More regular type activities have also continued. Hayley is working on the protocol for thin sectioning wood here. Frazer is picking midges and becoming increasingly media savey. While Bryan, Lottie and Natalie are all writing theses!
Alex Barret (left) and Will Gosling (right) looking at a bucket of mud
Recently PCRG members helped Alex Barrett out extracting mud from a lake so that he had some sediments to play with for his freeze/thaw experiments. I return Alex has written us a short post on his PhD research project.
Metre scale Sorted patterned ground on Tindastóll, Northern Iceland. This circle is approximately 1.5 m across and consists of a fine domain made up of silt and gravel sized particles, surrounded by a coarse domain consisting of cobble to boulder sized material. It is part of a larger net which extends across large regions of the hilltop.
I am researching possible occurrences of sorted patterned ground on the Northern Plains of Mars. I am conducting experiments to try to simulate freeze thaw sorting in the lab, under both terrestrial and martian conditions. This requires the use of fine grained silts as these are known to be frost susceptible. Experiments will be conducted to see whether lenses of coherent ice can be formed in this soil, initially under earth like conditions, but later at much colder temperatures, using salts of the sort known to occur on mars to depress the freezing point. If ice lenses can be formed at temperatures entirely below 0oC then it would provide another strand of evidence that martian features with similar morphology to terrestrial periglacial sites could have formed though the same processes.
Dr Phil Jardine joining us from the University of Birmingham
We are pleased to announce the imminent arrival of three new PCRG members Phil Jardine, Adele Julier and Nicholas Loughlin. Phil and Adele will be working on the African based, NERC funded, “500,000 years of solar irradiance, climate and vegetation changes” project as PDRA and PhD student respectively. While Nick will be working on South American palaeoenvironmental records looking at “Tropical forests response to past global climate change” as a NERC/CEPSAR funded PhD student. Phil will start in the department on Monday and the others will arrive with the October PhD student intake… exciting times.
Playing the “Who’s poo” game at Wychwood Festival.
Group members William and Frazer took part in the first music festival outing of the British Ecological Society 100 year celebration “Sex & Bugs & Rock ‘n Roll” at Wychwood (31 May – 3 June). Early reports suggest that over 900 people were “stickered” and around 100 people “swabbed” during the weekend. For full details of this event, and future activity, check out the blog and follow the BES Roadies on twitter @BESRoadies.
Lots of excitement in the Palaeo group over the last couple of months including:
Co-I Wes Fraser checks out the FTIR in its new lab. The FTIR will be the main kit used for pollen chemical analysis in the project.
1) Recruitment. Interviews, and offers, for the PhD and PDRA posts related to our recent NERC standard grant award. Hot competition made our life very difficult but we are delighted to be adding two new people to our team. More information as soon as positions have been confirmed…
2) Student conference. On 16 May it was the annual CEPSAR student conference. The standard of talks from our 2nd and 3rd year PhD students was as excellent. With both Hayley and Frazer representing the PCGR well. Frazer recieved a highly commended award from the judges which means that he is on the right track having just had a paper accepted for INTECOL in August – well done Frazer.
3) Outreach preparation & activity. The British Ecological Society “Sex and Bugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll” got its first outing at Imperialfest (04/05/2013), further activities and equipment were tested at The OU (24/05/2013) and hopefully we are now set for our first major outing at Wychwood – exciting times!
4) Science outputs on track. The acceptance of two papers for publication (an African pollen atlas to be published in Review of Palaeobotany & Palynology, and palaeo-ecosystem services in the Andes paper for TheHolocene).
Rachel Gill and Encarni Montoya with sediment cores from Jamaica.
Quick and belated update on activity in March! Not sure where the time is going at the moment…
Early in the month we were delighted to welcome Prof. Jonathan Holmes and Rachel Gill from UCL who came to use our core splitter to open new sediment cores from Wally Wash Pond in Jamaica! A visit from Steve Brooks (Natural History Museum) early in the month to discuss midgy progress with Frazer was great. We are getting ever closer to developing a training data set… Also popping by was ex-PhD student and now Aberystwyth lecturer Joe Williams who we will hopefully be developing some new collaborations with over the summer and fingers crossed mounting an expedition back to Bolivia!
The PDRA project will descover more about past vegetation and climate change in Lake Bosumtwi (Ghana)
We are seeking a PDRA to study past climate and vegetation change in tropical West Africa as part of the NERC-funded “500,000 years of solar irradiance, climate and vegetation changes” project. You will join a multidisciplinary collaborative research team and will work with an international network of project partners. The project will utilise cutting-edge organic geochemical techniques to generate the longest continuous record of fossil pollen chemistry change. The study will build upon previous research into the sediments recovered from Lake Bosumtwi (Ghana). The data generated will shed new light on the role of climate in driving vegetation change in the tropics.
You will already hold a PhD, or be near to completing your PhD, in a relevant scientific discipline with a background in the Earth or Environmental sciences. You must have substantial experience of organic geochemistry or tropical palynology, with well-developed self-management skills and the ability to prioritise effectively.
The PDRA will work with an associated PhD student looking at modern pollen-vegetation relationships in the same region.
The PDRA will be part of an international team; partners based at University of Nottingham, Oxford Brooks University, Imperial College London, Oxford University, University of Texas at Austin and the Forestry Research Institute of Ghana
Understanding how vegetation responded to past climate change requires the development of well constrained relationships between living floras, environment and climate. This project will help constrain the great uncertainty which exists as to how tropical ecosystems are represented in the fossil record by examining the relationship between modern vegetation and the pollen it produces. The project will analyse modern pollen rain using a combination of traditional microscopic analysis [1] and cutting edge geochemical techniques [2]. We anticipate that the findings will provide new insight into past vegetation and climatic change.
For further information on the project and how to apply see the full advert: NERC PhD advert. Prior to applying please check eligibility for NERC funding by clicking here.
Closing date: 25th April, interviews will be held at The Open University during May.
Four new workstations installed in the Past Environmental Change microscope lab
Excitement in February saw the arrival of a new research grant within the PCRG, to look at pollen and spore chemistry from Lake Bosumtwi (watch this space for new post-doc and PhD studentship positions), and (just in time) the expansion of benches in the microscope lab which will ensure that the new people will have spaces to sit in! In addition, we had a paper published with long time friends and collaborators at the University of Leeds; Roucoux et al. (2013).
Despite the disruption of the lab refit Hayley and Frazer have been cracking on with pollen and chironomid analysis. Encarni and Frazer returned from field work in Ecuador and half the samples have so far made it back to The Open University; we now wait with anticipation for customs to release the other box!
Four shiny new workstations from the other side – woo
June has been a month of exciting and unusual (for me at least) science communciation. It all started with the end of Sex & Bugs & Rock ‘n’ Roll at Wychwood, saw the publication of an article on environmental research in the Open Minds magazine, and went on to a parliamentry reception celebrating the British Ecological Society Centenary and launching the new Ecological Issues policy document “The impact of exterme events on freshwater ecosystems”.
Ecology of the past 