31 August 2018
PhD student Rachael Shuttleworth (@rachshuts) from NOC recently visited local school Oakwood Primary where she held a morning session with the reception class as part of their annual science week. After a short assembly introducing the children to key concepts such as global warming and climate change the classes were split up into groups for an experiment using infra-red lamps to heat up bottles filled with CO2 and air – where the bottle that was filled up with CO2 got hotter, faster! This... |
17 August 2018
Submarine landslides are gravitational mass movements that occur on all sediment bearing continental slopes worldwide. They can be exceptionally large, with volumes two orders of magnitude greater than terrestrial landslides. In addition, submarine landslides are hard to monitor directly, and many uncertainties surround their preconditioning and triggering factors.
Many studies have shown that basal failure planes of submarine landslides coincide with mechanically weaker layers... |
14 August 2018
The Younger Dryas (12,900-11,700 yrs BP) was an abrupt climate reversal during the last deglaciation and resulted in severe conditions across the North Atlantic region. This period of climatic extremes was hypothesised to be the result of a freshwater forced weakening of ocean circulation (AMOC) from the Laurentide Ice Sheet, which sat across much of North America 1, 2, 3. This freshwater may have enabled sea-ice advance across the North Atlantic, changing the nature of atmospheric... |
19 February 2018
Tephra (volcanic ash) ejected from volcanic eruptions is deposited instantaneously (on geological time scales) creating a layer of equal age in marine and terrestrial sedimentary records, which can then be used as regional dating and synchronisation markers, a technique known as tephrochronology. These deposits are often identified as being undisturbed and primary in nature, but the sampling and analytical methods used may fail to provide the resolution to detect structures that could indicate... |