The CEED blog - Page 5

A study published this month suggests that a mantle plume below Reunion triggered the initiation of subduction in the South Neotethys during the Late Cretaceous times. The results are published in Earth and Planetary Science Letters, and involved former CEED postdoc Maëlis Arnould. The event led to a series of plate reorganization events and ultimately to the closure of the South Neotethys Ocean, which used to separate Asia and India.

This week in Scientific Reports a ground-breaking study quantifies the amount of methane emissions from one of largest natural gas systems on Earth. The results deepen the scientific debate on the global emission of geological methane sources, and suggests that recent pre-industrial estimates are significantly underestimated. The study is part of an international collaborative study led by CEED Researcher Adriano Mazzini in the framework of the ERC grant LUSI LAB.

The European Space Agency (ESA) have formally adopted Ariel, the first mission dedicated to study the nature, formation and evolution of exoplanets. CEED's Professor Stephanie Werner is a co-PI of the Ariel Consortium, which includes more than 50 institutes from 17 ESA countries, and NASA. The mission holds big opportunities for the future of comparative planetology science, and the Norway space and technical industry too. See the ESA Press release here.

A European research effort with a contribution from the Natural History Museum and CEED (Fritz et al., 2020) has found and characterised a new mineral in the lunar meteorite - Oued Awlitis 001. The mineral, named donwilhelmsite, is also present in minor quantities in the Earth's mantle, in the 460-700 km depth range.

Colours are often essential to convey scientific data - from weather maps to the surface of Mars. But did you ever consider that a combination of colours could be “unscientific“? Well, that’s the case with colour scales that use rainbow-like and red–green colours because they effectively distort data. And if that was not bad enough, they are unreadable to those with any form of colour blindness. Researchers from the Uni. of Oslo and Durham Uni. explain what is a “scientific colour map,” and present free-to-download and easy-to-use solutions in an open-access paper released today in Nature Communications.