News

11 November 2021 marked the launch of The Cambridge Initiative for Planetary Science and Life in the Universe (IPLU) at Wolfson Hall, Churchill College. The IPLU is an emerging community of researchers investigating life in the Universe, from understanding how it emerged on Earth to examining the processes that could make other planets suitable for…

Madi East, second-year PhD student at Cambridge Earth Sciences,  is on a mission to help coral reefs — which are threatened by human-induced ocean warming — through improving our understanding of how they grow their intricate and varied skeletons.Coral reefs are essential for life on Earth — providing unique ecosystems for scores of organisms and p…

Scientists at the University of Cambridge have developed a new approach for observing mechanochemical reactions — where simple ingredients are ground up to make new chemical compounds and materials that can be used in anything from the pharmaceutical to metallurgical, cement and mineral industries.The study, published in Nature Communications and l…

In 2009 in L’Aquila, a city about 60 miles northeast of Rome, a severe earthquake killed over 300 people and left 60,000 homeless. In 2011 six Italian scientists and a government official were put on trial for manslaughter, with the prosecution alleging they had not properly communicated the risk of such a major earthquake occurring. They were foun…

A climate scientist from Cambridge Earth Sciences will feature in a panel discussion at the Arctic Basecamp — an organization committed to bringing the message of Arctic risk to global leaders —during the COP26 summit in Glasgow. The panel discussion, on ‘Climate Risk and Tipping Points in the Polar Regions’, will take place on 8th November and is …

Cambridge scientists have used downscaled laboratory models to show how sand dunes move through an idealized landscape, revealing the conditions that decide whether they will pass through hurdles in their path – like pipelines or walls – or get stopped in their tracks.The team’s experiment – which featured mock-up obstacles of varying size and shap…

Dorothea Moser, PhD student at the Department of Earth Sciences and British Antarctic Survey, has led an international team of scientists in new research that addresses the impact of melting on ice cores from Antarctica. Ice cores carry valuable information about how our climate has changed in the past; their annual layers trapping bubbles of ancie…

Mountain belts on Earth are some of the most striking manifestations of plate tectonics. The lifecycle of mountain building—where plates collide and are later uplifted and eroded—can also profoundly impact our climate and global carbon cycle over millions of years, as well as fuelling earthquake hazards.  Understanding mountain building, or ‘orogen…

How can thinking and expertise from a discipline forged in Earth’s 4.6 billion-year-old history inform the search for life beyond our solar system? This month’s edition of Elements Magazine International, titled ‘Geoscience Beyond the Solar System’, and co-edited by Cambridge University’s Dr Oliver Shorttle, explores what the field of Exoplanetary …

An asteroid strike 66 million years ago wiped out the non-avian dinosaurs and devastated the Earth’s forests, but tree-dwelling ancestors of primates may have survived it, according to a new study published today in the journal Ecology and Evolution.   Overall, the study supports the hypothesis that the widespread destruction of forests following …

Members of the Field Palaeobiology Research Group at the Department of Earth Sciences, together with staff at the Sedgwick Museum, were nominated for the Vice Chancellor's Collaboration Award for their exhibit, ‘Dawn of the Wonderchicken: the Oldest Modern Bird’. The Vice Chancellor’s Awards scheme was established in 2016 to recognise and celebrate…

The Integrated Ocean Discovery Program (IODP) has scheduled a new project – Expedition 397 –  that will build a detailed history of Earth’s climate extending back over the last 5 million years.The mission will collect marine sediments from off Portugal’s coast that preserve a detailed history of rapid climate and ocean circulation changes over mill…

CAMBRIDGE -- the Cambridge Centre for Climate Science and Cambridge Zero today held a panel discussion on the recently published IPCC Working Group I report, Climate Change 2021: the Physical Science Basis. The panel was chaired by Eric Wolff, Professor and ice core scientist at the Department of Earth Sciences, Cambridge, and one of the reviewers …

Dr Alex Liu, Lecturer at Cambridge University’s Department of Earth Sciences, will be running in the Cambridge Half Marathon and Town and Gown 10kmnext month, raising funds for family resources at the Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences. Normally looking for fossils of the earliest known animals – bizarre anemone and worm-like creatures that once inh…

What conditions lead to the formation of hydrogen needed for early life on rocky planets? Cambridge Earth Science's Dr Paul Rimmer and Prof. Nick Tosca recently featured amongst a panel of earth scientists who discussed this conundrum.Prebiotic chemistry deals with the synthesis and interaction of those organic compounds which might have been prese…