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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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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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Friends of the Sedgwick Museum Summer Placements 2022

We are four Earth Sciences undergraduate students from the University of Cambridge. We use samples from the Sedgwick Museum’s collections in our studies, so these placements were an exciting chance for us to work behind the scenes on current projects in the Museum. We each spent 1-4 weeks on a project during the summer of 2022, generously funded by the Friends of the Sedgwick Museum.

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Reflecting on the Department’s first Sutton Trust Summer School

This August, the Earth Sciences Department hosted a week-long summer school for college-level students, as part of the Sutton Trust programme.

The Sutton Trust is an educational charity which aims to improve social mobility and address educational disadvantage. The summer school is a widening participation programme open to state-school students and high-achieving students from disadvantaged backgrounds.

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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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Careers in earth sciences – Jenny Omma talks big data and rock analysis

Jenny Omma is Chief Geologist at Rocktype — a mineralogy consultancy using big data to revolutionize rock analysis.

After studying for her M.Sci in Natural Sciences, and continuing at Cambridge to do a PhD in earth sciences, Jenny spent five years in industry before setting up her own company in 2014. We caught up with Jenny in the following blog post to find out more about her career path and work in the energy and mineral sectors.

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