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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…

New research led by Cambridge earth scientists has documented heavy metal pollution along the North Sea coast over the last century. The study, published in the Marine Pollution Bulletin, used dog whelks collected from the Belgian and Dutch foreshores as a tool to identify changes in lead pollution over time. It reveals the impacts of contamination…

Seismologists try to understand where and when earthquakes might happen in the future by studying recent earthquake sequences. Typically, they rely on the principle that stress accumulates slowly along a fault and is periodically released as an earthquake in a repeating, cyclical pattern.  But two near-identical earthquakes that struck the Ibaraki-…

A new study involving Cambridge earth scientists has mapped out ocean currents in the North Atlantic over time, revealing changes in the movement of deep water tied to the growth and decline of ice sheets.The research, published in the journal Nature Geoscience, measured isotopic tracers of ocean circulation in samples of ocean sediments collected …

New research on an 80-million-year-old bird fossil suggests that early birds may have been highly intelligent like modern ones, changing our timeline of when they first got smart.  The study, which involved researchers from Cambridge’s Field Palaeobiology Research Group, mapped out impressions left inside the braincase of an exceptionally preserved…

International Ocean Discovery Program (IODP) Iberian Margin Paleoclimate Expedition 397 sets sail today for the coast of Portugal, southwest of Lisbon. The expedition, carrying 26 international scientists, will investigate areas where marine sediments accumulate rapidly, giving a high-fidelity record of climate change, on timescales of hundreds to …

Researchers have conducted a new analysis of the origins of ‘bird-hipped’ dinosaurs – the group which includes iconic species such as Triceratops – and found that they likely evolved from a group of animals known as silesaurs, which were first identified two decades ago.The researchers, from the University of Cambridge and the Universidade Federal …

The problem of how phosphorus became a universal ingredient for life on Earth may have been solved by a group of Cambridge scientists, who have recreated primordial seawater containing the element in the lab.Their results, published in the journal Nature Communications, show that seawater might be the missing source of phosphate, meaning that it co…