Features

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.

Oxford social geographer Dr Jane Dyson took filmmaker Ross Harrison to a village 2500m high in the Indian Himalayans to chart some of the significant social changes taking place. The result is a 15-minute film titled Lifelines [scroll to bottom to watch] about the hopes and frustrations of the villagers in the state of Uttarakhand.

It is a place of great beauty, known as Land of the Gods because it lies in the shadow of the towering Himalayan peaks where some of the great Hindu deities originate. However, it is also one of India's poorest states, with low levels of urbanisation and a mainly agricultural economy. The village sits high on a ridge in Chamoli District, not far from the border with Tibet. Life under the towering peaks of Nanda Devi (7816m) and Trishul (7120m) is one of hard agricultural labour. Villagers move seasonally between three settlements at different altitudes, ranging from 2200m to 2800m.

Since Jane's first visit in 2003, life has changed. Then, it took half a day to trek to, and there was no power or telecommunications. Only the first five years of primary education were provided for in the village. By 2012, the village had a telecommunications tower, irregular electricity and a road (of sorts), while many people used mobile phones. It is now relatively straightforward for young people to obtain education up to high school level.

The film focuses on Makar Singh, a father with three young children who is completing a master’s degree by correspondence. He, like many of the youth, finds ways to channel his frustration with the lack of opportunity.

In the film, he explains: 'We have very few earning sources here. There are no companies, no factories. If the government creates a post, it will be for three or four people, but more than 1,000 of us apply. Everywhere there is competition. The competition is so high. Even if you're qualified you won't get selected. You could open a small shop but nothing more because there isn't the market. There aren't enough jobs for everyone, so there’s lots of unemployment.'

But it is also a film about hope. Following community protests, the government built a road and provided electricity and a school for the village, so levels of literacy have risen to almost 100% for people aged below 40. Ten years ago, the literacy level was nearer 20%. Makar Singh hopes these changes will provide a brighter future for the next generation.

Jane has worked in the village for over a decade. Her doctoral research in the village focused on children’s work and is published by Cambridge University Press in her book Working Childhoods: Youth, Agency and the Environment in India.

The work was conducted from the School of Geography and the Environment with funding from the UK Economic and Social Research Council.