Laura and I both submitted our theses at the end of September after four years of intense work. We felt there’d be some value (nostalgic to ourselves, hopefully useful to others) in putting together some tips of our own now that we can look back on our achievements. There are loads of brilliantly-written and extremely useful posts providing advice on the pastoral side of undertaking a PhD, such as ...[Read More]
Tl,dr version: I think we need more appropriate guidelines for live-tweeting conferences, specifically regarding the broadcasting of sensitive research. This should be at the discretion of the author, and ideally stated at the beginning of each talk. Suzie Maidment, a colleague and friend of mine, recently started a major discussion on and off the internet with the following tweet: “I do think we ...[Read More]
Kick ’em Jenny is a submarine volcano located 8km to the north of the Caribbean island of Grenada. It lies close to the small, uninhabited volcanic islands of Ronde, Diamond, Ill Caille and Les Tantes, though no physical evidence of the volcano is evident from land. At least twelve recorded eruptions have occurred since Kick ’em Jenny’s discovery in 1939 (the last in 2001), and it is c ...[Read More]
It is now a year since the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) announced the results of its first competition for ‘Doctoral Training Partnerships (DTP)’, and just a few weeks since each of the 15 funded DTPs welcomed their first cohorts of doctoral students. In this time, the training landscape for PhD (or DPhil) students across the environmental sciences has changed radically. ...[Read More]
A tweet from Jenni Barclay about a Pirate Scientist gave me an excuse to visit the newly opened reading rooms in the Bodleian’s Weston Library.. William Dampier was a seventeenth century pirate, and later maritime adventurer, whose several books of ‘Voyages and Discoveries’ make for fascinating reading. In 1699, he set sail in HMS Roebuck to try and find Terra Australis, a mythic ...[Read More]
The nights are drawing in, the air is getting colder and here in Bristol it seems like viva season is in full swing. Enough time has elapsed since my own viva that I thought I would share my thoughts about what to expect on the big day. Whilst everybody’s experience is different, from talking to fellow alumni there do seem to be some common themes: Your examiners are human. The main thing to ...[Read More]
In my opinion, there aren’t many finer ways to spend an autumnal afternoon than ambling round the historical suburb of Clifton in Bristol. Bounded to the west by the dramatic limestone cliffs of the Avon Gorge and the bucolic open downs of Clifton and Durdham, Clifton Village is a Bristol rarity, in only having been only partly subsumed by the neighbouring metropolis. Clifton is home to many ...[Read More]
How is it that Earth developed an atmosphere that made the development of life possible? A study published in the journal Nature Geoscience links the origins of Earth’s nitrogen-rich atmosphere to the same tectonic forces that drive mountain-building and volcanism on our planet. It goes some way to explaining why, compared to our nearest neighbours, Venus and Mars, Earth’s air is richer in nitroge ...[Read More]
Carlos M. Asensio Grima casensio@ual.es Department of Agronomy University of Almería, Spain Soil wind erosion is influenced by soil inherent properties, different wind characteristics and surface vegetation cover. For a better understanding of this process is necessary to explain the effect and consequences of wind erosion on the ground and especially in agricultural areas of southern, eastern and ...[Read More]
Frans Kwaad, physical geographer Soil erosion is the removal of soil from cultivated land at a rate that is (much) higher than the rate that would occur under the natural vegetation at the considered site. Besides the loss of fertile topsoil, soil erosion entails the dissection of cultivated land by rills and gullies and the deposition of eroded soil material on roads, in residential areas, rivers ...[Read More]