21 May 2018 marked two hundred years since Adam Sedgwick (1785-1873) became the Woodwardian Professor of Geology in Cambridge. Staff at the Sedgwick Museum have organised events and displays to celebrate this special anniversary. In this blog we look at the Archive – beginning with Sedgwick’s early journals.
Continue reading “Sedgwick’s paper time machines”
Bye bye “Beast from the East”. We couldn’t have chosen a better time (and location!) for some fieldwork as we left behind an extreme cold snap that froze the UK and dumped fresh snow on Cambridge. In March a team of seismologists from the University of Cambridge and University of Aberdeen boarded a plane for Kota Kinabalu, the capital city of Sabah in North Borneo (Malaysia).
Continue reading “Deploying nBOSS: the North Borneo Orogeny Seismic Survey”
Making science – with all its complexities, uncertainties and nuances – palatable for the general public presents many challenges, and what better place to try this out than the Cambridge Science Festival.
Continue reading “A musical, an opera and stand-up comedy: sharing Earth Sciences with the public”
The Archean Eon (4–2.5 billion years ago) is one of the last great frontiers in our knowledge of the Earth. Plate tectonics is considered to have initiated during this time period, and large volumes of the continental crust formed, but fundamental questions remain regarding the timing, mechanisms and drivers of these transitions.
Continue reading “A day in the field: geological mapping of Northern Baffin Island”
It began with coffee.
Like so many things in life, the Sedgwick Club Conference 2018 started with a healthy dose of caffeine. The doors to the Cambridge Earth Sciences department were nearly ready to be opened and the masses allowed to flood in for the annual speakers’ event.
Continue reading “Behind the scenes at the Sedgwick Club Conference”
Geophysicist Professor Nick Rawlinson recently moved to Cambridge to take up the BP McKenzie Chair in Earth Sciences. During a career in Australia and the UK he has specialised in observational and theoretical seismology. Nick discussed his life and work with Greg Palmer.
Hippos from Barrington, woolly mammoths from Barnwell and beavers from Burwell Fen help tell the remarkable story of Late Ice Age Cambridgeshire. A new ‘Ice Age’ exhibit in the Sedgwick Museum displays spectacular fossil finds from local villages that show how life, climate and the environment of the region have changed dramatically over the last 125,000 years.
Continue reading “Life in Ice Age Cambridgeshire – a new exhibit in the Sedgwick Museum”
Last year I travelled out to Ethiopia for fieldwork twice, quite a feat considering it had taken two years of broken limbs and civil unrest causing setbacks. Avoiding the rains and unseasonably hot conditions of the summer (although I didn’t quite manage to avoid the heatstroke) I visited the Butajira volcanic field in April and Fantale volcano in November.
Continue reading “Investigating Ethiopian volcanism: RiftVolc fieldwork in East Africa”
