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Yesterday a giant blast levelled the top of a mountain, part of the 3000-metre peak of Cerro Armazones in Chile.

But this bang is nothing compared to the Big Bang that the telescope the mountain was blasted for will be studying. The European-Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT) will be the world's largest optical and infrared telescope and will help astronomers to observe the early Universe, just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang, in unprecedented detail.

The E-ELT is being built by the European Southern Observatory (ESO), an international collaboration supported by the UK’s Science and Technology Facilities Council. Oxford University scientists are playing a key role in the project: I asked Aprajita Verma, Deputy Project Scientist for the UK E-ELT project at Oxford University's Department of Physics, about what makes the telescope so special and what discoveries it could make…

OxSciBlog: What questions about the Universe will E-ELT investigate?
Aprajita Verma: There are so many! The E-ELT is designed to be a versatile telescope that will answer a huge range of questions in astrophysics and cosmology. Some examples are understanding the first stars and galaxies that formed after the Big Bang, studying extra-solar planets and looking for possible signs of life, and directly measuring the expansion of the Universe. 

In extra-solar planets, finding planetary systems like our Solar System but around other stars in the Milky Way is a key driver for the E-ELT. In the last 20 years we've gone from the first discovery of exoplanets to the prospect of directly imaging and studying the atmospheres of exoplanets that are at Earth-like distances from their stars with the E-ELT.

There's a whole host of contemporary astrophysics problems that we can tackle with the power of the E-ELT but perhaps the most fascinating and exciting prospect are the things we just can't predict yet. When we make such an enormous scale change from the currently largest telescopes in operation (8-10m) to a 39m telescope we can expect the unexpected! 

OSB: What makes E-ELT unique as an instrument?
AV: The E-ELT will be largest telescope of its kind in the world. The fact that it has a large primary mirror means that we can collect more light, so see deeper into the Universe but it also gives us the ability to observe objects in the Universe in exquisite detail. 

The telescope incorporates a system that's called adaptive optics that basically corrects for the blurring caused by atmospheric turbulence. This allows us to get the best possible resolution from the telescope, that's dependent on the size of the mirror, rather than the atmosphere. Space telescopes, like the Hubble Space Telescope [HST], are put up there to get above the atmosphere to avoid this blurring producing some of the most iconic images of the sky we know. But it's simply not feasible to put a mirror of the size of the E-ELT into space, so what the E-ELT can deliver is space quality images but from the ground. 

The E-ELT images will in fact be 16 times sharper than the HST! There are several advantages of having a ground-based telescope, we can take advantage of new technologies as they get developed, we can maintain the telescope, we can guarantee a long lifetime (not true of most space telescopes). The E-ELT's baseline operation is at least 30 years but we can expect it to be around taking images and spectra of astronomical objects for several decades to come.

OSB: How are Oxford scientists involved in the project?
AV: Oxford scientists are heavily involved in two main aspects: Instrumentation and science. For the former this means designing and building what can be thought of as the "eyes" of the telescope. The primary mirror collects the light but then this is passed through four further mirrors to a suite of instruments that span different capabilities. These instruments then record the light in different ways.

For example, for the first phase of the telescope there will be two instruments, a camera that takes very high resolution images of the sky called MICADO, and an instrument called HARMONI that is being led by Professor Niranjan Thatte. HARMONI is as an integral field spectrograph or imaging spectrograph. This means that you get an image, but for each pixel in that image you get a spectrum. This is an extremely powerful and versatile instrument, and it's a credit to Professor Thatte and his team that ESO selected their instrument to be available at early light. 

We're also involved in other instruments foreseen for the E-ELT, a multi object spectrograph that can take simultaneous spectra of objects in the sky over a wide field (ELT-MOS), and the technologically challenging instrument dedicated to studying extra-solar planets (ELT-PCS). 

Several Oxford scientists will be future users of the E-ELT and are therefore very interested in understanding the capabilities of the telescope and how that will aid their research and the UK astronomical community. Professor Isobel Hook and I work with the UK instrument teams and the community to promote and develop the science case for the telescope. Professor Hook has led ESO’s E-ELT Science Working Group that defined the key science cases for the telescope, and the ESO's E-ELT Project Science Team. 

OSB: After the ground-breaking what are the next big milestones?
AV: The next big steps for E-ELT are the dome and main structure contracts that are currently out for tender during the next months. Once the tender process has been completed this means that actual construction of the telescope will start. 

The contract for the primary mirror production is also a major milestone. The primary mirror of the E-ELT is so large that it can only be constructed by making it in smaller parts. In fact the E-ELT primary mirror is made up of 798 segments, each 1.4m across. Around 1000 segments will be made including spares, so this is a major contract. It's a challenging contract to fulfil as the precision on the smoothness of the mirror surface is very high, it's equivalent to ripples of a few centimetres on the surface of the Atlantic Ocean! To preserve the quality of the primary mirror, 1-3 segments will be removed for cleaning and coating each day! 

OSB: What puzzle from your own area of research do you hope E-ELT might solve?
AV: I'm really excited about the prospects for using the E-ELT to push the boundaries of the observable Universe to the first stars and galaxies that formed after the Big Bang. We can only go so far with current ground based facilities and the E-ELT might be able to capture galaxies that were in place in the Universe at only 2-3% of its current age (or about 300 million years after the Big Bang). This will give us tremendous insight on how galaxies first began to form in this very young Universe. We think that about 700 million years later, galaxies like the Milky Way just started their lives and the E-ELT will be able to capture these objects in unprecedented detail and help us understand how our own galaxy might have started its life. 

The Bodleian Libraries' summer 2014 exhibition tells the story of the first two years of World War One, focusing on compelling eyewitness accounts ranging from the Cabinet table at 10 Downing Street to outposts of the Empire in Africa. 

The Great War: Personal Stories from Downing Street to the Trenches draws upon the Bodleian Libraries extensive collections to reveal the different meaning and impact these first two years of the war had on politicians, soldiers and civilians.

Highlights of the exhibition include the diary entries of Cabinet member Lewis Harcourt, who secretly kept a record of Cabinet discussions during the war even though this was forbidden. These are going on public display for the first time. 

The exhibition will also feature personal letters from Prime Minister Herbert Asquith to his confidantes, a letter from future Prime Minister Harold Macmillan to his mother from the trenches, a draft of Edmund Blunden’s poem ‘Thiepval Wood’ written at the Somme, and letters from T.E. Lawrence ('Lawrence of Arabia') describing his intelligence work in Egypt.

The exhibition opened yesterday (18 June), on the same day that the winners of an Oxford University-run language contest for schools were awarded their prizes by Michael Steiner, the great-nephew of author Franz Kafka. The contest asked young people to create a piece of work on the theme of ‘1914’. It was run by the Oxford German Network in the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages.

The exhibition is on display in the Exhibition Room in the Bodleian Library’s Old Schools Quad on Catte Street until 2 November 2014. It is free to enter, and opens from 9am-5pm on weekdays, 9am-4.30pm on Saturdays and 11am-5pm on Sundays.

Image: A war memorial in Thiepval Wood, the site of a battle in World War One which inspired Edmund Blunden's poem 'Thiepval Wood'. A draft of the poem written while Blunden was at the Somme is currently on display in the Bodleian (credit: Bodleian Libraries)

The Ashmolean Museum will be holding a special late opening this weekend, offering a final opportunity to see its most popular exhibition on record. 

Cézanne and the Modern: Masterpieces of European Art from the Pearlman Collection has already attracted over 70,000 visitors, and is the first time this outstanding collection has been exhibited in Europe. This Saturday and Sunday, 21st-22nd June, the museum will be open until 8pm to give more visitors a chance to see the collection before it returns to the USA. 

Professor Christopher Brown, director of the Ashmolean, said: 'I am delighted that Cézanne and the Modern has been such popular and successful exhibition. The Pearlman Collection is one of the finest groups of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art to be found anywhere in the world, and the exhibition at the Ashmolean has provided a rare chance for people to see it here in Britain.'

At the heart of the exhibition are 24 paintings which span Cézanne’s career, showing the development of the artist’s treatment of fruit, trees and Provençal landscape. 16 of the works make up one of the finest groups of Cézanne watercolours in the world. 

Other highlights include Van Gogh's Tarascon Diligence, an unusual composition showing a stagecoach at rest in a sunlit yard, and Modigliani's distinctive portrait of Jean Cocteau. Works by some of the most famous artists of the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist movements are also on display, including pieces by Degas, Gauguin and Toulouse-Lautrec which demonstrate the diversity of their approaches to the human figure. 

The collection was put together by the American businessman Henry Pearlman, who was an avid collector of art until his death in 1974. He said of the first painting in the collection: 'When I came home in the evenings and saw it I would get a lift, similar to the experience of listening to a symphony orchestration… I haven’t spent a boring evening since that first purchase.'

Due to the unprecedented popularity of the exhibition, booking is essential.

This week a volcano is erupting in central London: this three metre high model may not be as scary as the real thing but its mission is to highlight the real risks posed by volcanoes.

Located outside the capital's Natural History Museum, London Volcano is an exhibit dreamt up by researchers at University of East Anglia and Oxford University for Universities Week (9-15 June). So far the smoke and pyrotechnics have given just a taste of the eruption that struck the Caribbean island of St Vincent in 1902, but, on 11 June (6pm-10pm), this mini-volcano will recreate the Big Eruption in a free event open to the public.

I talked to David Pyle of Oxford University's Department of Earth Sciences, one of the scientists behind the exhibit, about the St Vincent eruption, the research the model draws on, and the serious side to blowing things up… 

OxSciBlog: Why recreate the Soufrière St Vincent volcano?
David Pyle: St Vincent's volcano has erupted several times in the past 300 years; and each of these events has left us a record of what happened before, during and after the eruption. By looking at the written history of what happened, and analysing the rocks and other materials thrown out during these eruptions, we can better understand how to prepare for the effects of future eruptions. 

We have chosen to recreate the 1902 eruption of St Vincent over the five days of the exhibit. This eruption was very damaging, but also recorded in great detail - both in terms of the physical impacts (the ash, mudflows and hot pyroclastic currents), and the wider social and economic impacts, and the ways that the island recovered from the eruption. 

We are currently involved in a large international collaboration, called STREVA, whose focus is to reduce the negative impacts of volcanic activity on people and communities who live around volcanoes; and the approach this project is taking is to start off by seeing what lessons we can learn from the events of the past.

OSB: How can studying this volcano tell us about volcanoes in general?
DP: St Vincent's behaviour is fairly typical, both in terms of the nature of the eruptions, their size and spacing in time; and in the way that some eruptions are explosive, and others are not. So this means that it is a good 'physical' model for other volcanic systems, and we will be able to extend our new understanding from St Vincent to other volcanoes.

OSB: What were the biggest challenges in creating the model?
DP: Time! The opportunity to do this arose only a few months ago, but was not to be missed. And space - we weren't quite sure how big the model would need to be to have an impact. As it is, we are very happy with the result, even though it needs quite a large lorry to move it!

OSB: What do you hope people take away from the exhibit?
DP: We are really keen to engage with visitors to think about 'risks', and how to help to reduce the impacts of volcanic activity on communities whose livelihoods are tied to the volcano. The visual spectacle will make an impact, but beyond that we also want to show how we can use a huge variety of information sources to help improve our capacity to live with risks. 

We are also using the event to link back to communities on St Vincent; listening to their stories of what happened in the last eruption on the island - in 1979; and working with the volcano monitoring and emergency management agencies in the Eastern Caribbean to develop and evolve mitigation plans for the future. This volcano exhibit is going to be the starting point for discussions with governments, agencies and businesses to help develop better plans for coping with future volcanic emergencies in the Caribbean and elsewhere.

OSB: What other volcanoes might you like to recreate and why?
DP: It is now more a case of 'we have a model, and will travel..' and my ambition is to reuse the volcano model as the focal point of an exhibit that we can take to schools, science festivals and exhibitions, to continue the conversation. 

Our oceans aren’t just pretty to look at, they are doing a vital job storing away millions of tonnes in carbon emissions and mitigating climate change.

That’s the headline from a new report published by the Global Ocean Commission, co-authored by Alex Rogers of Oxford University’s Department of Zoology and Somerville College. I asked Alex how the report’s authors assessed the many ways we benefit from ocean ecosystems – benefits known collectively as ‘ecosystem services’ – and what more we can do to preserve them…

OxSciBlog: How do the oceans help to store our carbon emissions?
Alex Rogers: The oceans have taken up about 25-30% of all human carbon emissions and about 50% of those from the burning of fossil fuels. There are several routes by which this carbon enters the ocean. The primary one is the ‘solubility’ carbon pump by which CO2 dissolves into the ocean and is transported via ocean circulation into the deep sea. There is also the biological carbon pump whereby phytoplankton, microscopic organisms that use photosynthesis to fix carbon and convert it to tissue, take up CO2. 

These microscopic organisms form the basis of the food chains of most of the ocean. As they die and sink into the deep sea or are eaten and their carbon is transported into deep water through the movement of animals or the sinking of their faecal material the carbon is transported downwards. 

A small proportion of the surface derived carbon is stored in the deep sea. In our report we only looked at the biological carbon pump to look at how much CO2 is potentially sequestered through the actions of living organisms. This only represents a fraction of the CO2 sequestered in the oceans (total amount is estimated to be ~2.5 billion tonnes of carbon).

OSB: What impact could mining and other high seas industry have on their ability to store carbon?
AR: One of the fascinating things we found in our research was the evidence for the intimate connection of the activities of living organisms to nutrient cycling in the oceans. Fish, whales, gelatinous zooplankton all carry out a multitude of functions in ecosystems from feeding on other organisms and controlling their abundance to influencing the concentration of nutrients, such as iron, in surface waters and even stirring the oceans through their vertical and horizontal movements. When parts of the ecosystem are damaged by, for example, overfishing, then some of these functions are degraded with knock on effects to the rest of the ecosystem.

OSB: Why is it so hard to put a value on high-seas ecosystem services?
AR: We identified about 15 types of ecosystem service provided by the high seas but could only put a monetary value on a few of them. These services, which benefit humankind, range from the provision of food (i.e. fish) to the regulation of atmospheric gases (such as CO2). 

Many of them cannot be quantified at present. This is for a variety of reasons but the main one was simply insufficient scientific knowledge of how the ocean works and the complex relationships between its biological and physical (or biochemical) components. Another reason was that even where values could be identified we could not ascertain what share of a particular service was attributable to the high seas. 

An example of this is fishing (or mining!) of precious corals, where a significant component of global catch comes from the high seas but because of poor documentation of catches we do not know how much. In other cases the high seas contribute to ecosystem services that are in fact derived in coastal waters, examples including many fish species which might feed for part of the time in the high seas but which are caught in coastal waters.

OSB: How will these findings feed into your future research?
AR: The study has made us much more aware of the enormous knowledge gaps in terms of how the ocean works. For example, although our examination of carbon sequestration could estimate the rate of sinking of phytoplankton into the deep ocean there was little knowledge of active transport of carbon into the deep sea. This is where large numbers of organisms feed in surface waters, especially at night, and then dive into the deeps by day to avoid predators. These animals transport carbon into the deep sea but we do not even know how many there are, even, in some cases to orders of magnitude. Our research on deep-sea ecosystems will focus more on these questions in the future.

OSB: What could governments do to save high-seas ecosystems?
AR: Clearly there are problems with the management of human activities on the high seas. Overfishing and illegal fishing are two serious issues in a world of increasing human population and a resultant increasing need for fish protein. 

At present governance of the high seas is very fragmented. Management of different industrial sectors is undertaken by different bodies, some of which are ineffective and do little more than divide up the proceeds from extracting ocean resources. These organisations often operate in isolation of international agreements on the protection and sustainable use of the environment. 

Clearly a more joined up approach to ocean governance is required with increased transparency of decision making and assessment of institutional effectiveness. Where these organisations are failing, this must be identified and corrected. Policing the oceans must also be improved and we now have the technology to monitor much more closely what various parties are doing on the oceans. Some of these measures can be incredibly simple and cost effective. For example, insisting that all fishing vessels on the high seas, like other shipping, must carry an internationally registered identification number would help us identify those not following regulations.