Nick Reynard is a postdoc in the Centre for Climate Repair in Cambridge, working with Ali Mashayek’s research group at the Department of Earth Sciences. Here, Nick recounts his experience of boarding a five-week scientific cruise in search of the deep Antarctic waters that rise in the Madagascar Basin.
Continue reading “The deep ocean is closer than you think: scientific research and life at sea”
This summer a team led by Dr Oscar Branson, including myself and fellow PhD students Winnie Fang and Alice Ball, headed to Taiwan for five weeks. We were on a mission to catch and culture open ocean plankton (specifically foraminifera) and our aim was to understand how they build their shells.
Continue reading “A Foray into Foraminifera”
The Department recently launched its new Part II environmental geochemistry field projects as an alternative to the successful and long-standing mapping projects.
According to Ed Tipper, co-director of undergraduate teaching, “The decision reflects the diverse research areas of our teaching staff, combined with a growing student interest in pressing environmental issues. This year, 13 students enrolled in the new type of project, making it viable to develop a new field trip to train students ready for this environmental pathway.”
The following blog post is written by Tom Marquand, PhD student in the Department and demonstrator on the inaugural environmental geochemistry field trip to Provence, France.
Continue reading “Reporting on the inaugural environmental geochemistry field trip to Provence”
Dr Alex Liu joined the Department of Earth Sciences in 2016 and is an Associate Professor in Palaeobiology and a Fellow of Girton College. He reflects on his work with Erin Martin-Jones.
Continue reading “In Conversation with Alex Liu”
Fossils of the Earth’s earliest animals appear abruptly in the geological record ~574 million years ago (Mya), and then suffer a mysterious decline in diversity just a few million years later ~550 Mya. Some researchers consider this biological change to be Earth’s first mass extinction event.
Continue reading “Exploring the environments inhabited by Earth’s earliest animals in Namibia”
I recently accompanied an intrepid group of Cambridge alumni on board the Ocean Endeavour as we sailed a section of the fabled Northwest Passage from West Greenland to the western Canadian Arctic.
Continue reading “Into the Northwest Passage: four billion years of Earth history”
I can normally be found writing news stories or running outreach events for the Department, but this year I decided to dust off my walking boots and tag along to Arran with our first years to find out what makes this fabled Island so geologically exciting. Let’s just say it didn’t disappoint, and in the post below I’ve managed to condense down what — according to our students and demonstrators — makes this trip so special.
Continue reading “Arran 2022: best bits, as chosen by staff and students!”
My last blog about the WACSWAIN project was in February 2020. We had just started the chemical analysis of our 651-metre-long ice core from Skytrain Ice Rise (Antarctica). The theme of this article is time – the first aspect being that a lot of time has since passed. Soon after I wrote last, our labwork was completely shut down by the pandemic, some of the team went back to their families in other countries, and we all learnt what Zoom meetings were.
Continue reading “WACSWAIN: Time and ice”
