PhD Life: Millie

This week we are sharing a little about life as a PhD student at NOCS, so here is a run down of a typical day for me! Feel free to ask me questions!

Most days start with a little reading over some coffee, a large part of the first year involves getting to grips with the science, and getting to know the material. I try to read for a good hour or so before I head into work, then make some notes and follow up on the references.

At the moment, a lot of time is spent down in the core store: BOSCORF . This is a huge repository of sediment cores from around the world, and the primary resource for my PhD, it holds not only the cores, in a very large refrigeration unit, but also many of the analytical tools that can be used to generate data sets. Here is a picture of the start of a typical day: finding the right core!

The first stage with any new core is to log it, this involves recording the depth of each layer or interesting feature, and recording the colour the grain size, the nature of the boundary between different horizons, and in particular, if there are any shell fragments which could later be used for radiocarbon analysis to give a date that the layer was deposited. Cores can vary widely, but some are particularly beautiful, such as this one, where each black layer is recording an outwash of volcanic debris:

And sometimes, they look quite different, this is a good example of a turbidite, the coarse layer at the bottom is one of the key horizons to describe. A turbidite is essentially the deposit formed from a submarine landslide, and these are a very important hazard that we need to understand. Here is a nice overview from the BGS. 

Once the core has been logged, any turbidite layers present are often sampled so that we can later deduce their origin. This involves a lot of lab work in one of the clean labs here, and unfortunately, there are no pictures available at the moment, but sampling the mud takes quite a bit of time. 1-2cm of mud is extracted, placed in small sample pots:

And then dried in the oven on a low heat for about two days. One of the aims of my PhD is to compare the turbidites found in my cores, so that of the Storegga Landslide, which happened around 8200 years ago. In order to do so, I was sent a sample of the muds, which made for some very exciting post last week!

Once the days sampling and logging is done, it is then back to the office, normally for more coffee, and typing up any notes. I also demonstrate on an undergraduate module which means that one afternoon a week is given over to lab time, where Josh and I assist with the sedimentology practicals. We also have regular meetings with our supervisors to discuss the latest results, and to talk about the way forward with our own research. The facilities here are outstanding, and all around the building there are small display cases for interesting minerals and collections, in the big teaching lab, there are some incredible examples of sedimentary structures, and large corals, such as this one:

 There are daily seminars and guest lectures here at NOCS, so every day is broken up by meetings or talks. Every friday there is a special, hour long seminar, normally from a guest speaker, followed by social hour to discuss the talk, or to relax and talk over the weeks activities. We are very lucky here to be situated right on the Dock, so there is always something to look at, as many of the research boats dock here for loading/unloading. Recently, the new RRS Discovery was here, there is a great article, and some photos of this brand new research vessel here.

My PhD should run until 2017, at the moment I am in the early stages, still learning the literature and developing plans for the lab work I would like to do. I am taking part in my first scientific cruise this summer, when Josh and myself will be heading to the Arctic for four weeks to take a new suite of sediment cores. We will be using these cores to identify and hopefully date past submarine landslides around the Arctic, as part of the Arctic Landslide Tsunami Project, you can read more about that here. Our cruise takes us quite far north, through the Norwegian and Greenland basins, it will be my first time on a boat, so I am looking forward to it!