School of Ocean and Earth Science (SOES)

Using sophisticated methods of dating rocks, a team including University of Southampton researchers based at the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton, have pinned down the timing of the start of an episode of an ancient global warming known as the Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum (PETM), with implications for the triggering mechanism.

Today has been a red-letter day in the cruise calendar, with two major activities starting up. Through the first half of the night the ship steamed further north towards the Outer Hebrides, in the weather forecast area “Hebrides”, unsurprisingly. Eventually we arrived at our target site close to the islands of Mingulay and Barra.

The UK research vessel RRS Discovery left Liverpool yesterday on the first research cruise specifically to study ocean acidification in European waters. Twenty-four scientists from eight different UK institutes, led by the National Oceanography Centre Southampton, will carry out the science.

The present rate of greenhouse carbon dioxide emissions through fossil fuel burning is higher than that associated with an ancient episode of severe global warming, according to new research. The findings are published online this week by the journal Nature Geoscience.

By studying the tolerance of marine invertebrates to a wide range of temperature and pressure, scientists are beginning to understand how shallow-water species could have colonised the ocean depths.

RV Callista, the University of Southampton’s inshore research vessel based at National Oceanography Centre, set sail for the Jurassic Coast in deepest Dorset last weekend (29 April to 1 May) as a star attraction in the Lyme Regis Fossil Festival 2011.

Recent research into the late stages of continental breakup, has shown that a final episode of plate stretching may be responsible for the eruption of large volumes of magma often seen at magmatic rifted margins.

A team of scientists in the United Kingdom and the United States has warned that the  native fauna and unique ecology of the Southern Ocean, the vast body of water that surrounds the Antarctic continent, is under threat from human activity. Their study is published this week in the peer-reviewed journal Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences.

This spring, researchers including Professor Damon Teagle of the University of Southampton's School of Ocean and Earth Science, based at the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton, will mark the 50-year anniversary of an ambitious project to drill to the mantle, by taking another significant step towards the same dream.

Professor Eric Achterberg, University of Southampton – Discovery 361

We have returned home this week from our UK GEOTRACES cruise in the tropical Atlantic Ocean. The cruise (February 7-March 19, 2011) was part of our project funded by the UK Natural Environment Research Council.