Ok, so I took some license with the title. This isn’t really a curious case and neither Krypton-81 nor ATTA are actually people. In fact, Krypton-81 (81Kr) is a radioisotope of the noble gas krypton and ATTA, which stands for atom trap trace analysis, is the revolutionary technique that has made its analysis possible. I recently heard about developments with ATTA at the IAEA Isotope Hydrolog ...[Read More]
Yes, Nessie had to be in the title. Am I sorry? A little. But not enough to not use it. Colleagues from the University of Edinburgh and myself have described the first Scottish crocodile fossil! It’s from the Isle of Skye, from a time known as the Middle Jurassic, and dates back around 160 million years ago. Based on a partial bit of a jawbone (the dentary), it’s hardly the most specta ...[Read More]
Earth’s history is punctuated by extreme events known as mass extinctions. The End-Permian extinction, 252 million years ago, is believed to be the biggest, killing 90 % or more of all species – no wonder it is also called “The Great Dying”. The big question out there is to understand what caused it, but it is a challenge to get the complete picture of an event so long ago in prehistory. We ...[Read More]
Hello everyone. Great that you could make it out to my blog post. I would like to introduce you to some ideas about environmental modelling that I have recently discovered during my work. These ideas are from this paper by Christine Koltermann and Steven Gorelick back in 1996. Whilst the primary focus of their paper is on modelling hydrogeological properties such as hydraulic conductivity, I think ...[Read More]
Our 3rd Annual Conference, with the theme Fighting Global Poverty – Geology and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) takes place on Friday 30th October, hosted by the Geological Society of London. Here we introduce the speakers taking part in Session 2, a panel discussion on ‘Geology and the SDGs’… Dr Katherine Royse (Science Director – Environmental Modelling, Br ...[Read More]
A new species of extinct dolphin closely related to modern Amazonian ‘river dolphins’, but which dwelled in ancient oceans, is helping to solve the mystery of how and when dolphins adapted for life away from the sea. Freshwater dolphins are endangered, largely due to human activity. In modern ecosystems, only five or six species remain, and among these, the Yangtze ‘river dolphin’ was declared ‘fu ...[Read More]
The ARCS (Advancing Research Communication and Scholarship) have launched a new ‘open scholarship’ competition. The aim is simple: describe your ‘open science story’, and you could win $1000! In particular, the competition is aimed at finding success stories – how has practicing any form of open science helped you advance or enhance your career in some way? All submis ...[Read More]
In January 2015, GfGD took a small group of members to a discussion event hosted by the British Geological Survey, on best practice in international development. Ben Clarke and Eleri Simpson, then final year undergraduates at the University of Leicester (UK) joined the event to share about their fantastic work in Vanuatu. Here they write a guest blog about one presentation that caught their intere ...[Read More]
Permeability is a crazy parameter: heterogeneous on many spatial scales, highly variable over up to 20 orders of magnitude, and transient on many temporal scales. Yet, for better or for worse it is essential to our understanding of numerous earth processes, as well as how human impact and interact with the earth. I have had the honor of guest editing a special issue of Geofluids called ‘Cru ...[Read More]
This was originally posted at: http://exchanges.wiley.com/blog/2015/08/26/the-rise-of-open-research-data/ As a junior researcher in the UK, it has given me great pleasure over the last few years to see the dramatic development of open access publishing. Most major research funders in the UK now require public access to published research articles in one form or another, and many other research int ...[Read More]
