Another Earth Day – another opportunity to reflect on my footprint. No better way to start this day than walk the earth without shoes, feel soil and stones, let the cold dew wet the skin between my toes, sense the odd nettle sting and slug adhere momentarily …
Read More
While working on tall ships as scientist, I am always intrigued by the roles of professional crew on board. Here is what I’ve learned about bosuns …
Read More
Sometimes my job involves flying to distant places and for my recent trip to Panama for the sail training charity Seas Your Future, I sought to find out about the fuel consumption and carbon footprint for different routes. I found interesting results worthy of consideration.
Read More
The future of your (grand)children will be shaped by the fate of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation.
Read More
Three hours of blowing bubbles among the coral reefs around Bocas del Toro gave me plenty of time to take in beautiful impressions of a rich ecosystem and questions about its long-term survival.
Read More
In 1922, the British geologist R. L. Sherlock argued that humankind had a major impact on inanimate nature in his work “Man as a Geological Agent”. 101 years later, the Anthropocene Working Group proposed Crawford Lake in Canada as the official site for marking the beginning of a the Anthropocene, a new epoch on the geological time scale.
Read More
I’m on the Dutch tall ship Regina Maris in northwest Panama to work with students and staff of Students without Borders Academy on behalf of Seas Your Future. Yesterday we set sail towards the bay of Blue Fields, where we were welcomed by a mixture of curiosity, entrepreneurship and generosity.
Read More
Science communication can take many formats, from the diaries of explorers, meticulous records of experiments in the field and laboratory, the detailed and highly technical publications in scientific research journals and textbooks, to popular science books, magazines, documentaries and diverse media web content.
Read More
Call me a nerd (I’m doing that all the time) but there is something beautiful about the coming together of superb engineering and design to create a gadget that does what it is meant to do, simply, efficiently and fool-proof.
Read More
My first close encounter with pollution emanating from the abandoned mines in England’s Southwest occurred in the mid 1990s, when research for my undergraduate dissertation brought me to Restronguet Creek in the Fal Estuary. A former tin mine had come to fame for all the wrong reasons…
Read More
We take young people to the beach to transform…
Read More
There’s a difference between looking and seeing. One way of encouraging seeing is drawing.
Read More
Challenging Habitat 