EGU Blogs

Daniel Schillereff

Daniel Schillereff has been employed as a Teaching Fellow in Physical Geography at King's College London since September 2015, contributing to teaching across the broad curriculum. Prior to this post he held a Post-doctoral position jointly at the Centre of Ecology and Hydrology in Lancaster and the University of Liverpool on the NERC-funded LTLS project. This research looked at sources, fluxes and interactions of carbon, nitrogen and phosphorus across the UK over the last 200 years. He submitted his PhD thesis at the University of Liverpool in 2014 that analysed basal sediments from lakes to determine whether imprints of extreme historical floods could be detected. He tweets as @dschillereff and his personal webpage is danielschillereff-cv.com.

Sharing my new discovery – aquatic plants are (sometimes) suitable for radiocarbon dating!

December 4, 2014

Radiocarbon dating is probably the most well-known chronological technique regularly employed by archaeologists, geomorphologists and researchers analysing sediment cores. Palaeolimnologists (those who study lake sediments) hoping to determine the age of a sample extracted from a long sediment core traditionally seek terrestrial plant macrofossils (fragments of organic matter visible without a microscope), as these are considered most likely to return a reliable date. When I was searching for material to send to the radiocarbon lab during my PhD, finding bits of leaf from a tree, seeds or twigs made me especially excited.

Segment of a core extracted from Brotherswater, UK. Photo: D. Schillereff

Segment of a core extracted from Brotherswater, UK. Photo: D. Schillereff

A new paper written by James Marty and Amy Myrbol (Department of Earth Sciences, University of Minnesota) and published in Journal of Paleolimnology (MM2014) reviews the feasibility of acquiring robust ages from certain aquatic plant macrofossils. It was an interesting read, as I had not previously considered their viability, and I believe worthy of attention from the palaeolimnology community. The online Tool for Macroscopic Identification available from LacCore team at the University of Minnesota is a valuable resource too.

Examples of terrestrial plant macrofossils found in a sediment core extracted from Brotherswater, England. From left to right: Birch seed; leaf fragment; alder seed. Photos: D. Schillereff.

Examples of terrestrial plant macrofossils found in a sediment core extracted from Brotherswater, England. From left to right: Birch seed; leaf fragment; alder seed. Photos: D. Schillereff.

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Some handy tips towards stress-free PhD completion…

November 19, 2014
Some handy tips towards stress-free PhD completion…
Printed, bound and submitted. (Credit: Dan Schillereffe and Laura Roberts)

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 developing your relationship with your supervisor and tips for improving your scientific writing. Laura put together a comprehensive series of posts entitled ‘making the post of your PhD’ earlier this year on our blog: here, here and here, and I wrote a piece describing my first experiences of submitting a paper for peer-review and being invited to review my first paper.

So this is the first of a series that aims to offer more specific pieces of advice hopefully relevant to PhD students at any stage of their research:

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After a busy summer, we have returned to the blogosphere…

October 26, 2014

Well, it has been a while since either of us has produced a GeologyJenga post, so first of all apologies on this front. We both have the same excuse – finishing our PhD theses! Our mutual deadline was 30 September 2014, and thankfully we both made it. The last few months were challenging at times and we both agreed that the feeling upon submission is hard to describe: certainly wonderfully joyous, coupled the tremendous relief, but tinged with no small amount of surrealism! We intend to put together a more comprehensive piece in the near future outlining the positives (and negatives) of our PhD experiences as well as suggestions and advice for those who may be at an earlier stage (or indeed approaching the end), but we thought it might be nice to precede that with a ‘welcome back’ post about our current activities and prospects.

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A much shorter review of flood stratigraphies in lake sediments

August 8, 2014
A much shorter review of flood stratigraphies in lake sediments
An example from Lake Superior of a sediment plume dispersing across a lake. A similar feature may occur during floods, although sometimes the high suspended sediment concentration causes the plume to plummet rapidly to the lake flood. (Photo courtesy of WikiCommons (Thoth), CC-BY 2.0, Image by David Dewitt).

Earlier this year my PhD supervisors and I (Daniel) had a paper accepted for publication in Earth-Science Reviews entitled ‘Flood stratigraphies in lake sediments: A review’ (Schillereff et al., 2014). It’s been fairly popular in terms of downloads but it occurred to me the other day that many of those prospective readers may be put off somewhat by its hefty word count. Thus, putting together a shortened version outlining the main points and conclusions seemed wise!

The review stems from my PhD research investigating whether sediment cores extracted from UK lakes contain distinct layers deposited by severe floods that occurred in past decades or centuries. It follows many neat papers illustrating similar case studies from every continent bar Antarctica. (We’ve included a KML GoogleEarth file in the Supplementary Info enabling users to fly to the sites of each published palaeoflood record mentioned in the text).

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