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Rocking Around Arran: Cambridge First-Year Earth Sciences Field Trip 2025

“If I were to be trapped on a remote island by an all-powerful geologist for a week, Arran would be near the top of my list for the sheer range and beauty of its history. Trekking across the coast with hand-lens and friends close by was truly memorable and even more so when Ed Tipper used his extensive skillset to try convince us that crinoids grew to the size of a small town.” (Shifat, 1st year Natural Sciences student)

After weeks of lectures, practicals, and plenty of prep back in Cambridge, the long-anticipated first-year undergraduate field trip to the Isle of Arran finally began! This week-long geological journey took us across 600 million years of Earth’s history—from the late Precambrian to the Palaeogene—packed into one spectacular island off the west coast of Scotland.

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A Field Journey through the Messinian Salinity Crisis and Beyond

 
During the Easter holidays, 31 Part III Earth Science students and 8 demonstrators travelled to southeastern Spain (Almería) for the students’ final fieldtrip. The region’s complex geology offered something special for everyone. Over six days in the field, we moved through geological time and explored the diverse environments—from metamorphic basements and Miocene reef outcrops, to orbitally paced sedimentary cycles and gypsum beds, and on to turbidite deposits, volcanic centres, and strike-slip fault zones. 

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From magma to magnets: a summer of fieldwork in Greenland investigating critical metal behaviour in alkaline intrusions

This summer Carrie Soderman, Owen Weller and Charlie Beard headed to Greenland to investigate how metals critical for green technologies form.

Rare earth elements (REEs) are classed as ‘critical metals’ in modern society, meaning a group of metals and minerals that cannot be easily substituted in technology but whose supply is at risk. In particular, the REEs are a vital part of green energy transition technologies, such as the magnets that go inside motors for wind turbines and electric vehicles. Demand for these elements is therefore expected to increase rapidly in the coming decades.

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Exploring the environments inhabited by Earth’s earliest animals in Namibia

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.

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Cambridge at the Goldschmidt 2022 Conference

Alasdair Knight,  a second year PhD student in the Department of Earth Sciences, reports back from the 2022 Goldschmidt conference in the blog post below.

Alasdair can normally be found researching the chemical reactions that occur between greenhouse gases in Earth’s atmosphere and the rocks at Earth’s surface. These reactions are thought to have been important for keeping Earth within the correct temperature range for life to exist. 

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