Back in June, a team of researchers form the Coastal Group at University of Southampton (UoS), comprising Prof Carl Amos, Prof Ian Townend, Dr Charlie Thompson and Dr Hachem Kassem completed a 10 day trip to China. The team were invited by the College of Harbor, Coastal & Offshore Engineering at Hohai University (HHU), Nanjing,… Read More OES G&G Coastal team visits China
The global population is rising at an alarming rate, and is expected to reach 9.8 billion (UN Website, population database) by the year 2050. The demand for resources such as food, energy and metals will soar as a result. While technological advances in renewables and food production may be sufficient to satisfy future demand, maintaining… Read More Marine electromagnetics for the investigation of deep water massive sulphide deposits
By Dr Thomas Gernon – Associate Professor in Earth Science (Thomas.Gernon@noc.soton.ac.uk) Last month, Ocean and Earth Science welcomed Professor Paul Hoffman from Harvard University for a three-day visit. Paul is famous for developing the theory of ‘Snowball Earth’, when in the late Proterozoic (~700 Ma) the oceans froze and our whole planet was covered… Read More A 3-day visit by Professor Paul Hoffman with a short-course on Snowball Earth
A team of seismologists from the University of Southampton are currently on board the Royal Research Ship Discovery sailing across the Mid-Atlantic Ocean. They are out for the second phase of the PI-LAB (Passive Imaging of the Lithosphere-Asthenosphere Boundary) project, this time recovering ocean bottom stations that were deployed last year. Their scientific mission is… Read More PI-LAB phase II: The recovery
During October, new PhD student Ben Callow and Prof Jon Bull visited California to study field examples of sandstone injectites as part of two collaborative carbon sequestration projects STEMM-CCS (Horizon 2020) and CHIMNEY (NERC). California is home to some of the largest onshore examples of sandstone injectites in the world, providing Ben and Jon with… Read More Fieldwork investigation of Sandstone Injectites in California
This is a press-release for a new paper – Wave breaking patterns control rip current flow regimes and surf zone retention, published by members of the coastal group which can be accessed here. Research by the Universities of Southampton and Plymouth has found a new link between breaking waves and the hazard posed by rip currents. The… Read More New understanding of rip currents could help to save lives
As part of Southampton Science and Engineering Festival, a team from Geology&Geophysics research group put on a large, and largely popular display on Sediment Dynamics at the new Bolderwood Innovation Campus. The University’s Science and Engineering Day 2016 took place on Saturday 12th March. This free event was part of British Science Week www.britishscienceweek.org and was previously awarded Best… Read More Sediment Dynamics from the beach to Mars – Science and Engineering Day 2016
By PhD students Aude Lavayssiere and Finn Illsley-Kemp. As part of the RiftVolc project aiming to understand magmatism and rifting in the East African Rift System, Dr Derek Keir and two PhD students, Finn Illsley-Kemp and Aude Lavayssiere, went to Ethiopia last month to deploy seismic stations. RiftVolc is a project that started in September… Read More Seismic deployment in the Main Ethiopian Rift
The Passive Imaging of the Lithosphere and Asthenosphere Boundary project aims at studying the interaction of the base of the rigid tectonic part (the lithosphere) with the softer layer underneath it – the asthenosphere. Understanding interaction between the two layers is essential in order to better understand what makes plates ‘plate-like’, and thus understanding the origin… Read More PILAB project sails through (cruise blog now live)
Earthquakes and associated tsunamis can be exceptionally dangerous. In the last 12 years, earthquakes and tsunamis offshore Sumatra, Japan and Haiti have killed over 350,000 people. Despite this, many large and growing population centres are located close to plate boundaries worldwide, which is where most large earthquakes occur. It is therefore important to understand how… Read More ‘Skinny’ landslides and big earthquakes