Blue skies thinking nets Oxford two awards
20 Aug 09
Oxford researchers have won two out of six new Royal Society awards that are intended to lead to ‘blue skies’ scientific discoveries.
Professor Alex Halliday and Professor Gideon Henderson, both in the Department of Earth Sciences, have received Royal Society Theo Murphy Blue Skies Awards. This new award scheme provides funding for novel and groundbreaking research which is original and exciting, but where there may be a lack of a sufficient evidence base for the projects to be supported by traditional grant schemes.
Professor Alex Halliday of the Department of Earth Sciences and head of the Mathematical, Physical and Life Sciences Division will use his award of over £105,000 to develop very sensitive detectors for trace amounts of rare isotopes.
The technique could be used to measure very small amounts of specific isotopes present in our solar system that came from distant explosions of stars. It could also be used to trace environmental contaminants or understand the paths key atoms and molecules follow in our bodies.
Isotopes are atoms of the same element that differ in their weight. For example, there are different isotopes of carbon including carbon-12 and carbon-14. Variations in the amounts of different isotopes can be used to understand how the natural world functions and to reveal the past. For example, it is possible to get insight into the conditions under which an organism grew, date an object using radiocarbon dating or provide information about the Earth’s past climate.
Professor Halliday with Dr Nick Belshaw (left) and Dr Teodor Krastev (right) will use the Theo Murphy Blue Skies Award to tackle the problem that very small amounts of some isotopes are currently hard to detect. If successful, it could open up new possibilities for investigation in many fields.
They will work on developing new detectors for a powerful new type of mass spectrometry that can measure the isotopic composition of small amounts of most elements. Oxford University has world’s largest and most advanced mass spectrometry facility of this kind. The research team will also explore the use of the technique for measuring trace amounts of isotopes formed in space, such as carbon-14.
Professor Gideon Henderson, of the Department of Earth Sciences and the 21st Century Ocean Institute of the James Martin 21st Century School, will make use of his award to understand ocean flows at the sea floor.
Oceans flows behave differently at the ocean surface and sea floor, and these ‘boundary layer’ flows play a crucial role in the circulation and chemistry of seawater. The boundary layer at the surface of the ocean is easy to access, but flows at the bottom of the ocean are much harder to study. The boundary layer here is only ten meters or so thick, but it is kilometers below the surface, making it difficult to investigate with anything lowered from a ship.
Professor Henderson's Theo Murphy Blue Skies award of £44,800 will be used to build, test and deploy equipment to land on the sea floor, where measurements and samples spanning the bottom boundary layer will be collected. The initial goal is to assess the supply of the critical nutrient, iron, from marine sediments into the oceans, work that will be carried out in the South Atlantic during 2010.