News

Of all songbirds, the bowerbird has perhaps one of the strangest courtship displays. To attract a mate, males of the species build arched structures or ‘bowers’ using twigs, embellished with colourful objects such as leaves, fruit and even plastic—behaviour famously captured in David Attenborough’s documentaries.Now, research led by the University …

PhD student Julian Pahl recounts his fieldwork in Hawaiʻi 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 magmatic processes of active volca…

Buried in ancient seafloor sediments dating back millions of years lie minuscule magnetic fossils—fragments left behind by a mysterious, unidentified organism. Shaped like spearheads, spindles, bullets and needles, and no larger than a bacterial cell, scientists are confident these magnetofossils are biological in origin, but they don’t know what c…

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 examine how the region's ocean…

Flightless birds such as ostriches, emus, rheas, and kiwis inhabit far-flung corners of the Southern Hemisphere, but how did these grounded birds spread so far and wide? New research sheds light on the mystery, showing they had ancestors that could likely fly across oceans.  Researchers from the University of Cambridge and the Smithsonian National …

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, then at St Andrews, and hi…

Sara Crozier, third year PhD student and isotope geochemist reports on the 2025 Goldschmidt in Prague in this blog post.The journey from Cambridge to Prague was short and relatively painless — a smooth hop across Europe, and before we knew it, we were off and running. The conference centre itself was easy to find, just one metro stop from the city …

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 boundary—unleashed volcan…

On 11–15 August, the Department welcomed Year 12 students from across the country for a week-long summer school.The scheme is spearheaded by The Sutton Trust, an educational charity which aims to improve social mobility and address educational disadvantage.Students experienced studying Earth Sciences at university through taster lectures, lab pract…

A drought lasting 13 years and several others that each lasted over three years may have contributed to the collapse of the Classic Maya civilisation, chemical fingerprints from a stalagmite in a Mexican cave have revealed.A detailed analysis of oxygen isotopes in the stalagmite allowed a team of researchers, led by the University of Cambridge, to …

After decades of research, seismologists understand why earthquakes occur, but they still can't predict when they will happen. Rather than pinpointing their exact timing, scientists can only estimate the likelihood of future quakes within broad time windows.Earthquakes happen when pent-up stress on a fault is released suddenly, a phenomenon governe…

A treasure trove of exceptionally preserved early animals from more than half a billion years ago has been discovered in the Grand Canyon, one of the natural world’s most iconic sites. The rich fossil discovery – the first such find in the Grand Canyon – includes tiny rock-scraping molluscs, filter-feeding crustaceans, spiky-toothed worms, and even…

In this blog post, Agathe Foulon describes her research internship in the Department of Earth Sciences.In April, I joined the Department of Earth Sciences for a six-month internship on polar oceanography, focussing on nutrient transport in the Arctic Ocean.As a Master’s student in Oceanography and Applications based jointly at the University of Tou…

We’re delighted to announce that Professor Nick Tosca has been selected as a Mineralogical Society of America Distinguished Lecturer for the 2025–2026 academic year.The Mineralogical Society of America (MSA) offers universities that normally do not have the opportunity to hear talks about recent advances in mineralogy to choose among several topics…

On 10th July at 11:45, Professor Helen Williams will present the prestigious Paul Gast Medal Lecture at this year’s Goldschmidt Conference in Prague. The lectureship is awarded to a mid-career scientist for outstanding contributions to geochemistry.Titled “From Hard Rock to Heavy Metal: High-Mass Stable Isotope Adventures in Mantle Geochemistry,” t…