News

In the search for life elsewhere in the Universe, scientists have traditionally looked for planets with liquid water at their surface. But, rather than flowing as oceans and rivers, much of a planet’s water can be locked in rocks deep within its interior. Scientists from the University of Cambridge now have a way to estimate how much water a rocky …

Many of the most violent outpourings of volcanic activity in history are fed by mushroom-shaped pillars of hot rock extending deep to Earth’s mantle, the region between the core and the crust we walk on. These ‘mantle plumes’ can be active for millions of years — leaving huge lava fields and chains of volcanic islands in their wake. But the exact m…

The Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences marked this year’s International Women’s Day celebrations with a tour showcasing some lesser-known stories of trailblazing women of geology and palaeontology.The tour — hosted by Liz Hide, Director of the Museum —uncovered some of the many women whose contributions to geology have been marginalized and underest…

Congratulations to Dr Carrie Soderman on being awarded the Geochemistry Group Postdoctoral Medal for her 2022 paper in Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta.The paper discusses the use of stable isotopes as new tools for investigating temperature and lithological heterogeneity in the mantle. “This paper showcases some of the work that I’m most proud of f…

Geoscientists use isotopic analysis to answer a range of questions, from the age and origin of a rock to the processes that have shaped it since formation. Across our department, researchers are applying the technique to developments at the forefront of climate, environmental and planetary science. The forensic detective work starts in the Geochemi…

Fossil bones from two newly-described penguin species, one of them thought to be the largest penguin to ever live – weighing more than 150 kilograms, more than three times the size of the largest living penguins – have been unearthed in New Zealand. An international team, including researchers from the University of Cambridge, reported the discover…

Two Cambridge Earth Scientists have been awarded NERC funding for research that will ‘open up discipline-shifting discoveries in environmental science.’Dr Rachael Rhodes and Professor Marie Edmonds have received NERC ‘Exploring the Frontiers’ grants, allowing them to investigate questions at the forefront of volcanology and climate science using in…

Scientists have examined a period of extreme global warming that happened about 56 million years ago to find out how climate change could influence Earth’s water cycle in the future. The research, led by Cambridge Earth Scientists, finds evidence for increased rainfall and storminess during the Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum (PETM), when global t…

Scientists are taking on one of the biggest conundrums in the field of planetary geology – the question of when Earth first got its magnetic field – by peering at the atoms inside ancient minerals called zircons.  The new study, led by scientists from Cambridge’s Department of Earth Sciences, investigated whether zircons from the Jack Hills outcrop…

The London Underground is polluted with ultrafine metallic particles small enough to end up in the human bloodstream, according to University of Cambridge researchers. These particles are so small that they are likely being underestimated in surveys of pollution in the world’s oldest metro system. The researchers carried out a new type of pollution…

Northern Borneo is dotted with puzzling landforms that can’t be explained by typical plate tectonic processes. One example is Mount Kinabalu —in the Malaysian state of Sabah in northern Borneo — an anomalous granite mountain which towers at twice the height of all other peaks in the country.“We wanted to know how strange surface features like Mount…

Our planet’s surface might seem stable and constant, but it is in fact being continually recycled by plate tectonic processes that send old rocks diving into Earth’s interior. Looking around us, from the mountains of the Himalayas to the bottom of the ocean, many rocks are no more than a few hundred million years old. But some areas of Earth’s surf…

The largest recorded deep ocean volcanic eruption happened in 2012, when the Havre seamount in the Kermadec arc, New Zealand, exploded — releasing a raft of pumice up to five metres thick and covering an area of 400 square kilometres. Roughly three quarters of volcanoes on Earth are not on land but in the deep ocean, hidden at depths of 1-4 km on t…

Fossilised fragments of a skeleton, hidden within a rock the size of a grapefruit, have helped upend one of the longest-standing assumptions about the origins of modern birds.Researchers from the University of Cambridge and the Natuurhistorisch Museum Maastricht found that one of the key skull features that characterises 99% of modern birds – a mob…

Ali Mashayek joins us from Imperial College London, where he is a lecturer in geophysical fluid dynamics and climate science and an affiliate of the Grantham Institute of Climate Change and the Environment. Ali’s research group studies ocean physics and ecosystem processes in order to understand larger scale budgets of carbon and heat. His research…