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PhD student Julian Pahl recounts his fieldwork in Hawai ʻ i this summer, where he got a chance to sample historic lava flows and witness the ongoing eruption of Kīlauea. Hi! I am Julian, a second-year PhD student specialising in igneous petrology at Cambridge’s Department of Earth Sciences. My research focuses on the...

As her plane approached Victoria Island in Nunavut, Canada, Kate Oglethorpe caught her first glimpse of the white and expansive Arctic, and the study region of her PhD. Normally Oglethorpe studies the Arctic Ocean from her desk at Cambridge’s Department of Earth Sciences, where she uses publicly available ocean data to...

Back in the 1970s, renowned igneous petrologist Barry Dawson was sectioning a mantle rock from southern Africa when the cutting saw jammed on something extremely hard: a diamond. It was the first time a diamond had been found in situ, locked inside a chunk of mantle rock carried up from hundreds of kilometres deep. Dawson...

What do the rumblings of Iceland’s volcanoes have in common with the now peaceful volcanic islands off Scotland’s western coast and the spectacular basalt columns of the Giant’s Causeway in Northern Ireland? About sixty million years ago, the Icelandic mantle plume—a fountain of hot rock that rises from Earth’s core-mantle...