies relevant for understanding multi-scale aspects of geologic and geomorphic processes. Are they linear or, as usual, non-linear involving fractal or multifractal features? We invite contributions that discuss the challenges (and chances) that arise from combining and interpreting results obtained on different scales, from small to large, from short to long. The emphasis lies on adequate concepts, as well as numerical and analogue techniques and methods used to tackle scaling issues.
Contributions that cover the field of: geomorphology, geodynamics, tectonics, volcanology, igneous petrology, seismology, and Earth critical zones (i.e. soil hydrology, landslide processes etc.) are more than welcome.
Discussing state-of the-art successful (and less-successful) approaches in tackling scale issues in Geoscience we would like to address questions like: 1) How can observations on different scales be combined? 2) How can we transfer observations we make on one scale to another? 3) What are the errors of predictions made at different spatiotemporal scales? 4) How do we justify the upscaling- and downscaling techniques we implement? 5) What techniques are working and in what direction should we continue investigating?