If we look at Mars today, we’ll see a cold, dusty desert, but peel back the surface geology, and the planet tells quite a different story! Networked river valleys, ancient deltaic fans, carved impact crater lakes, and potential palaeoshorelines all point to a warm and active past during the Noachian and early Hesperian epochs, circa …[Read More]
Tidal flats, the muddy reaches of estuaries unveiled at low tide, support rich ecosystems and fisheries worldwide. But these habitats are under threat from climate change, as sea level rise overwhelms the landscape and heavy rainfall scours away the sediment – impacts that scientists are only just beginning to explore. In an effort to understand …[Read More]
Recently, we had a big name in fire ecology visiting our institute. He had come, among other things, to look for records of a certain fire-adapted shrub in my university’s herbarium. While myself and a colleague helped him go through the stacks of pressed and archived specimens, I asked him why there were so little …[Read More]
Artificial intelligence (AI) has been here a while, and it isn’t going anywhere, not any time soon. It has become an integral part of many lives and businesses. When I speak of AI, I am not referring to GenAI (generative AI) that writes your emails for you: Think about the algorithms that suggest what movie …[Read More]
AI is here, and when I say here, I mean e-v-e-r-y-w-h-e-r-e. For all you know, this blog may have been written by an algorithm (it wasn’t — I’m not a robot, promise. Or am I?). In what feels like the blink of an eye, AI has gone from a curiosity to a fully-fledged co-pilot in …[Read More]
When it comes to peering beneath the Earth’s surface, geophysicists have an arsenal of high-tech tools at their disposal. But what happens when you need to track something as elusive as underground ice forming and melting in real time? Enter borehole Ground-Penetrating Radar (GPR), the underground detective that helped Peter Jung and his colleagues image …[Read More]
Extracted from a depth of 2,500 meters, a giant 12-meter long marine sediment core from the Fram Strait, between Svalbard and Greenland, preserves a climate record spanning up to 400,000 years. Its sediment layers offer crucial insights into the Arctic’s past, helping Dr Jochen Knies and his research team answer two important question: Was the …[Read More]
Ever wonder what happens to the chemicals and medications we use once they go down the drain? The fourth Sunday of September each year marks the World Rivers Day, and this post is dedicated to our global rivers and what humankind can do to preserve our waters. This is because pharmaceuticals and household products, even …[Read More]
When I was thirteen years old, my family and I almost lost our lives due to a carbon monoxide (CO) leak. I never stopped thinking about that incident even though it happened over twenty years ago. Not only because it was a premature realisation of my own mortality, but also because of how sneaky it …[Read More]
It appears that plastics have well and truly invaded even our most inaccessible environments: the deepest point in the ocean (the Mariana trench) and the highest mountain peak in the world (Mt. Everest) both contain pieces of plastic from human activities miles away. With plastic waste flowing into aquatic ecosystems expected to nearly triple by …[Read More]
