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.

New Nature paper by a team including Fred Worrall, shows the dominant importance of controlling the water table in developing CO2 sinks on peatlands. 

Jeroen van Hunen has been elected as President for the Geodynamics division of the European Geoscience Union Geodynamics.

Jenny Jenkins one of new Assistant Professors sent several days in Iceland working with her husband collecting seismic data about the recent Fagradalsfjall volcano eruption.

Professor Jon Gluyas (Director of Durham Energy Institute) is leading a new initiative bringing Industry and Academia together to advance the role of geothermal energy in the energy transition: the newly formed Geothermal Energy Advancement Association (GEAA).

We are excited to announce the launch of our new 3 year Climate Science degree course!

Two scholarships available for UK students to undertake MSc by research projects in Durham Earth Sciences.