Articles about 'Department of Earth Sciences'

Major changes in the chemical composition of the world’s oceans enabled the first large organisms – possibly some of the earliest animals – to exist and thrive more than half a billion years ago, marking the point when conditions on Earth changed and animals began to take over the world. 

A team of researchers from the University of Cambridge have developed a new way of measuring the pressure inside volcanoes, and found that it can be a reliable indicator of future eruptions.

Could waste material from mining be used to trap CO₂ emissions? A new £8.6 million research programme will investigate the possibilities. Simon Redfern (Department of Earth Sciences) explains, in this article from The Conversation. 

A team of volcanologists and engineers from the Universities of Cambridge and Bristol has collected measurements from directly within volcanic clouds, together with visual and thermal images of inaccessible volcano peaks.

In recent years, tsunamis have devastated coastal regions. Writing in The Conversation, Camilla Penney, PhD Candidate in Geophysics at University of Cambridge, looks at the risks faced by Gulf states and what can be done to mitigate them.

Brexit won't be the first time Britain has left Europe, says Simon Redfern, professor in Earth Sciences at University of Cambridge writing for The Conversation. Almost half a million years ago we experienced a catastrophic separation.

More than a century of theory about the evolutionary history of dinosaurs has been turned on its head following the publication of new research from scientists at the University of Cambridge and Natural History Museum in London. Their work suggests that the family groupings need to be rearranged, re-defined and re-named and also that dinosaurs may have originated in the northern hemisphere rather than the southern, as current thinking goes.

A tiny sea creature identified from fossils found in China may be the earliest known step on an evolutionary path that eventually led to the emergence of humans

An international team of researchers has found that the Antarctic Ice Sheet plays a major role in regional and global climate variability – a discovery that may also help explain why sea ice in the Southern Hemisphere has been increasing despite the warming of the rest of the Earth.

Researchers have identified the first known example of fossilised brain tissue in a dinosaur from Sussex. The tissues resemble those seen in modern crocodiles and birds.