Department of Earth Sciences

Apparently conflicting results published by researchers from Bristol's QUEST programme reveal the difficulties of accurately estimating sources and "sinks" of CO₂, although all of the authors agree that the only way to control climate change is through a drastic reduction in global CO₂ emissions - 18.11.09

Evidence published today in Nature Geoscience, by Drs Pru Foster, Pierre Friedlingstein, Jo House and Prof Colin Prentice from the University’s QUEST programme, suggests that the rise in atmospheric CO₂ emissions continues to outstrip the ability of the world’s natural ‘sinks’ to absorb carbon. - 18.11.09

Recently-published research by Dr Wolfgang Knorr, a member of QUEST's core team at University of Bristol, shows that the balance between the airborne and the absorbed fraction of carbon dioxide has stayed the same since 1850, despite a huge rise in emissions over the same period. This suggests that oceans and ecosystems have a greater capacity to absorb CO₂ than had been previously expected - 09.11.09

After 210 million years of being entombed in rock, the Bristol Dinosaur (aka Thecodontosaurus) is about to be released. Thanks to a Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) grant awarded to the University of Bristol, Prof Mike Benton and his team will expand their labs., employing a specialist preparator to free the bones and an education officer to visit local schools.

In a letter published today in Nature, and highlightend on NERC's PlanetEarth online website, Prof Jon Blundy and colleague Dr Olivier Reubi of ETH Zurich show that andesitic magmas which are erupted in arc volcanoes around the world do not come from pure molten rock. Chemical study of tiny droplets of silicate liquid, trapped in crystals in andesite rocks has revealed that, instead, that they come from a mixture of silica melts and old crystal residues - 29.10.09

Research by James Lamsdell and Dr Simon Braddy, published today in Biology Letters, sheds new light on why eurypterids (giant sea scorpions) became so large and eventually died out. Their work shows that competition with armoured vertebrates and environmental pressures affected the two main eurypterid lineages differently, but that both responded by increase in size of the animals. - 14.10.09.

Over 1,000 paleontologists from all over the world are arriving in Bristol this week for an international conference at the University of Bristol. For the first time since its foundation in 1940, the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology (SVP) is holding its annual meeting outside the Americas. - 22.09.09

New finds of a fossil water scorpion that lived in rivers around Bristol some 370 Million years ago have shown Bristol palaeontologists what the animal looked like and how it was related to other eurypterids. Work by Dr Simon Braddy and James Lamsdell from Bristol,and colleague Dr Erik Tetlie from Norway, is published in the journal Palaeontology - 17.09.09

Having studied fossil tracks of reptiles from below and above the end Permian mass extinction boundary, Prof Mike Benton and Palaeobiology student Tai Kubo found that , medium and large-sized reptiles of the had changed from walking with a sprawling gait, to walking with their legs tucked uder their bodies. The results and a discussion of their implications was published today in the journal Palaeontology -15.09.09

Dr Gavin Foster is part of a team that has shown that the formation of the Antarctic ice-cap, some 33.5 million years ago, was directly linked to declining levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The study, involving researchers from Bristol, Cardiff and Texas A&M universities, and using microfossils from East Africa is published in Nature online. - 13.09.09

During his MSc project, Palaeobiology student Ben Kotrc analysed the relative importance of abiotic versus biotic effect on the evolution of marine plankton. The results of the work, supervised by Dr Daniela Schmidt and recently published in PNAS, show that both competition with other organisms and long term climatic changes influence evolutionary change in radiolarians. - 08.09.09

Using data from fossil corals and temperature records from ice cores, Dr Mark Siddall and colleagues from Switzerland and the US have tested projections of future sea level rise. Their model, details of which have just been published in Nature Geoscience, predicts a rise of between 7- 82 cm by the end of this century (depending on the amount of warming that occurs). This is similar to the figures projected by the IPCC report of 2007. - 26.07.09