School of the Environment, Geography and Geosciences - UoP

26/07/2024

Congratulations to all our 2024 Graduates who graduated earlier this week 🎓🥳

The Meet our 2024 Graduates series on the UoP blog has highlighted the story of BSc (Hons) Palaeontology graduate Josie Pallister about her story of resilience, determination and passion and her experience at university

In July, over 8,000 graduating students will join our worldwide Portsmouth alumni community. The Meet our 2024 Graduates series gives you the opportunity to get to know a handful of these impressive alumni and hear their stories of hard work, resilience and academic excellence. On Monday 22 July, Jo...

03/07/2024

The GB Historical GIS project has been awarded an ESRC Future Data Services grant to collaborate with Portsmouth's Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation UUoP Cosmologyon applying machine learning to simplify access to the social, economic & political statistics held by GBHGIS

We have just started a new ESRC-funded project called Data Discovery Made Easy: Applying machine learning to a diverse social science database (DDME for short). This is part of the Future Data Serv…

02/07/2024

Tessa Collins, a student currently studying Geology at SEGG, will be delivering a talk for the Horsham Geological Field CLub on Wednesday, July 10 at the Forest School in Horsham

The next lecture for the Horsham Geological Field Club will be given by Tessa Collins. "Life as a Geology Student"

25/06/2024

Mo Hoque, senior lecturer in hydrogeology and environmental geoscience at SEGG, comments on the dangers of censorship and bias in a new Chinese chatbot being developed for use by geoscientists

GeoGPT developed in Chinese-funded earth sciences programme aimed at researchers in global south

24/06/2024

Professor Jim Smith of SEGG is quoted in this article commenting on surveys showing the farmland near the Chernobyl nuclear reactor is now safe to produce food 38 years after the disaster of 1986

One expert believes more than 80 percent of [surveyed] territory near the Chernobyl nuclear plant can be returned to agricultural production.

21/06/2024

Humphrey Southall, Professor of Historical Geography in SEGG, has co-authored an article for The Conversation which identifies 10 seats where Reform poses a threat to the Tories

Boundary changes are making this election difficult to map, so we turned to the census.

21/06/2024

New research by Mark Witton Palaeoart and Richard Hing of SEGG rejects the idea that ancient discoveries of dinosaur fossils inspired legends of the griffin

A popular and widely-promoted claim that dinosaur fossils inspired the legend of the griffin, the mythological creature with a raptorial bird head and wings on a lion body, has been challenged in a new study. The specific link between dinosaur fossils and griffin mythology was proposed over 30 years...

13/06/2024

An article on recent work by Harold Lovell and Mark Hardiman investigating wildfires in Greenland and how speaking with local people helps identify fires undetected by satellites while also revealing how their increasing frequency affects everyday life

If a wildfire burns in Greenland and a satellite does not see it, chances are there is no record of it anywhere. Speaking with people who use the land has helped scientists identify previously unknown fires, while also revealing the impact of their increasing frequency.

13/06/2024

Congratulations to SEGG Emeritus Professor Rob Strachan, who has been awarded The 2024 Dewey Medal by The Geological Society for his significant contributions through sustained field mapping and observation to structural geology, tectonics and geochronology🍻

04/06/2024

Fossils of a gigantic flying pterosaur with a maximum wingspan of 3.75 metres from the Jurassic period of Oxfordshire have been scanned and described by a team including researchers from SEGG

A team of palaeontologists has discovered a fossil of a gigantic flying reptile from the Jurassic period with an estimated wingspan of more than three metres - making it one of the largest pterosaurs ever found from that era.

16/05/2024

Professor Gary Fones is quoted in this article about the National Farmers’ Union calling for post-Brexit rules on pesticides in drinking water to be weakened

Weaken post-Brexit rules on pesticides in drinking water, farming lobby told minister The National Farmers’ Union called for changes to EU-era standards on river pollution and drinking water, FOI documents show 10.05.2024 Zach Boren Share this story Farm machinery spraying an arable field...

07/05/2024

The final SEGG seminar for this academic year is TODAY, Tuesday 7th May, 3-4 pm in BB3.30, by Dr. Carmen Falagan (UoP Biology) - Mining with microbes: how microbes aid in metal extraction

ABSTRACT: The use of microbes to extract metals from minerals, also known as biomining, is currently used worldwide for the production of precious and base metals from refractory ores (gold) and low-grade ores (e.g. nickel, copper). The high demand for metals creates a problem in that it generates a vast amount of waste. Typically, 95 % of the mined mineral is discarded as mining waste which contains unrecovered metals and mineral sulfides. This presentation will focus on the results obtained during the NEMO project (https://h2020-nemo.eu/) where laboratory-scale columns were carried out to understand and improve metal extraction yields through biomining from low-grade pyrrhotite-pyrite mine waste produced after leaching in a high-temperature heap.

We studied the mineralogical composition of the sulfidic waste before and after leaching using QEMSCAN and SEM-EDX and determined metal distribution within the different minerals. We determined that mineralogy was the major driver of the leaching of some of the base metals (e.g. Ni) and biomining was necessary for the extraction of Co. The biomining process also successfully removed nearly all the remaining sulfides present in the mine waste.