A leading scientist from our Department of Earth Sciences has collaborated with researchers in China to reveal that a group of prehistoric sea creatures is not as ancient as we thought - their earliest fossils are actually seaweeds.

The 2023 Jean Baptiste Lamarck Medal is awarded to David A. T. Harper in recognition of his outstanding work on the evolution and biostratigraphy of Lower Paleozoic invertebrate faunas, as well as his important contributions to quantitative palaeontology education.

Ancient fossils have shed new light on a type of sea worm linking it to the time of an evolutionary explosion that gave rise to modern animal life.

Available studentships for the 2023/24 cohort will be added here throughout September, October and November 2022. Applications will open early November 2022.

The Department of Earth Sciences has recently been awarded an Athena SWAN Silver award.

The Facility has, funded by the NERC's URGENCY scheme, just deployed a set of six ocean-bottom seismographs around the islands of the Azores

We’ve discovered the world’s longest underwater avalanche – after recovering lost data swept away by the dramatic event.

The Royal Society of Edinburgh (RSE), Scotland’s National Academy has announced its 2022 intake of Fellows. We are pleased to share the news that Professor Bob Holdsworth from the Department of Earth Sciences has been named as one of the intake alongside a range of academic and artistic minds.

With co-awardee Asma Bachich from Morocco, PhD student Mohammad Daud Hamidi has been awarded a prestigious UNESCO Silk Roads Youth Research Grant to study the “The Shared Heritage of Water Management and Allocation along the Silk Roads”. The project is just one of twelve selected out of a total of 800 proposals from around the world, from postgraduate researchers aged 35 and younger.

The department of Earth Sciences is the lead on the large, interdisciplinary research project entitled “The Geothermal Energy from Mines and Solar-Geothermal heat (GEMS)”, which will explore the geological, engineering, social, and economical aspects of extracting geothermal heat from water in abandoned coal mines.

The Department is now offering and participates in 2 taught postgraduate degree programmes:

New Nature Geoscience paper by our team in the Rock Mechanics Laboratory, including Giacomo Pozzi, Nicola De Paola, Stefan Nielsen, Bob Holdsworth and Telemaco Tesei, shows that viscous deformation is a potentially prevalent mechanism of fault lubrication during earthquakes.