Category: opinion

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Supporting our Department’s Queer community

First days at a new school can be intimidating, and my first day coming to Cambridge’s Earth Sciences Department to begin my MPhil degree in Michaelmas term 2019 was especially so.

I had just moved overseas from America to a country I had never even visited before, and I didn’t know a single person. When I stepped inside, there was something that put me at ease: the proliferation of pride flag stickers all around the department. Immediately, I felt that this was a place where I would be accepted, and as I settled in and met more people over the next few weeks and months, I was quickly proven right.

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GeoVarsity competition back after 4 year hiatus

4th Year Earth Scientist Ellie Austin reports on the GeoVarsity games

Perhaps spending your Saturday afternoon falling around in mud and losing football matches to people who refuse to refer to you as anything other than a “Tab” isn’t your cup of tea. But it must’ve been someone’s*, since the tradition of GeoVarsity football has been running almost every year (bar the pandemic) since 2006 (with the concept of GeoVarsity running back until the 1990s!). 

GeoVarsity football began as a simple idea: invite some academics from ‘the other place’ round for a friendly game of football and see who has the best sporting ability (which is of course completely correlated to academic standing). 

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Birds of a feather: Katrina van Grouw on art and science

It was an emotional journey. Nose pressed to the small oval of glass as London City Airport was left far below, I smiled wistfully down at the River Thames, golden in the rising sun’s first rays, as it made its final sweeping arc to meet the sea. The cut-out shapes of the Kent marshes, and the Isle of Sheppey beyond; home to a plethora of birdlife now as ever, is a place of special significance for me. Not only was it the intended destination of my first ever birdwatching trip, aged nine, but from this same London Clay Formation laid down in the Eocene, over 50 million years ago, came the first fossilised skull of a very remarkable bird. With jaws lined with bony projections of different sizes, like lobster claws, it was unlike any bird known.

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Celebrating International Women’s Day 2021

Cambridge Earth Sciences is proud to be celebrating International Women’s Day on 8 March 2021. International Women’s Day has occurred for well over a century with the first gathering held in 1911. In addition to celebrating the social, economic, cultural and political achievements of women, International Women’s Day also marks a call to action for accelerating gender parity.

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