News archive 2017

Petroleum Experts, a British engineering company, has donated ten licenses of the Move software suite including Petex’s Network Licensing Manager (HARDLOCK) worth equivalent of £1,525,561.89 to the Department of Earth sciences at Uppsala University. The Move software suite is used to visualise and analyse three-dimensional geological data and applied in both research and teaching activities.

A new study published today in Nature Sustainability exemplifies the breadth of ways in which biodiversity can contribute to achievement of all 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and thereby help to underpin sustainable development.

Research activities in the field of recovery of Rare Earth Elements (REE) from different sources have increased dramatically during the last decade due to high demand on the market, not least for high-efficient magnets and new types of batteries. Extraction and recovery of REE from its most common source, a mineral called apatite, is challenging.

Volcanoes that extrude lava domes – mounds of blocky lava that form as high-viscosity magma slowly extrudes from the top of a volcanic conduit – are among the most hazardous on Earth.

Much of our modern technology relies on the use of rare earth elements (REEs), and a key to finding more of them is to understand the processes that concentrate them in the Earth’s crust. In the ancient Bergslagen ore province of central Sweden lies a zone of ‘Bastnäs-type’ rare earth element deposits, and in a new study, scientists from Uppsala University and the Geological Survey of Sweden (SGU) show how these deposits originally formed.

Prior to the collapse of a section of the volcano Anak Krakatau in December 2018, which triggered a deadly tsunami, it exhibited several signs of activity in the months leading up to the event. A study recently published in Nature Communications, notes that at the time, and when considered individually, none of the anomalies would have been conclusive enough to predict the events to come, but the observations could prove useful in the future.

The source of carbon dioxide (CO₂) emitted from volcanoes has been the topic of a long-standing debate. Now, a team of scientists show that CO₂ is efficiently liberated from limestones by volcanic activity and released into the atmosphere. This limestone-derived CO₂ is likely a significant contributor to the global carbon cycle, but has so far been underestimated in respect to climate effects. The findings have been published in the journal Scientific Reports.

Professor emeritus Sergej Zilitinkevich has been named as the winner of the prestigious International Meteorological Organization (IMO) Prize for his outstanding contribution to meteorology and climatology and scientific research.

The origin of giant apatite-iron oxide ores of the so-called ‘Kiruna-type’ has been the topic of a long standing debate that has lasted for over 100 years. In a new article, published in Nature Communications, a team of scientists presents new and unambiguous data in favour of a magmatic origin for these important iron ores. The study was led by researchers from Uppsala University in Sweden.

Hello to Björn Lund, seismologist, who tests sensors for the monitoring of the deep geological repository for spent nuclear fuel in Forsmark.

Around 56 million years ago, global temperatures spiked. Researchers at Uppsala University and in the UK now show that a major explosive eruption from the Red Hills on the Isle of Skye may have been a contributing factor to the massive climate disturbance. Their findings have been published in the journal Scientific Reports.

A new paper on the Nature’s journal Scientific Data describes the first high-resolution global map of Earth’s floodplains developed by an international team of four water scientists, including Giuliano Di Baldassarre professor of hydrology at the Department of Earth Sciences at Uppsala University, and director of the Centre of Natural Hazards and Disaster Science, CNDS.

Our visiting Professor Chin-Fu Tsang from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, gave out the prize named after him during the CouFrac Conference in Wuhan on 12-14 November 2018