News & Events

A new PANalytical Axios x-ray fluorescence spectrometer will be delivered on February 17th 2010 to replace the PW1480 instrument used by the department since 1990. The new instrument is the most sensitive XRF on the market and will substantially enhance our current capabilities.

Two recent trips to Gibraltar have finished installation of our second multichannel CO₂ monitoring system (Beryl) which completes a NERC-funded network of 13 sampling stations in caves over a 300m vertical section of karst. Monitoring of cave air CO₂ in New St. Michaels cave, located near the summit of the Rock has revealed remarkable seasonal reversals in ventilation which controls the kinetics of speleothem calcite precipitation and the way that climate is recorded as isotope and trace element proxies. Our new monitoring system in Ragged Staff extends this network to sea level and measures CO₂ at 4 hr intervals through a series of linked caves which include the last remaining pristine chambers in Gibraltar.

Work by Graeme Eagles and co-workers has produced a deeper understanding of the geological evolution of West Antarctica over the past 50 million years. The resulting improved reconstructions of Antarctic history will advance our understanding of how ice-sheets slowly formed on the southern continent and hence will deepen our understanding of Earth's climate system. This research has been published in the prestigious journal "Geophysical Research Letters" and is part of the ANTscape palaeogeographic map reconstruction project.

Dr James France, a researcher at Royal Holloway, University of London, is embarking on an expedition to Antarctica to uncover crucial information about climate change, as part of a £300,000 research project funded by the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC). Dr France explains, 'This research is vital to helping us understand the variability of the atmosphere in the past and in predicting future climate change. The chemicals trapped in deep ice-cores, such as those in Antarctica, potentially provide the strongest evidence we have for previous climate change events. Understanding such events is vital for making accurate climate change predictions'.