News

Earlier this year, Cambridge’s Postdoc Academy asked women postdocs to submit short stories describing their scientific inspiration and what it means to them to be a woman in STEMM.The project is aimed at encouraging more young girls to study science. Participants submitted stories, aimed at 10-12 years old girls, about their scientific superpowers…

New evidence confirms that all but the final stages of megacryst formation occur in magma that is still relatively fluid, rather than a locked-up crystal mush.The Shap Granite of northwest England has gained celebrity status amongst Cambridge Earth Science students because it is one of the first rocks they see in practical classes. Known as G5a in …

The IMPULSE research expedition sailed from Hafnarfjörður, Iceland on Sunday 4 August. The international team are collecting detailed measurements of the seafloor near Iceland to better understand processes operating deep within the ‘Icelandic Mantle Plume’ — a giant fountain of slowly-creeping hot rock that rises from Earth’s core-mantle boundary.…

Pollutants preserved in Antarctic ice document historic fires in the Southern Hemisphere, offering a glimpse at how humans have impacted the landscape and providing data that could help scientists understand future climate change.Researchers from the University of Cambridge and British Antarctic Survey tracked fire activity over the past 150 years …

Climate scientists from University of Cambridge and the British Antarctic Survey will be at the 2024 Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition, showcasing how they are using Antarctic ice cores to unlock the past and uncover clues to our planet’s future.The exhibit is one of 14 flagship exhibits at this year’s Summer Science Exhibition. This annual e…

Colossal undersea mountains, towering up to thousands of metres high, stir up deep sea currents: impacting how our ocean stores heat and carbon.An international team, led by the University of Cambridge, used numerical modelling to quantify how underwater turbulence around these mountains, called seamounts, influences ocean circulation; finding it i…

Writing in The Conversation, Cambridge Earth Sciences' Professor Ali Mashayek, PhD candidate Sophie Meyjes and Tyler Rohr from the University of Tasmania discuss how tiny marine animals might decide the fate of attempts to capture and store CO2 in the oceans.As the world struggles to decarbonise, it’s becoming increasingly clear we’ll need to both …

The discovery, published in Nature, opens a new window on early animal evolutionAt first glance, the simple, spikey sea sponge is no creature of mystery.No brain. No gut. No problem dating them back 700 million years. Yet convincing sponge fossils only go back about 540 million years, leaving a 160-million-year gap in the fossil record.In a paper r…

Video footage of Iceland’s 2010 Eyjafjallajökull eruption is providing researchers from the University of Cambridge with rare, up-close observations of volcanic ash clouds — information that could help better forecast how far explosive eruptions disperse their hazardous ash particles. When Eyjafjallajökull erupted in 2010, it ejected roughly 250 mi…

Congratulations to David Hodell, Woodwardian Professor of Geology at the Department of Earth Sciences, on being elected a Fellow of the Royal Society.This year, over 90 exceptional researchers from across the world have been elected to the Fellowship of the Royal Society, the UK’s national academy of sciences.David Hodell, who is Director of the Go…

A new climate-themed art exhibition by local school children opens its wings at the Sedgwick Museum of Earth SciencesA new art installation intended to spark conversation and action about climate change has opened at the Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences, created and curated by local school children, ages 11 to 16, from Parkside Community College. …

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?Iceland sits over a mantle plume — a fountain of hot rock that rises from Earth’s core-mantle boundary — explaining, in part, why this is one o…

Scientists from the Cambridge University have suggested that molecules vital to the development of life could have formed from a process known as graphitisation. Once verified in the laboratory, the finding could allow scientists to recreate plausible conditions for life's emergence.It has long been debated how the seemingly fortuitous conditions f…

Research England has announced that it will support nine of the University’s museums and collections, including the Sedgwick Museum, with £3m a year of Higher Education Museums, Galleries and Collections (HEMG) funding, over the coming five years. The Sedgwick Museum — which houses more than 1.5 million geological objects of international importanc…

On Saturday 23rd March, the Department of Earth Sciences and Sedgwick Museum hosted their first Earth Sciences Fair as part of the wider Cambridge Festival.Visitors had a chance to meet scientists from the Department and hear about their research to understand our planet and tackle environmental challenges. Interactive activities on wide-ranging th…