Department of Earth Sciences

Scientists at the Universities of Bristol and Southampton have developed important new insight into climate sensitivity – the sensitivity of global temperature to changes in the Earth's radiation balance – over the last half million years.
Climate sensitivity is a key parameter for understanding past natural climate changes as well as potential future climate change.

Ant nests are some of the most remarkable structures in nature. Their relative size is rivalled only by our own skyscrapers but there is no architect or blueprint. Instead they are built collectively, through self-organization and the local interactions of ants with one another and their environment. So, how do ants decide what and where to build?
To answer these questions, geologist Dr Nicholas Minter, archaeologist Dr Kate Robson Brown, and biologist Professor Nigel Franks used high-resolution CT scanning to obtain repeated three-dimensional images of ant nests throughout their excavation.

Mineral inclusions discovered in diamonds prove that surface rocks can be subducted into the deep part of the Earth's mantle. The isotopic composition of the diamonds confirms that recycling of crustal materials, including carbon, extends into the lower mantle.

Professor Jon Blundy is one of two Bristol academics to have won coveted Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Awards in the latest funding round.
Jon won the award for a project on 'Magmatic differentiation in the Earth's crust'. The project will use a combination of fieldwork, geochemistry, geophysics, petrology and numerical modelling to understand the processes and timescales over which Earth's continental crust has formed.

Ultra high precision analyses of some of the oldest rock samples on Earth by researchers at the University of Bristol provides clear evidence that the planet's accessible reserves of precious metals are the result of a bombardment of meteorites more than 200 million years after the Earth was formed. The research is published in Nature.
During the formation of the Earth, molten iron sank to its centre to make the core. This took with it the vast majority of the planet's precious metals – such as gold and platinum. In fact, there are enough precious metals in the core to cover the entire surface of the Earth with a four metre thick layer.

Research into the dating techniques used to identify the origins of the living world has found the way in which fossils are used to calibrate the Earth's evolutionary clock is of critical importance. The findings could help us better understand the gaps in the evolutionary timeline.
The study, led by academics at the University of Bristol and published in Biology Letters, analysed how the 'molecular clock' and fossil record align to determine how the Earth's environment and living world have co-evolved.

Reorganisation of the brain and sense organs could be the key to the evolutionary success of vertebrates, one of the great puzzles in evolutionary biology, according to a paper by an international team of researchers, published today in Nature.
The study claims to have solved this scientific riddle by studying the brain of a 400 million year old fossilized jawless fish – an evolutionary intermediate between the living jawless and jawed vertebrates (animals with backbones, such as humans).