Oxford Earth Sciences

I'm excited to announce the Oxford Critical Minerals Summit, in partnership with Critical Minerals Association (UK) and Oxford Earth Sciences. Resource access is an increasingly important part of national security and reindustrialization. The UK is home to world-class talent in science, mining, finance, industry, and defense. It's time to bring them all together at Oxford. Speaker announcements and updates to come shortly. Register below: https://lnkd.in/euDQZAzq

🔋 The world needs critical minerals and that is why a new £3.4m cross-university programme Oxford EARTH has been launched. These minerals, which are needed in sustainable technologies, are essential if climate targets have a chance of being achieved. 👐 Our own Professors Rafael Ramirez and Trudi Lang will be joining forces with academics from Engineering, Earth Sciences, Geography, Economics and Law to tackle this critical challenge of sustainable natural resource management. To start with they will be using business school know-how and techniques around achieving collaborative strategy to design a Futures Forum to map a way forward. 🌍 This will enable different parties to come together and understand each other better, and in turn figure out what common ground they have between them. By bringing together these different perspectives Oxford EARTH’s programme and direction will take shape. Led by Mike Kendall, Chair of Geophysics, and Jon Blundy, Royal Society Research Professor, Oxford EARTH sits within Oxford’s Mathematical Physical and Life Sciences division, led by Jim Naismith. Learn more about Oxford EARTH - https://oxsbs.link/3DWrweR Oxford Earth Sciences

Our third year undergraduates are just back from a week-long field trip to Almeria, in southern Spain. Unusually, for a desert, the trip began and ended in the rain, but they saw plenty of spectacular geology in between. Highlights of the trip included vast cliffs of gypsum (from when the Mediterranean dried out); some spectacular fans of columnar-jointed lava; a multicoloured active strike-slip fault zone, and hand-specimen-scale examples of the aluminosilicate trio: kyanite, sillimanite and andalusite.

The Department of Earth Sciences is excited to be a part of a new multidisciplinary research initiative for sustainable natural resources. The Oxford EARTH programme (Ensuring equitable Access to sustainable Resources for a Thriving Habitat) aims to address the challenges in natural resources underpinning the net zero energy transition, including critical raw materials needed for the generation, storage and transmission of renewable energy, and the social license needed to extract them from the Earth. Ultimately, the insights from Oxford EARTH programme could help inform ‘the mines of the future’: sustainable and equitable operations, that have minimal environmental impact. These could include finding sources of natural hydrogen, using microbes to scavenge for metals in industrial waste, or co-recovering critical metals with geothermal energy. Supported by £3.4 million in funding from the University of Oxford, this five-year programme will position Oxford as a global leader in this research area through collaborative efforts with a diverse range of external stakeholders. The interdisciplinary research team spans nine departments and faculties - Earth Sciences, Chemistry, Biology, Engineering, Geography, Economics, Law, Materials, and the Saïd Business School - bringing together expertise from across the university to drive a truly holistic approach to resourcing the sustainable energy transition. Find out more at https://lnkd.in/eH2iZZMD

🌍 Exciting News! 🌍 I'm very excited to be part of OxEARTH - a new £3.4million Oxford program addressing one of the biggest challenges of our time. OxEARTH is a new, multidisciplinary, initiative from the University of Oxford to drive solutions for the natural resources challenges underpinning the net zero energy transition. It brings together experts, thought leaders, and change-makers from diverse fields. Being a part of this program is an incredible opportunity to address the future of our natural resource use as the complex system of environmental, engineering, social, business, and governance dynamics that it is. I'm looking forward to learning so much as we collaborate on this work. A huge thank you to the University of Oxford for supporting OxEARTH, and to my fellow participants who are just as passionate about making a meaningful impact in the world. https://lnkd.in/euzQbApv School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment - University of Oxford Oxford Earth Sciences Oxford Martin School #OxfordEarth#OxfordUniversity#SustainableResourceManagement

Our research has just been published in 𝘍𝘳𝘰𝘯𝘵𝘪𝘦𝘳𝘴 𝘪𝘯 𝘔𝘢𝘳𝘪𝘯𝘦 𝘚𝘤𝘪𝘦𝘯𝘤𝘦! As co-first author with Dr Stergios Zarkogiannis, I had the opportunity to work with a great team at the Natural History Museum to assess whether samples collected by the HMS 𝘊𝘩𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘦𝘯𝘨𝘦𝘳 Expedition in the 1870s could help reconstruct ocean conditions from 150 years ago. We visualised the collection using X-ray micro-computed tomography—a non-destructive technique that allowed us to examine these specimens in incredible detail without damaging the original 19th-century material. This feasibility study is the first step toward our ultimate goal: using these historical samples to evaluate how ocean acidification, driven by human-induced climate change, has affected marine life since the Industrial Revolution. Beyond the science, I’ve been particularly fascinated by the history behind this project. Finding the right samples meant delving into the archives of the expedition that laid the foundations of oceanography, using original station maps and shipboard logs to guide our research. Last year, I also wrote an article for 𝘈𝘥 𝘏𝘰𝘤 exploring this history-based approach and its significance for modern climate science. A huge thank you to our collaborators Dr Giles Miller and Dr Stephen Stukins at the Natural History Museum for making this possible, and to Prof Ros Rickaby for getting me involved with the project. Science builds on the work of those who came before us (sometimes 150 years before!), and I’m grateful to contribute to this ongoing story. 🔗 Read the research: https://lnkd.in/e4qk3aVc 📖 Learn about the history behind it: https://lnkd.in/eYQ5Tiwe Oxford Earth Sciences | St Anne's College, University of Oxford #NewPublication #MarineScience #ClimateResearch #ScienceHistory

New Oxford EARTH programme for sustainable resources. Excited to be part of a new Oxford strategic research programme on the equitable and sustainable access to resources. This £3.4m programmes includes researchers from 9 Departments/Faculties. https://lnkd.in/e6YW8EWV

What if the key to clean, reliable energy has been beneath our feet all along? That’s exactly what our colleague Jonathan Verlander, Head of Investment Evaluation at Baseload Capital, explores in his latest article for the Oxford Earth Sciences Alumni Magazine. He breaks down groundbreaking innovations that could unlock geothermal’s full potential—transforming it from a niche energy source to a global powerhouse. Could this be the key to 24/7 clean energy? Read Jon’s full article on page 24 and explore other engaging content in the latest issue here: https://hubs.la/Q03cfvHV0

We are right in the middle of British Science Week and our awesome researchers are doing their work all across the world! Professor Richard Walker's team have recently been in Morocco, working alongside colleagues from the Mohammad V University of Rabat, examining evidence of active faults and past earthquakes on the margins of the Atlas Mountains. Prompted by destructive earthquake in 2023, this is the first of what will be many visits on a project funded by the Africa-Oxford Programme (Afox).

School trip! Today was a pathfinders trip to Lincoln College, University of Oxford; the last of 6 for my Guilsborough Academy y11s who were in the pilot batch. It was a jam packed day with year 9 doing a tourism taster lecture and a library archives session, year 10 learning about psychology and visiting the museum of natural history, and year 11 getting a tour of Magdalen College, University of Oxford and learning about volcanoes at Oxford Earth Sciences (see video of exploding film pots!) We all came together for lunch and an introductory Criminology lecture too. Thanks as always to Andrew Miller and the team for being excellent hosts and putting on an engaging and varied programme. It was nice to check in on Noah Scull as one of our student ambassadors again too.