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16th February 2023

GeoVarsity competition back after 4 year hiatus

4^th 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).

13th October 2022

Into the Northwest Passage: four billion years of Earth history

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.

5th April 2022

In Conversation with Prof. Helen Williams

Prof Helen Williams joined the Department of Earth Sciences in 2016 and is currently Professor of Geochemistry. She reflects on her life and work with Erin Martin-Jones.

24th November 2021

Updates from Nick Tosca and the Mars 2020 Perseverance mission

Nick Tosca, Professor of Mineralogy and Petrology, is a member of the core science team for the Mars Perseverance 2020 mission. In this blog post Erin finds out how Nick has adapted to life as a researcher with NASA and gets the inside scoop on the first tantalising results.

27th October 2021

Corals on climate, and why they are even cooler than you already think

There is a lot to be said about corals: their diverse beauty, their importance for marine ecosystems and, of course, their plight against climate change and warming oceans. And yet this only begins to scratch the surface of these complex, mesmerizing and somewhat alien animals.

22nd September 2021

Arran 2021: reporting on the successes of running a field trip in Covid-times

Nicholas Barber, 4^th Year PhD Student, tells us about his experience as a demonstrator for this summer’s first year field trip to Arran – the first since the pandemic started.

Covid-19’s impact has touched each and every one of our lives. While the impacts of the pandemic have been devastating, in a much smaller way Covid-19 has completely reshaped what it means to study Earth Sciences at Cambridge. Traditionally, our students would spend a week over the Easter holiday tramping through the bogs and heather on the Isle of Arran – this would be their first taste of fieldwork and would be “the best revision any Cambridge undergraduate could ask for.”

11th February 2021

Catherine Craston demystifies the role of a Museum Collections Assistant

The roles of museum curators and archivists are often shrouded in mystery – what do they get up to behind the scenes? In this post I lift the lid on the profession and give you an insight into my job as Sedgwick Museum’s Collections Assistant for the intriguingly named, Moving a Mountain project. But first, I’ll start at the beginning – how I first got hooked on museum collections.

25th January 2021

The UK’s best student mapping project

In June every year, the Part II examiners in Cambridge Earth Sciences select the best mapping project of the year group, based on the quality of field maps and notebooks, and on the final drafted map and report. Since 2006, this top project has won the Reekie Prize within the department; a useful accolade to put on the CV. However, a yet bigger prize is then at stake. In December, the project gets submitted for a national award: the Dave Johnston prize of the Geological Society’s Tectonic Studies Group (TSG).