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PhD candidate Hannah Muir is visiting BOSCORF this year on several occasions to split sediment cores taken from coastal and marine habitats around the Isle of Man. Her PhD research will investigate the ability of these sediments to store carbon, known as ‘blue carbon’.
Daniel James, PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge, visited BOSCORF this week with a collection of speleothem samples. Together with Rebecca Garnett, BOSCORF’s X-ray imaging scanner operator, he collected high-resolution radiograph and laminograph images on 15 speleothem slab samples.
This week the filming was on location for a new series of online courses provided collaboratively by BOSCORF and National Environmental Isotope Facility. At a scenic coastal location in southwest Scotland the filming of the BOSCORF course commenced.For an upcoming series of online courses on the Geo-Biosciences Advanced E-Learning Academy (in short GAEA platform) several video clips were filmed. The course on argon-argon dating, for example, will launch spring 2022, with further courses being made available throughout the year.
This week our new Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) was installed. This machine replaces an older model that had limited capabilities. Our new Hitachi TM4000 SEM, in contrast, can magnify samples 100,000 times, does 3D mapping of surfaces, has an option for cathodoluminescence imaging, and energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy. In short: a very fancy microscope that BOSCORF makes available to the scientific community.