̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - Helen Williams

Scottish rocks to play a key role in Mars space mission

sc604 — Fri, 28 Jul 2023 15:48:18 +0000

A group of scientists, including from the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, have this week been collecting samples of rock from the NatureScot National Nature Reserve (NNR) as part of the NASA and European Space Agency (ESA)’s Mars Sample Return Program.

̽��ֱ��programme is gathering samples of rocks from around the world that bear a similarity to those on Mars, ahead of rock samples from the Red Planet being brought back to Earth in 2033.

Rum has been selected as the only UK site for sampling, and is a high priority in the programme, as some of its igneous rocks have a very similar mineral and chemical content to those that have been collected by NASA’s Perseverance Rover during its exploration of an ancient lakebed on Mars.

Intensive study of the rocks from Rum and around the globe will crucially help scientists understand what methods of testing and analysis will work best in readiness for when the Martian rocks return to Earth.

As the first samples from another world, the Mars rocks are thought to present the best opportunity to reveal clues about the early evolution of the planet, including the potential for past life.

̽��ֱ��Rum sampling is being led by Dr Lydia Hallis, a geologist and planetary scientist from the ̽��ֱ�� of Glasgow, and member of the programme’s Science Group. ̽��ֱ��team also includes scientists from the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, the ̽��ֱ�� of Leicester and Brock ̽��ֱ�� in Canada.

“These Rum rocks are an excellent comparison to one particular Martian rock sample, which the NASA Perseverance Rover collected from the igneous Séítah Formation within Jezero crater,” said Hallis. “Not only is the mineralogy and chemistry similar, but the two rocks appear to have a similar amount of weathering.

“This seems strange when we think how wet and warm Rum is compared to present-day Mars, but billions of years ago when the Séítah formation crystallised on Mars the difference in environment would not have been so pronounced. At this time Mars was much wetter and warmer, with a thicker atmosphere that may even have produced rain (though not as much as we get in Scotland!). Over time the Martian atmosphere thinned, leaving the surface much dryer and colder, essentially halting any further weathering within Séítah and preserving the rocks at Jezero Crater for us to investigate today.

“ ̽��ֱ��rocks on Rum are much younger, but their exposure to the Scottish elements has produced roughly the same amount of weathering as was produced in the Séítah Formation during Mars’ early wet and warm climate. Because of all these similarities, analysis of the Rum rocks should give us a good head start and help the samples from the Red Planet achieve their full potential when they are returned to Earth.”

“It’s amazing to think that somewhere right here in the UK might be able to tell us something about the geology of a different planet,” said team member Professor Helen Williams from Cambridge’s Department of Earth Sciences. “We’ve still got several years left to wait before we can study the real Mars rocks, but in the meantime, our Scottish samples will provide scientists with the perfect material to test and refine the analytical techniques they will be using to investigate material returned from the Red Planet.”

Lesley Watt, NatureScot’s Rum NNR reserve manager, said: “With its extinct volcanoes and dramatic mountains, Rum has always been one of the best places to discover Scotland's world-class geology, but we didn’t quite realise that the rocks here were of interplanetary significance as well.

“It has been fascinating to learn more about the NASA/ESA mission, and really exciting for the island to play a small part in this truly historic endeavour to find out more about Mars. We hope it will add yet another element of interest for visitors to this special place.”

Adapted from a NatureScot press release.

Ancient rocks from the Isle of Rum in northwest Scotland are playing an important role in an international space mission to discover more about Mars.

It’s amazing to think that somewhere right here in the UK might be able to tell us something about the geology of a different planet

Helen Williams

NASA/JPL-Caltech

Illustration of NASA's Perseverance rover operating on the surface of Mars.

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – as here, on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

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Twelve Cambridge researchers awarded European Research Council funding

sc604 — Thu, 22 Apr 2021 10:00:00 +0000

Two hundred and nine senior scientists from across Europe were awarded grants in today’s announcement, representing a total of €507 million in research funding. ̽��ֱ��UK has 51 grantees in this year’s funding round, the most of any ERC participating country.

ERC grants are awarded through open competition to projects headed by starting and established researchers, irrespective of their origins, who are working or moving to work in Europe. ̽��ֱ��sole criterion for selection is scientific excellence. ERC Advanced Grants are designed to support excellent scientists in any field with a recognised track record of research achievements in the last ten years. Apart from strengthening Europe’s knowledge base, the new research projects will also lead to the creation of some 1,900 new jobs for post-doctoral fellows, PhD students and other research staff.

Professor Melinda Duer from the Yusuf Hamied Department of Chemistry has been awarded a grant for her EXTREME project to explore the chemistry that happens when a biological tissue stretches or breaks.

So-called mechanochemistry leads to molecules being generated within the tissue that may be involved in communicating tissue damage to cells. Detecting and understanding this chemistry is highly relevant for understanding ageing, and for developing new therapeutics for degenerative diseases and cancer.

“This award means I can do the research I’ve been dreaming about for the last ten years,” said Duer. “I am extremely grateful to the European Research Council for giving me this amazing opportunity. ̽��ֱ��ERC is one of the few organisations that understands the need for longer-term funding for high-risk, high-reward research, which is essential for this project. I really couldn’t be more delighted and I can’t wait to get started!”

Professor Manish Chhowalla, from the Department of Materials Science and Metallurgy, received funding for his 2D-LOTTO project, for the development of energy-efficient electronics.

“This grant will enable our research group to realise the next generation of energy-efficient electronics based on two-dimensional semiconductors,” he said. “ ̽��ֱ��funding will also support a team of students, early career researchers and senior academics to address the challenges of demonstrating practical tunnel field effect transistors.”

Professor Henning Sirringhaus from the Cavendish Laboratory received funding for his NANO-DECTET project, for the development of next-generation energy materials. “Worldwide, only about a third of primary energy is converted into useful energy services: the other two thirds are wasted as heat in the various industrial, transportation, residential energy conversion and electricity generation processes,” said Sirringhaus. “Given the urgent need to mitigate the dangerous consequences of climate change, a waste of energy on this scale needs to be addressed immediately.

“Thermoelectric waste-heat-to-electricity conversion could offer a potential solution, but the performance of thermoelectric materials is currently insufficient. In this project we will use the unique physics of molecular organic semiconductors, as well as hybrid organic-inorganic semiconductors, to make efficient, low-temperature thermoelectric materials.”

Professor Marcos Martinon-Torres from the Department of Archaeology received funding for his REVERSEACTION project, which will study how societies in the past cooperated. “Many prehistoric societies did pretty well at maintaining rich and complex lives without the need for permanent power hierarchies and coercive authorities,” he said. “Arguably, they chose to cooperate, and not just to ensure survival. ̽��ֱ��lack of state structures did not stop them from developing and sustaining complex technologies, making extraordinary artefacts that required exotic materials, challenging skills and labour arrangements. I’m keen to understand why, but also how they managed.

“This grant couldn’t have come at a better time, as collective action is increasingly recognised as the only way to tackle some of our greatest global concerns, and there is value in studying how people collaborated in the past. With our labs freshly revamped through our recent AHRC infrastructure grant, we are ready to take on a new large-scale, challenging archaeological science project.”

Professor Marta Mirazon Lahr, also from the Department of Archaeology, was awarded funding for her NGIPALAJEM project, which will bring a new understanding of how the evolution of our species is part of a broader and longer African evolutionary landscape.

“My research is in human evolution, a field that advances through technical breakthroughs, new ideas, and critically, new fossils,” said Lahr. “A big part of my work is to find new hominin fossils in Africa, which requires not only supportive local communities and institutions, but long-term planning and implementation, a dedicated team, significant funds and the time to excavate, study, compare and interpret new discoveries. This new grant from the ERC gives me all this and more – and I just can’t wait to get started!”

Professor Richard Samworth’s RobustStats project will develop robust statistical methodology and theory for large-scale data. “Large-scale data are usually messy: they may be collected under different conditions, and data may be missing or corrupted, which makes it difficult to draw reliable conclusions,” said Samworth, from the Department of Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics. “This grant will allow me to focus my time on developing robust statistical methodology and theory to address these challenges. Equally importantly, I will be able to build a group of PhD students and post-docs that will dramatically increase the scale and scope of what we are able to achieve.

Professor Zoran Hadzibabic from the Cavendish Laboratory was awarded funding for his UNIFLAT project. One of the great successes of the last-century physics was recognising that complex and seemingly disparate systems are fundamentally alike. This allowed the classification of the equilibrium states of matter into classes based on their basic properties. At the heart of this classification is the universal collective behaviour, insensitive to the microscopic details, displayed by systems close to phase transitions.

A grand challenge for modern physics is to achieve such a feat for the far richer world of the nonequilibrium collective phenomena. “Our ambition is to make a leading contribution to this worldwide effort, through a series of coordinated experiments on homogeneous atomic gases in two-dimensional (2D) geometry,” said Hadzibabic. “Specifically, we will study in parallel three problems – the dynamics of the topological Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless phase transition, turbulence in driven systems, and the universal spatiotemporal scaling behaviour in isolated quantum systems far from equilibrium. Each of these topics is fascinating and of fundamental importance in its own right, but beyond that we will experimentally establish an emerging picture that connects them.”

Dr Helen Williams from the Department of Earth Sciences said: “By funding the EarthMelt project, the ERC has given me the amazing opportunity to study the early evolution of the Earth and its transition from a largely molten state to the habitable planet we know today. This funding will also help me to develop exciting new instrumentation and analytical techniques, and, most importantly, mentor and support the next generation of PhD students and postdoctoral researchers working in geochemistry.”

Professor Sir Richard Friend from the Cavendish Laboratory has been awarded funding for his Spin Control in Radical Semiconductors (SCORS) project, which will explore the electronic properties of organic semiconductors that have an unpaired electron to give net magnetic spin. ̽��ֱ��project is based on a recent discovery that this unpaired electron can couple strongly to light, allowing very efficient luminescence in LEDs. Friend’s group will explore new combinations of optical excited states with magnetic spin states. This will allow new designs for LEDs and solar cells, and opportunities to control the ground state spin polarisation in spintronic devices.

Professor Christopher Hunter’s InfoMols project is focused on synthetic information molecules. “ ̽��ֱ��aim of our project is replication and evolution with artificial polymers,” said Hunter, from the Yusuf Hamied Department of Chemistry. “ ̽��ֱ��timeframe for achieving such a breakthrough is unpredictable, and it is the flexibility provided by an ERC award that makes tackling such challenging targets possible.”

Professor Mark Gross from the Department of Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics received funding for his Mirror symmetry in Algebraic Geometry (MSAG) project, and Professor Geoffrey Khan from the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies was awarded funding for ALHOME: Echoes of Vanishing Voices in the Mountains: A Linguistic History of Minorities in the Near East.

Twelve ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge researchers have won advanced grants from the European Research Council (ERC), Europe’s premier research funding body. Their work is set to provide new insights into many subjects, such as how to deal with vast scales of data in a statistically robust way, the development of energy-efficient materials for a zero-carbon world, and the development of new treatments for degenerative disease and cancer. Cambridge has the most grant winners of any UK institution, and the second-most winners overall.

̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge

Top, left to right: Helen Williams, Richard Friend, Richard Samworth, Melinda Duer. Bottom, left to right: Chris Hunter, Marta Mirazon Lahr, Marcos Martinon-Torres, Manish Chhowalla

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – as here, on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

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Traces of Earth’s early magma ocean identified in Greenland rocks

cmm201 — Fri, 12 Mar 2021 19:00:00 +0000

̽��ֱ��study, published in the journal Science Advances, yields information on an important period in our planet’s formation, when a deep sea of incandescent magma stretched across Earth’s surface and extended hundreds of kilometres into its interior.

It is the gradual cooling and crystallisation of this ‘magma ocean’ that set the chemistry of Earth’s interior – a defining stage in the assembly of our planet’s structure and the formation of our early atmosphere.

Scientists know that catastrophic impacts during the formation of the Earth and Moon would have generated enough energy to melt our planet's interior. But we don’t know much about this distant and fiery phase of Earth’s history because tectonic processes have recycled almost all rocks older than 4 billion years.

Now researchers have found the chemical remnants of the magma ocean in 3.6-billion-year-old rocks from southwestern Greenland.

̽��ֱ��findings support the long-held theory that Earth was once almost entirely molten and provide a window into a time when the planet started to solidify and develop the chemistry that now governs its internal structure. ̽��ֱ��research suggests that other rocks on Earth’s surface may also preserve evidence of ancient magma oceans.

“There are few opportunities to get geological constraints on the events in the first billion years of Earth’s history. It’s astonishing that we can even hold these rocks in our hands – let alone get so much detail about the early history of our planet,” said lead author Dr Helen Williams, from Cambridge’s Department of Earth Sciences.

̽��ֱ��study brings forensic chemical analysis together with thermodynamic modelling in search of the primeval origins of the Greenland rocks, and how they got to the surface.

At first glance, the rocks that makeup Greenland’s Isua supracrustal belt look just like any modern basalt you’d find on the seafloor. But this outcrop, which was first described in the 1960s, is the oldest exposure of rocks on Earth. It is known to contain the earliest evidence of microbial life and plate tectonics.

̽��ֱ��new research shows that the Isua rocks also preserve rare evidence which even predates plate tectonics – the residues of some of the crystals left behind as that magma ocean cooled.

“It was a combination of some new chemical analyses we did and the previously published data that flagged to us that the Isua rocks might contain traces of ancient material. ̽��ֱ��hafnium and neodymium isotopes were really tantalizing, because those isotope systems are very hard to modify – so we had to look at their chemistry in more detail,” said co-author Dr Hanika Rizo, from Carleton ̽��ֱ��.

Iron isotopic systematics confirmed to Williams and the team that the Isua rocks were derived from parts of the Earth’s interior that formed as a consequence of magma ocean crystallisation.

Most of this primeval rock has been mixed up by convection in the mantle, but scientists think that some isolated zones deep at the mantle-core boundary – ancient crystal graveyards – may have remained undisturbed for billions of years.

It’s the relics of these crystal graveyards that Williams and her colleagues observed in the Isua rock chemistry. “Those samples with the iron fingerprint also have a tungsten anomaly – a signature of Earth’s formation – which makes us think that their origin can be traced back to these primeval crystals,” said Williams.

But how did these signals from the deep mantle find their way up to the surface? Their isotopic makeup shows they were not just funnelled up from melting at the core-mantle boundary. Their journey was more circuitous, involving several stages of crystallization and remelting – a kind of distillation process. ̽��ֱ��mix of ancient crystals and magma would have first migrated to the upper mantle, where it was churned up to create a ‘marble cake’ of rocks from different depths. Later melting of that hybrid of rocks is what produced the magma which fed this part of Greenland.

̽��ֱ��team’s findings suggest that modern hotspot volcanoes, which are thought to have formed relatively recently, may actually be influenced by ancient processes. “ ̽��ֱ��geochemical signals we report in the Greenland rocks bear similarities to rocks erupted from hotspot volcanoes like Hawaii – something we are interested in is whether they might also be tapping into the depths and accessing regions of the interior usually beyond our reach,” said Dr Oliver Shorttle who is jointly based at Cambridge’s Department of Earth Sciences and Institute of Astronomy.

̽��ֱ��team’s findings came out of a project funded by Deep Volatiles, a NERC-funded 5-year research programme. They now plan to continue their quest to understand the magma ocean by widening their search for clues in ancient rocks and experimentally modelling isotopic fractionation in the lower mantle.

“We’ve been able to unpick what one part of our planet’s interior was doing billions of years ago, but to fill in the picture further we must keep searching for more chemical clues in ancient rocks,” said co-author Dr Simon Matthews from the ̽��ֱ�� of Iceland.

Scientists have often been reluctant to look for chemical evidence of these ancient events. “ ̽��ֱ��evidence is often altered by the course of time. But the fact we found what we did suggests that the chemistry of other ancient rocks may yield further insights into the Earth’s formation and evolution - and that’s immensely exciting,” said Williams.

Reference:
Helen M. Williams et al. ‘Iron isotopes trace primordial magma ocean cumulates melting in Earth’s upper mantle.’ Science Advances (2021). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abc7394

New research led by the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge has found rare evidence – preserved in the chemistry of ancient rocks from Greenland - which tells of a time when Earth was almost entirely molten.

It’s astonishing that we can even hold these rocks in our hands – let alone get so much detail about the early history of our planet

Helen Williams

Hanika Rizo

Isua in Greenland

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Women in STEM: Dr Helen Williams

sc604 — Thu, 03 Oct 2019 06:00:00 +0000

My research has taken me all over the world. I have been lucky enough to work in remote places like Kohistan in northwest Pakistan, Tibet, Iceland and Greenland, collaborating with a wide spectrum of great people and experiencing many interesting cultures and places.

I use rocks as pieces of forensic evidence. They help me to understand how the chemistry of the Earth and other planets has evolved since their formation more than four billion years ago. I work on a range of problems, including trying to understand how the plate tectonic processes can help cycle elements like iron, carbon and sulfur between the Earth’s surface and deep interior. I am also trying to find evidence for the Earth’s earliest internal melting events in 3.7-billion-year-old rocks. My work involves analytical lab work and plasma mass spectrometry as well as sample collection and fieldwork.

I’m an Earth Scientist with a very broad scientific background. I read Natural Sciences in Cambridge as an undergraduate and leaned towards the biological sciences initially. I took earth sciences to broaden my scientific horizons and found I loved it, so switched to this in my second year. After my PhD, I held a series of postdoctoral research positions and fellowships in the UK and abroad. There are so many people in Cambridge who are enthusiastic and passionate about research and understanding the world around them, and I find this uplifting, motivating and intellectually stimulating. I feel this environment brings out the best in me.

I’ve always wanted to have a career where you have a sense of real discovery. I remember when I made my first major scientific discovery during my first postdoc position at ETH-Zurich. When I looked at the emerging data patterns, at first I didn’t believe what I was seeing, then I was so excited I felt almost physically sick. For me, these rare moments are worth the sacrifices (and there are many) that are needed for a career in academia. Another really exciting project involved carrying out experiments that simulated the conditions of the Earth’s lower mantle (about 720km below the Earth’s surface) and using isotope tracers to understand how reactions taking place in this part of the Earth could have governed the chemical evolution of the Earth’s surface, and made our planet habitable.

One of the best pieces of advice I was given was to turn every decision you make into the right one. If I were to offer any words of advice I would like them to be “don’t give up” - but that is rather simplistic. Everyone feels like giving up at some point but, realistically, I think it’s a case of being proactive and making continued forward progress however tough you are finding things. It’s easy to get discouraged by situations or by comparing yourself to others. It’s also easy to find everything overwhelming - but a lot of small steps can take you where you want to be. I also feel it’s always important to ask advice and heed it, but ultimately you have to make your own decisions and stick with them. Occasionally you have to be prepared to take risks and sometimes you have to decide between difficult options.

Dr Helen Williams is a Reader in Cambridge's Department of Earth Sciences and a Fellow of Jesus College. Here, she tells us about using rocks as pieces of forensic evidence, what it's like hundreds of kilometres below the Earth's surface, and why Cambridge brings out the best in her.

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