Press releases
Press releases and announcements are compiled and issued by the Press Office.
An adventure-filled time awaits those visiting the British Geological Survey for its Open Day at their headquarters in Nottingham this Saturday 8th June. World-leading scientists and support staff from the BGS are inviting the public to explore the past, present and future through a packed programme of tours, talks and hands-on demonstrations.
Kids of all ages will experience a unique glimpse into real Jurassic Parks , tsunami, space weather, energy and many other fields of exciting science. With our family friendly hands-on demos, guests can make their own dinosaur footprints, take part in green-screen photo shoots, pan for gold and even drive a remote controlled underwater vehicle in our 12 ft pool! The day also includes a special guest appearance from TV s Professor Iain Stewart.
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Material from the 500 m-deep borehole will provide scientists on the TW:eed project with details of the entire rock record in which these new fossils have been found.
The core will act as a timeline on which to pin the fossil finds and allow scientists to (literally) unearth the evolutionary relationships among these early tetrapods and find out how they developed into modern forms.
Drilling began on 8 April 2013 and marked a major step in this ground-breaking scientific research project.
Download the full Press Release PDF 83 kB
New work published today, by scientists from the British Geological Survey (BGS), shows how the very rapid retreat of Iceland's glaciers during the last 10 years – unprecedented in over 80 years of measurements - is due to a combination of interlinked processes driven by warmer summers.
BGS scientists have been monitoring a retreating glacier in south-east Iceland for over 15 years, making detailed measurements of its health and the dramatic changes currently occurring.
In the last five years, its health has noticeably deteriorated: the front of the glacier has retreated at a rate of around 40 m per year, or almost 200 m in total since 2007.
The new work not only identifies these recent rapid changes but suggests that this accelerated retreat is due to more than a decade of warmer than average summers.
These warm summers have caused enhanced glacial thinning and ice stagnation resulting in a new, more unusual (and more rapid) style of glacier retreat by ice margin collapse.
Download the full Press Release or the Boreas open-access paper: Recent, very rapid retreat of a temperate glacier in SE Iceland PDF 119 kB
Mike is presently Head of Energy Science at the British Geological Survey and Deputy Director of the Nottingham Centre for Carbon Capture and Storage. He holds a PhD and MSc in Earth Science and has visiting Professorships at the Universities of Nottingham and Leicester. His main expertise is palynology and stratigraphy applied to petroleum geology and past climate change. Following his degree from Imperial College, Mike worked as a school teacher in Botswana for 10 years. He then completed an MSc and PhD at the University of Sheffield. He joined BGS in 1999 and became Head of Energy Science in 2008. He has represented BGS at Government level and regularly speaks on the national stage on energy issues including carbon capture and storage (CCS) and UK and world-wide shale gas resources.
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The Rt Hon David Willetts MP will be at the British Geological Survey’s Nottingham headquarters on 27 February 2013, to officially open the new National Geological Repository (NGR).
The National Geological Repository (NGR) is the UK’s largest collection of information and samples gathered from and beneath the earth’s surface. It houses enough drill core to stretch between London and Edinburgh (over 500 kilometres) and cuttings from over 23 000 wells and boreholes. There are over three million fossil specimens from the UK, which chart the evolution of life from over 600 million years ago. The NGR also includes the library, which holds over 500 000 books and reports.
The NGR was created following the extension of the British Geological Survey’s (BGS) core store in order to house the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) oil and gas cores that were relocated from Gilmerton during 2011–12. This facility now means that the majority of the BGS holdings are in one place, where they can be fully exploited in the specialist examination facilities and technical laboratories.
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The £300 000 project will be led by global engineering and construction company Foster Wheeler, in collaboration with the British Geological Survey.
The five-month-long project will assess the economics of flexible power generation systems which involve the production of hydrogen from coal, biomass or natural gas, its intermediate storage (for example, in underground salt caverns) and production of power in flexible turbines.
The ETI commissioned and funded project will look to map suitable hydrogen storage salt cavern sites in and around the UK. The sites, which tend to be located inland or up to 25 miles off the UK coastline, will need to be of sufficient size, depth, location and quality before they can be considered for hydrogen storage.
Download the full ETI Press Release PDF 249 kB
The Antarctic Peninsula Ice Sheet is one of the most rapidly warming areas of the planet. This is causing concern as it contains enough water to raise global sea levels by 5m. By analysing the chemistry of microscopic marine algae that lived in the ocean surrounding Antarctica, scientists have created a record of the amount of melting of the ice sheet that stretches back 12,000 years. This window through time has already unlocked hidden patterns in our past climate.
PDF 113 kB
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