News

Announced today, Dr Field, University Lecturer in Evolutionary Palaeobiology, has been named a recipient of a Future Leaders Fellowship by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI). Dr Field is an expert on the origins and evolution of birds, and his award, entitled 'Modernisation, diversification, and domination: Macroevolutionary origins of living bird d…

Global environmental change is generally bad news for life on Earth. But the future may not be entirely doom and gloom. Cambridge biologist Luca Telesca and colleagues have conducted the first large-scale examination of natural variation in biomineralisation in ecologically and economically important Atlantic mussel species Mytilus edulis and M. tr…

Richard Harrison (Fitzwilliam 1990), Professor of Earth and Planetary Materials and Fellow of St Catharine’s College, will take over as Head of Department on 1st August 2019.Richard was both an undergraduate and graduate student in the Department. After spending nearly five years as a post-doctoral researcher at the Institut für Mineralogie in Müns…

Perching birds, ranging from sparrows, tits and jays to the South African White-bellied Sunbird, form the largest and most diverse group of living birds. With over 6,000 species belonging to 143 families, the passerines, as they are technically known, have had astonishing evolutionary and geographical success. Within the last 45 million years they …

Congratulations to Professor Marian Holness, Dr Nigel Woodcock and Dr Brendan McCormick Kilbride who each received awards from the Geological Society of London. The awards were presented on President's Day on 6 June 2019.Marian Holness, Professor of Petrology, received the Murchison Medal. The medal is awarded annually to a scientist who has made a…

A team led by Cambridge Earth Sciences' Joshua Einsle and Richard Harrison have used advanced microscopy techniques and numerical simulations to gain new insight into the formation, composition and magnetic behaviour of the meteoritic composite known as the ‘cloudy zone’.The iron-nickel composite material known as the 'cloudy zone' is only found in…

Have you ever wondered why the Megalodon shark became to be so big? Or wondered why some other sharks are much smaller?New research from an international team of scientists including Cambridge Earth Sciences' Dr Daniel Field, led by Swansea University’s Dr Catalina Pimiento, examines the biological traits of all sharks and rays before running a ser…

A team of scientists and engineers from the University of Cambridge and the British Antarctic Survey has successfully drilled over 650 metres in to an Antarctic ice cap to obtain an ice core that will show how the West Antarctic Ice Sheet responds to warming.The team, now consisting of six people, has been at Skytrain Ice Rise for the last seven we…

The Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences, the oldest of the University of Cambridge museums, has appointed its first full-time director.Dr Liz Hide, previously the University of Cambridge Museums Officer and an independent consultant specialising in museum strategy and advocacy, will provide strategic leadership for the museum, enabling it to provide …

Many of the world’s most hazardous volcanoes are either too remote or too active to make measurements safely from the ground. Cambridge Earth Scientists are now taking to the skies to investigate the gases being released by these elusive volcanoes.Leverhulme Research Fellow Dr Emma Liu has been awarded $215,000 by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to …

Gases erupted by volcanoes contain various volatile metal products. New research by Marie Edmonds and Emma Liu in Cambridge and Tamsin Mather in Oxford has discovered that different kinds of volcanoes have distinctive metal ‘signatures’, which reflect differences in how their magma forms.The research focused on two types of volcano - hotspot volcan…

Selected intervals in the past that were as warm or warmer than today can help us understand what the Earth may be like under future global warming. A latest assessment of past warm periods, by an international team of 59 scientists from 17 nations including Cambridge Earth Sciences' Professor Eric Wolff, shows that in response to the warming ecosy…