Profile

During secondary school I did not actually really enjoy Geography! It wasn’t until I started doing my GCSE’s that I found I did like understanding how the world worked around me. I decided then to take both Geography and Geology at A level and from there I started learning not only about climate change today but climate change in the past and I was fascinated by how the landscapes of Earth have changed over millions of years. I decided to continue with only Physical Geography at Undergraduate level and took modules where I could learn more about past ice ages and their warm periods (called interglacials). My undergraduate dissertation, a really big piece of work you do at the end of your last year looked at the world’s first forests when Dragonflies were the size of dogs! My masters looked at if we could still find colour preserved in the fossil record from the age of the Dinosaurs and now I reconstruct how sea-level has changed using tiny fossils preserved in sediment.

Crossing a melt water river in NZ, you need six people to hold on to wade across because the force of the river is that great! (and very cold!)

Mt Cook in NZ

Spot the iceberg!

Me and my greatest love, ROCKS!

Me taking a sediment core in Scotland, it was very cold!

An upside down photo (sorry!) of me in the lab looking at my microfossils

My current work looks at how sea-level has changed over the last 500 years before humans had much impact on the climate and how glacier ice melt in the Arctic may have caused the rise in sea-level. I will do this by going to Australia and taking sediment cores which are big long cylinders of soil basically!! Inside these are tiny tiny little fossils that look like shells. Each different shape is a different type of species and each species likes to live in different habitats. Some prefer dry habitats some prefer wet habitats. Therefore by looking at the past fossils in the core I can reconstruct whether the habitat was wet or dry and therefore if the sea was over the site or not!

I normally start off the day by replying to the emails and enquiries that people have sent me after I have been away from my desk. I will then decide what I want to do for the day. Sometimes I will read papers and work on my thesis (the big piece of work I have to hand in at the end!) sometimes I will go into the laboratory and work on picking all the tiny fossils out of my sediment core. I normally get around 400 tiny fossils per 1 cm of sediment so it takes a long time! Sometimes I will listen to talks given by other people in the department, my building has a lot of people working on everything from fish to crops to politics so its always interesting to hear what everyone is doing. I also sometimes take students on field trips where we go out and look at our surroundings and interpret what we can see going on today, this can usually help us work out how landscapes evolved in the past too.