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Escaping the pandemic – my experience as an exploration geologist in Yukon

If you had the chance to escape from the ongoing pandemic to a remote exploration geology camp in northern Canada, 150km from the closest town and only accessible by helicopter, would you take it?

I came to Cambridge to start my PhD in January 2020 and, although I was warmly welcomed, things were at first pretty uneventful. However, this changed dramatically with the sudden onset of COVID-19. I chose to return home to Canada where I continued to work on what I still hope to be a lab-based PhD. However, there are, of course, limitations to research from a bedroom 5000km from Cambridge!

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Could there be life on Venus? Dr Paul Rimmer explains

A UK-led team of astronomers recently discovered a rare molecule – phosphine – in the clouds of Venus that could have been created by microbes.

We caught up with one of the co-authors of the study – Dr Paul Rimmer, a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Earth Sciences Cambridge with affiliations at Cavendish Astrophysics and the MRC Labratory of Molecular Biology, to hear more about this extraordinary finding – and what it means for life beyond Earth. 

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Research in Lockdown: Fieldwork Disrupted

Bromo Tengger Semeru National Park, Java; image credit: NationalGeographic/Manamana

My PhD concerns a longstanding question—how do valuable metals move through volcanic systems? Since starting my PhD in September 2018, I’ve been looking forward to testing my hypotheses on this topic in the field, on a six-week expedition called the Metals in Magmas field campaign. Like many Earth scientists, I spent months planning the project’s logistical and technical details. But, two weeks before the fieldwork was set to begin, the outbreak of the current global pandemic stopped the project in its tracks. My plans are now on hold and my PhD can’t continue as originally billed. In this blog post, I hope to share my perspective on the impact of COVID-19 on my PhD research.

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