… brought to you by Earth System Science (ESS) and Cambridge Climate, Life and Earth (C-CLEAR) DTP students. This is a series of blogs written by PhD students involved in the NERC Doctoral Training Partnerships at Cambridge. They have a diverse range of expertise and research areas, with students from the British Antarctic Survey and the University of Cambridge in the following departments: Archaeology, Chemistry, DAMTP, Earth Sciences, Genetics, Geography, Plant Sciences and Zoology.
Experiments are crucial to furthering scientific understanding, but it isn’t always glamorous.
By Lois Salem, 3rd year PhD
I look at the chemistry of crystals and their melt inclusions to understand how the mantle melts, how different processes affect the melt such as crystallisation, exsolution, diffusion and mixing, and model their chemical signature to inform our understanding of how and why volcanoes erupt. In particular my PhD focusses on basaltic volcanoes with Oceanic Island Basalt chemical signatures … Continue reading
It’s 0300, at BESSY II – the synchrotron in Berlin. We’re having a philosophical debate about what makes ‘science’ science. Our PI is currently checking wikipedia for ‘Scientific Method’ (I’m pretty sure he should know this by now…). This is pretty characteristic for a beam time, where you work all night, having very little to do other than click the odd button, and occasionally make … Continue reading
It’s 0300, at BESSY II – the synchrotron in Berlin. We’re having a philosophical debate about what makes ‘science’ science. Our PI is currently checking wikipedia for ‘Scientific Method’ (I’m pretty sure he should know this by now…). This is pretty characteristic for a beam time, where you work all night, having very little to do other than click the odd button, and occasionally make … Continue reading
I’m Lil, a 1st year PhD student based at the downtown department in Cambridge and at Diamond Light Source. Thats not a picture of me doing any science, thats a picture of me having fun, which PhD students do sometimes.
I’m looking at climatic paleoproxies and how they can be refined, in order to be better understand out planet’s past climate, and hopefully know a … Continue reading