July 2022: Congratulations Dr Hamish Couper and Dr Chris Theaker for both passing your vivas with minor corrections. A huge thanks to all of the examiners for your help and involvement: Franzi Lechleitner, David McGee, Stuart Robinson, Gideon Henderson.
June 2022: Congratulations Sam Hollowood on your excellent results for your 4th year project, including winning the EarthScience-MetOffice Academic Partnership (MOAP) prize for an outstanding 4th year project on a climate-related topic.
April 2022: Congratulations to Hamish Couper and to Chris Theaker for completing your DPhil dissertations. Very nicely done indeed.
March 2022: A big congratulations to Sam Hollowood on securing a position on the Oxford DTP programme for next year.
August 2021: Stalagmite climate science is in the media again, with this nice article by Emma Bryce about Prof. Gina Moseley‘s work with stalagmites, that Gina and her team have recovered from northeast Greenland. Gina is using these samples (some dating back to 588,000 years ago) to recover key information about our environment during warm periods in the past.
March 2021: Our latest publication on Li isotopes (together with Philip Pogge von Strandmann and Andrew Mason) has been accepted for publication with GCA. Entitled “Lithium isotopes and partition coefficients in inorganic carbonates: proxy calibration for weathering reconstruction” the pre-proof is available here.
March 2021: Congratulations to William Hawkes on his successful application for a NERC Scenario DTP project with Renee Lee (University of Reading), Fabio Nudelman (University of Edinburgh) and the Environmental Proxies group here in Oxford Earth Sciences. Looking forward to working together on joint biology-geochemistry topics.
December 2020: Happy to hear that Dr Gül Surmelih’s Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions Fellowship (AQUEA) project now has a starting date in August 2021. Looking forward to working with Gül, with Prof. Andrew Wilson and other colleagues, making use of geochemical measurements from aqueduct samples for reconstructing environmental change applicable to Roman archaeology. Congratulations Gül on your fellowship.
November 2020: NERC Scenario DTP project available for 2021. Supervised by Dr Renee Lee, co-supervised by Dr Chris Day and Dr Fabio Nudelman. Full details are available here.
June 2020: Thanks to NERC and to NEIS for supporting Chris Theaker’s research by awarding him with support for radiocarbon measurements at the National Environmental Isotope Facility. Chris Theaker will use these measurements as part of his work into developing historic reconstructions of ENSO variability using a stalagmite sample from Borneo (more details to follow in due course). Congratulations Chris for your successful application.
Dec 2019: The Environmental Proxies Group is very grateful to the John Fell Fund for financial support relating to a series of updates and developments of the ‘Oxford Cave’ laboratory setup. This will significantly increase the experimental output of this setup for a growing number of internal and collaborative projects. We look forward to reporting on the outcomes of these experiments and to supporting additional collaborations in the years to come.
Feb 2019: Eos Buzz Newsletter: The Akkadian Empire—Felled by Dust? Chemical measurements of a stalagmite from a cave in Iran reveal a large uptick in dust activity in northern Mesopotamia roughly 4,200 years ago, coincident with the decline of the Akkadian Empire.
Dec 2018: Congratulations to Hamish Couper for winning the “Elsevier Travel Grant for effective communication and clearest exposition of work” at the NERC DTP conference! The grant is much appreciated in supporting his ongoing fieldwork in North Africa.