The latest journal in the Nature family, Nature Geoscience, introduces a section called Backstory, to celebrate the passion and endurance that geoscientists bring to their work. Each month, there is a question-and-answer piece at the back of the journal or on the journal’s website. Because earth scientists like to know exactly where a story is set, each backstory shows the globe from a different perspective, centred on the location of the field work.

Here are some examples from the current (January 2008) issue:

Drillship on ice (Nature Geoscience 1, 76; 2008).

Kate Moran and Jan Backman took an ice-hardened drillship, two icebreakers and two helicopters to the high Arctic to recover many million-year-old sediments from the Lomonosov Ridge. The goal of the Arctic Coring Expedition was to reconstruct the past 60 million years of environmental change in the Arctic by recovering the first-ever long sediment core of deep-sea marine sediments from the Arctic Ocean. The site on the Lomonosov Ridge was chosen by the authors because it has a thick sequence of sedimentary layers covering its crest, which they thought should hold a record of the Arctic’s past climate.

Midnight glacier hikes (Nature Geoscience 1, E1; 2008.)

Tim Bartholomaus and Suzanne and Bob Anderson hauled 25 kilograms of equipment over 25 kilometres in 25 hours to get a handle on glacier flow without breaking the bank. Glaciologists and geomorphologists are always looking for the best natural experiments to study the processes acting to shape a landscape. Glacier sliding is key to erosion at the glacier bed. In Kennicott Glacier, Alaska, the authors found an ideal natural experiment to probe the role of glacier hydrology in setting basal motion.

Plates under the sea (Nature Geoscience 1, E2; 2008.)

Using sophisticated multibeam imaging equipment aboard a French Navy vessel, Marc Fournier and colleagues mapped the structure of the enigmatic Owen fracture zone underneath the Arabian Sea. The region where the Arabian, Indian and Somalian tectonic plates meet — a triple junction — is probably the only such feature in the oceanic domain that had not been surveyed with modern oceanographic instruments. Before these authors’ expedition, there was very little information regarding its precise location and geometry, although this triple junction can potentially shed light on the history of the break-up of the African plate and the formation of the Arabian plate.