Recent posts

Helen Ashcroft is currently a DPhil student at the University of Oxford. She blogs for the Bang! Science Magazine (Planet Blog) and is also a STEMNET Ambassador, working to promote science, technology, maths and engineering to young people.  Jim Cust, a graduate student in economics, presented this term's Oxford University Group GfGD seminar. In addition to his research Jim is also a director of the Natural Resource Charter, an organisation which gives guidance to societies and governments on natural resource extraction. Helen has written for the GfGD Blog before, about career paths in the development sector, and today she shares some of the lessons ...more

Placements give students a valuable opportunity to get an insight into the international development sector, consider what key skills they need to develop to contribute to such work, and better understand the role of geoscience in fighting poverty. Following successful placements with the NGO CAFOD, GfGD are delighted to announce two new placement opportunities for UK-based geoscience students - both taking place this summer. PLACEMENT A WHERE: TEARFUND (Teddington, UK) WHEN: 1st - 12th July 2013 (two weeks) FULL PLACEMENT DETAILS & APPLICATION GUIDELINES The successful candidate for this placement will be working with Tearfund’s Disaster Risk Reduction and Environment Adviser. The focus of this two week ...more

The underside of a cricket in focus against a blurred carbonate ramp succession in the background. Taken in Namibia in 2012. Send us your favourite photos of wild encounters whilst out in the field! Bloggfgd.org (c) Geology for Global Development ...more

It is already May!! Crazy. Everyone in the department is incredibly busy right now trying to get all of those things on their winter to-do list checked off before it is time to head out to the field once again and re-fill the to-do list for next winter with sample prep, analysis and some interpretation. It is also time to start thinking of preparing for the field. Some of you hard rock folk might think it is a bit early to start prepping since all you need is a hammer, some canvas bags, and....what else do you need? However, for ...more

Conserving our world’s biodiversity is currently one of the biggest challenges we face. I wrote a post recently about some of the issues palaeontologists face when trying to make our science relative to current conservation management and biodiversity issues (and have written elsewhere about this too). This is very much a developing issue within which palaeontology is framing itself, as with ever squeezing science budgets around the world, scientists are being forced to find the hook or application that makes their research ‘relevant’ to broader society. The role that palaeontology can play for both climate change and biodiversity patterns and ...more

The photo of the week this week is of a very special place in Canada. Yes, predictably, it is the Yukon. However, this part of the Yukon is unique. It is a special region known as Beringia, which extends into Alaska and Siberia and it is the only part of Canada that was not covered by kilometers of ice during the last glaciation. Beringia is a special place because it is believed that that first human inhabitants of North America made their way across the exposed land bridge form Siberia into the Yukon and spread west and south. Geologically, Berinia ...more

This edition of the photo of the week highlights another piece from my personal collection. Cephalopod - Matt Herod Collection (Photo: Matt Herod) This is a cephalopod. More specifically it is a member of the Order Endocerida and the Family Endoceratidae. This creature, which hopefully you can see was pretty large (golf tee for scale) was the largest of the Ordovician cephalopods found in Ontario and this is a particularly fine/large example mainly because it tapers all the way to the apex at the end, which is a very rare find, and because of its large size (~7ocm). Cepahlopods, such as Endoceras, were the top ...more

This was initially posted at: http://www.nature.com/spoton/2013/04/social-media-for-science-outreach-a-case-study-that-social-media-thang/ as part of a series of case studies exploring how academics use social media. Jon began university life as a geologist, following this with a treacherous leap into the life sciences with a course in biodiversity and taxonomy. Now undertaking a PhD in tetrapod biodiversity and extinction at Imperial College London, there was a brief interlude were Jon was sucked into the world of science policy and communication. He blogs at http://blogs.egu.eu/palaeoblog/, tweets as Protohedgehog and co-runs an podcast series called Palaeocast. Jon can usually be found procrastinating in pubs, trying to exchange bad science, usually about dinosaurs, in exchange ...more

Dinosaurs. What springs to mind when they're mentioned? Colossal, towering sauropods? Packs of feisty feathered fiends? Or huge herds of hadrosaurs, chomping their way across the plains of long-lost worlds? Most, including myself, will automatically default to any one of these images when dinosaurs come up in conversation (what, you mean it's not that frequent for normal people?) But we often neglect to think the earliest dinosaurs, spectacular organisms that gave birth to the most successful, and on-going, terrestrial vertebrate radiation of all time. Dinosaurs arose about 232-225 million years ago (mya), during the Carnian-lowermost Norian stage of the Triassic, the ...more