Quaesitum 2016

Quaesitum Van Mildert College Scholarly Journal

Volume II December 2016

Quaesitum Van Mildert College Scholarly Journal

Welcome to Quaesitum Quaesitum is Van Mildert College’s scholarly journal, which seeks to demonstrate the wide range and high quality of research activities currently undertaken by members of the Van Mildert community, across the Junior, Middle and Senior Common Rooms.

This edition of Quaesitum contains articles from all three Faculties of the University, with contributions from Van Mildert’s IAS and COFUND Fellows, introductions to the work of the College’s two new Trust Scholars, and examples of work undertaken by the recipients of the Principal’s Award, Conference Attendance Fund, Travel Bursary and Undergraduate Internship Support Bursaries.

As we look to expand Quaesitum in the future, we are always looking for more contributions from members of the Van Mildert community. If you would like to contribute as a current student, alumnus or SCR member, please contact the Development Officer via vm.development@durham.ac.uk.

I hope you enjoy the latest edition of our scholarly journal.

Professor David A.T. Harper Principal, Van Mildert College

1

Contents JCR Research Articles Should we abandon our worries about resource depletion?

5

Investigating silicified Permian brachiopods from Vinodden, Svalbard

7

Brachiopods from the Plio-Pleistocene sediments of northeast Rhodes, Greece

9

Josefin Malmberg, Department of Geography Josh Scott, Department of Earth Sciences

Tara Love, Department of Earth Sciences

MCR Research Articles Bridging the Border: A comparative archaeological and historical study of the 11 bishop’s residences of Northern England and Southern Scotland (c.1450 – c.1660) Caroline Smith, Department of Archaeology and Department of History

An examination of the human propensity to acquire and collect through archaeological museums

12

‘The sole unquiet thing’: the behaviour of silence in Romantic poetry

13

Brittni Bradford, Department of Archaeology

Sraddha Venkataraman, Department of English

Van Mildert College Trust Scholars’ Introduction Using mangroves to reconstruct Holocene sea-level changes

15

Examining the distribution of Baryonic and Dark Matter using Gravitational lensing

16

Juliet Sefton, Department of Geography

Sut Ieng Tam, Department of Physics

Travel Bursary Reports Tracking small-scale pollutant flows across the Ganges Plains

17

Fieldwork in Roman Israel

19

Max Smyth, Department of Geography

Donald MacLennan, Department of Classics

2

Contents Conference Reports 21 Social Movements in European Perspectives: Past-Present-Future Asli Kandemir, School of Government and International Affairs

22 International Geoscience Programme 653: Onset of the Great Ordovician Biodiversification Event Dr Alycia Stigall, University of Ohio

Principal’s Award Report 23 A geological mapping project on the Isle of Raasay, Scotland Andrew Knott, Department of Earth Sciences

IAS Fellow’s Article 27 Phytoplankton: the driver of marine ecosystem evolution

Prof. Thomas Servais, Van Mildert College and Institute of Advanced Study

COFUND Fellow’s Article 30 Challenging the agricultural transition models of prehistoric human health change: Insights from infants and children from diverse environments Dr Siân Halcrow, Van Mildert College and Department of Archaeology Dr Andrew Millard, Department of Archaeology

SCR Research Articles 35 The Rocks on the Roof of the World

Prof. David A.T. Harper, Van Mildert College and Department of Earth Sciences

37 Late Holocene earthquakes in Alaska - evidence from Shuyak Island Dr Martin Brader, Department of Geography

39 Worms, shellfish and snails: charting the rapid rise of animal diversity Dr Martin Smith, Department of Earth Sciences

42 The Ordered Universe: a unique interdisciplinary project Prof. Brian K. Tanner, Department of Physics

43 Climate, black gold and a view to the future Dr Howard Armstrong, Van Mildert College

3

Photo Credit: Martin Brader

Quaesitum Van Mildert College Scholarly Journal

Should we abandon our worries about resource depletion?

Josefin Malmberg Department of Geography It is the end of 2016, and we have Sustainable Development Goals, a Paris Agreement, businesses that want to switch towards circular supply chains, and a global ‘Overshoot Day’ indicating when society has exceeded the limits of the ecological system every year.1 These examples stem from one key idea: that we, in one way or another, are running out of precious resources essential to sustaining human life. Yet the relative scarcity or availability of resources is not as clear as it might appear. In fact, the idea that we are running out of resources has been fiercely contested over time, and particularly in the last 60 years. The Cornucopians2, who do not believe in impending scarcity have time and time again showed how many resources instead seem to be growing more abundant. Should we abandon our worries about resource depletion?

The argument of the early proponents of resource scarcity, often called Neo-Malthusians3, is appealing because of its clear logic: Natural resources are finite products of the biophysical world, subject to depletion if the rate of extraction exceeds the rate of replenishment (Bridge, 2009a; Emel et al., 2002). Yet if prices are taken as an indicator of scarcity, the historic decline in prices of non-renewable resources during the 20th century despite a tremendous rate of extraction suggests that these resources are growing more abundant (Bridge, 2009b). This gives the Cornucopians their primary evidence. According to their theory there is no impending resource scarcity since the finite nature of resources is not what matters.

This might appear paradoxical, but it is just a matter of perspective. One can understand resources as biophysical entities like the Neo-Malthusians do, or as the service they provide. Key Cornucopian writer Julian Simon (1998), explains that temporary shortages cause prices to rise. This increase provides incentives to create more efficient methods of production and use, leading to new frontiers of resource extraction and potentially the substitution of one resource for another.

The service given by a particular resource, e.g. oil, would therefore always be ensured, even if the physical

5

material itself would run out. This is a consideration of natural resources in economic terms, rather than in the more Neo-Malthusian physical terms.

Going beyond the typically debated resources toward less obvious ones such as clean air, resilient ecosystems and stable ocean levels, the two perspectives continue to disagree along seemingly simple lines. On the one hand, the Cornucopians express scepticism against the idea of significant human influence on the planet and suggest that environmental problems will push populations to find better solutions, provided that the economic and political conditions are conducive (e.g.

Kelly, 2013; Simon, 1998). On the other, the Neo-Malthusians argue that technological innovation will not be able to save humanity from future collapse, since complex feedbacks between the industrial and ecological systems will cause environmental problems at a time and scale beyond human control (e.g.

Meadows et al., 1974). There is thus a clear philosophical divide between the two sides. The Cornucopians believe that the exceptional qualities of the human being enables them to overcome ecological limits whereas the Neo-Malthusians believe in the opposite, that unique human characteristics are insufficient to ensure our survival (Dunlap, 1983).

However, resource consumption and potential depletion are more complex issues than just matters of philosophy. Arguably, there are situations where we can find solutions through innovations such as inventions that clean polluted air or rid oceans of plastic waste. Yet there are also irreversible matters like climate change where little can be done to free up a precious resource we perhaps never realised we had, namely freedom from climate change-related hazards.

These resources cannot easily be substituted, and the service they provide our society cannot be retained through innovation. They are non-recoverable.

JCR Research Article Moreover, there are additional environmental and human costs not related to the price of a resource (Emel et al., 2002). For example, the future impact of greenhouse gases is not reflected in the price of fossil fuels. Since such ‘externalities’ and their effects are not felt equally around the world, and not necessarily by the consumers of the resource, it is clear that the resource problem goes beyond the fear of running out.

To conclude, we may not need to worry about resource depletion in the classical sense, but we have strong reasons to continue to be concerned about our ideas and use of the precious services provided by our planet.

References

Acknowledgments

Earth Overshoot Day (2016) Earth Overshoot Day 2016.

Available at: http://www.overshootday.org/ (Accessed 11 November 2016).

A special thank you to Prof. in Economic Geography Gavin Bridge for inspiration and input.

Footnotes [1] In 2016, the Earth Overshoot Day fell on 8 August 2016.

[2] The term ‘Cornucopian’ is derived from the word Cornucopia, the ‘horn of plenty’ that symbolises abundance.

[3] ‘Neo-Malthusians’ are named after the 19th century thinker who inspired their theory, Thomas Malthus.

Bridge, G., (2009a) 'Natural Resources', in Kitchin, R. & Thrift, N. (Eds.) International Encyclopedia of Human Geography, pp. 261-268.

Bridge, G., (2009b) 'Material Worlds: Natural Resources, Resource Geography and the Material Economy', Geography Compass, 3(3), pp. 1217–1244.

Dunlap, R.E., (1983) 'Ecologist Versus Exemptionalist: The Ehrlich-Simon Debate', Social Science Quarterly, 64(1), pp. 200–203.

Emel, J., Bridge, G., Krueger, R., (2002) 'The Earth as input', in: Johnston, R.J., Taylor, P.J., Watts, M. (Eds.), Geographies of Global Change: Remapping the World, Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 377–390.

Kelly, M.J., (2013) 'Why a collapse of global civilization will be avoided: a comment on Ehrlich & Ehrlich', Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 280(1767), pp.

20131193.

Meadows, D.H., Meadows, D.L., Randers, J., Behrens, W.W.I., (1974) The Limits to Growth, 2nd ed., London: Pan Books LTD. Simon, J.L., (1998) The Ultimate Resource 2, 2nd ed., Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Photo Credit: Pexels

6

Quaesitum Van Mildert College Scholarly Journal

Investigating silicified Permian brachiopods from Vindodden, Svalbard Josh Scott Department of Earth Sciences Introduction In 2008, Prof. David Harper co-led a field expedition to Spitsbergen, to investigate the Kapp Starostin Formation, from which he sourced the Brachiopods investigated in this project.

fragmented nature of the material, however, a number of samples could not be linked to a species.

Geological Background The Kapp Starostin Formation was deposited during the Permian, over an interval of approximately 27 million years, and it was the final Palaeozoic unit found in Spitsbergen. The Kapp Starostin Formation contains four cyclic facies successions, shallow-water carbonates, terrigenous sands, deep-water siliceous and basinal mud facies. The brachiopods collected from this formation were deposited adjacent Palaeoplysina build-ups, formed in a complex shallow marine environment, with glacial-eustatic fluctuations in sea level. (The complexity of the build-ups is reflected in the number of different faunas that can be found in the Kapp Starostin Formation). Once located and excavated, the rocks (containing the samples) were acid washed, to dissolve the rock but not the silicified fossil remains held within it. It is from this stage that my investigation began.

Investigation The first step of the investigation was to sort the samples, grouping those that looked similar in shape, size and morphological features (ribbing, growth lines, internal structure for example), a very lengthy process.

As the samples were heavily fragmented, unfortunately much of the material was unidentifiable; there were, however, a few complete specimens that showed exceptional amounts of detail. The second step of the investigation followed, identification. Using two different published works, first on the brachiopods of Greenland (Permian Brachiopod faunas of central east Greenland, C.O. Dunbar 1955, and second on the Carboniferous and Permian brachiopods of Svalbard, D. J. Gobbett 1963), it was possible to assign many of the specimens to their respective genus. Due to the

7

Fig. 1: Stratigraphic log for the Kapp Starostin formation.

Credit: http://www.nhm2.uio.no/norges/litho/

JCR Research Article Results and Discussion

1

The following images show the most dominant species identified within the samples examined. Images 1 and 2 show well-preserved specimens of Sowerbina rudis (?), where both internal and external structure has been preserved (an example where it was possible to identify both genus and species). Image 3 shows an array of Cleiothyridina (?), identified by its distinct, sharply curved, ventral valve. Here you can also see the fragmented nature of the material discussed and the silicification is not as precise, therefore only the genus can be confidently identified.

This project shows potential and the specimens are very promising. Further work will be undertaken to compare the samples from this project to those of existing publications.

2

Image 1: Sowerbina rudis (?), exceptionally preserved dorsal valve interior showing detail of the cardinal process and muscle scars.

Image 2: Sowerbina rudis (?), ventral valve exterior showing detail of epifaunal shell borings.

Image 3: Multiple examples of Cleiothyridina (?), ventral valve exteriors.

Acknowledgements I am very grateful for the support received through the Undergraduate Internship Support Scheme and for the use of facilities in Van Mildert College and the Department of Earth Sciences.

3

I would also like to thank Prof. David Harper for providing the specimens used and for his supervision of this project.

Biography I am in my third year in Earth Sciences (MSci) here at Durham University and have chosen to study modules from the Geology course, to give a greater variety of career paths available to me. Participating in this internship, as well as work placement within environmental consultancy, has helped guide my intentions for my future career. My ambition, once graduated from Durham, is to complete an MSc to specialize in the metals and mining industry and go on to work in this field.

8

Quaesitum Van Mildert College Scholarly Journal

Brachiopods from the Plio-Pleistocene sediments of northeast Rhodes, Greece Tara Love Department of Earth Sciences Introduction This project investigated brachiopod fossils from the Plio-Pleistocene sediments from the largest of Greece’s Dodecanese islands, Rhodes. The material was fully sorted, identified and photographed.

Geological Background Each brachiopod species has a preferred substrate and live at different (bio-) depth zones. Within these sedimentary rocks, brachiopods (along with other types of fossils) can be used, together with other methods, to interpret palaeoenvironments.

The brachiopods collected are from a group of coastal basins in the northeast of Rhodes and this is where Plio-Pleistocene sediments accumulated; these sections have superior preservation where they were protected from erosion by headlands or “islands of basement limestone” (Hanken et al., 1996).

According to Hanken et al. (1996), these sediments formed “complex facies mosaics reflecting several cycles of regression and transgressions”; the Rhodes Formation was formed during a “major phase of transgression” in the Late Pliocene and a forced regression during the Lower Pleistocene.

The specimens all came from the Lindos Bay Clay or Kolymbia Limestone facies within the Rhodes Formation (as seen in Fig. 1). According to Hanken et al.

(1996), their ages range from the Pliocene to the Pleistocene; the Kolymbia Limestone being Late Pliocene (~5.33 Ma) in age and the Lindos Bay Clay 3 Ma (Lovelie et al., 1989) at the base to an age of 0.7 Ma at the top.

Methods The shells size ranged from 1 mm to 1.5 cm in width, and a microscope was often required to identify most of the fossils. ‘Manuals’ were used to help identify species; The Brachiopods of the Mediterranean Sea (Logan, 1979) was particularly useful.

Identification of species was achieved by observations made of internal and external shell characteristics and the comparison with the ‘manuals’ at my disposal and with that of Davidson’s Monograph.

Preliminary Results Fig. 1 - The Plio-Pleistocene lithostratigraphy of the different formations of northeast Rhodes. The samples dealt with in this article are from the Lindos Bay Clay and Kolymbia Limestone facies.

Credit: Hanken et al., 1996.

9

The brachiopods identified (all from the Rhodes Formation) appear to be from two depth groups; those of shallow water (down to about 200 m) and the eurybathic species (a depth of about 600 m) (Logan et al., 2004).

JCR Research Article Formation

Species

Rhodes Rhodes Rhodes Rhodes Rhodes Rhodes Rhodes Rhodes Rhodes Rhodes Rhodes Rhodes Rhodes

Megerlia truncata Megerlia echinata Megathiris detruncata Argyrotheca cuneata Agyrotheca cistellula Arygyrotheca cordata Platidia spp Platidia anomala Platidia anomoides Platidia davidsoni Gryphus vitreus Terebratulina retusa Platidia anomala

No. of species 35 6 478 62 16 50 54 2 4 1 232 223 85

Within the Kolymbia Limestone the eurybathic species, Gryphus vitreus, was dominant. This species, as well as Megerlia truncata and Terebratulina retusa (as seen in Fig 3), showed signs of predation in the form of boreholes (Fig.3. B) from samples in both facies.

The majority of the samples came from the Lindos Bay Clay facies; a calcareous, silty clay (Hanken et al., 1996).

Due to the high numbers of calcareous microfossils, the clay is carbonate-rich (Hanken et al., 1996). The dominant species in this facies were Megathiris detruncata, Terebratulina retusa (Fig.3 A), Gryphus vitreus and Megerlia truncata (Fig.3 B).

Fig. 2 - A summary of results from within the Rhodes Formation.

This is without differentiating between the different facies groups.

From the 1248 shells that were sorted, 13 brachiopod species were identified. 12 of the species would have been attached to either submarine rocks or cave walls by pedicle attachment, whereas Neocrania anomala would have been cemented to submarine cave walls in the Mediterranean region.

A A

There were a number of samples that were too fragmented, or had no useful identifying features, so these were catalogued separately and not included in the Summary of Results. I will be going through these difficult samples and double-check the previous identifiable ones to ensure that the correct species names have been given to each shell.

Acknowledgements Richard G. Bromley kindly left the majority of the fossils and the final samples were from Prof. David A.T. Harper’s own collection.

Many thanks to Van Mildert College for support and for allowing use of the Postgraduate Rooms and to the Earth Sciences Department (Durham) for access to rooms and equipment.

Special thanks must go to Prof. David A.T. Harper for his supervision, continued advice and support and to Dr Howard Armstrong for his academic advice.

References

B B

Benton, M., & Harper, D.A.T. 2009. Introduction to Palaeobiology and the Fossil Record.

Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell.

Hanken, N-M., Bromley, R.G., and Miller, J. 1996.

Plio-Pleistocene sedimentation in coastal grabens, north-east Rhodes, Greece. Geological Journal, 31, 393-418.

Logan, A. 1979. The Brachiopods of the Mediterranean Sea. Bulletin de L’institut oceanographique, Monaco, vol 72, no. 1434 Logan, A., Bianchi, C.N., Morri, C., and Zibrowius, H. 2004. The Present-day Mediterranean brachiopod fauna: diversity, life habits, biogeography and plaeobiogeography. SCI. MAR., 68 (suppl. 1): 163-170

Fig. 3 - Examples of two common species from the Rhodes samples.

A - Terebratulina retusa. B - Megerlia truncata. The specimen on the left shows an example of bioerosion that seems common to this species from the Lindos Bay Clay.

Lovelie, R., Stole, G., and Spjeldnaes, N. 1989. Magnetic Polarity stratigraphy of Pliocene-Pleistocene marine sediments from eastern Mediterranean. Physics of the Earth and Planetary Interiors 54, 340-352.

10

Quaesitum Van Mildert College Scholarly Journal

Bridging the Border: A comparative archaeological and historical study of the bishop’s residences of Northern England and Southern Scotland (c. 1450 – c. 1660) Caroline Smith Department of Archaeology and Department of History Today, bishops are the highest appointed members of Christian clergy in the United Kingdom and their role is largely confined to the spiritual governance of the Church. This stands in contrast to the role of the medieval bishops. In the medieval period their role afforded them more jurisdictive influence and bishops were responsible for managing vast landholdings, conducting legal affairs and in some cases, levying armies. Consequently, bishops occupied exulted social spheres and existed at the interface between religion, politics and power. They owned large and dispersed estates to facilitate their multifaceted role which served as functional and symbolic products of their role, though few of these have received appropriate attention. My current doctoral research seeks to redress this imbalance by examining the changing nature of these buildings and associated landscapes during the religious, social and political turbulence of the mid-15th to mid-17th centuries in northern England and Scotland. This builds upon work conducted for an MA

by Research in Archaeology which explored the development of the residences of the Bishops of Durham (c. 1100 - c. 1450)1.

Buildings, one of the most durable and visible elements of the archaeological record, have the potential to reveal patterns of long-term change and continuity. A combination of historical and diverse archaeological datasets have the potential to offer valuable insights into the inner workings of the bishopric and the specific role of the residences in this. Moreover, this project exists at a vibrant time for the study of bishop’s houses.

In recent years, there have been multiple development-led archaeological projects in northern England and Scotland that have uncovered the remains of previously undiscovered episcopal residences. My project therefore draws on a variety of new and unpublished data which, when taken with other

11

sources, offers rare scope for novel understandings of the role and nature of bishop’s houses in our wider narratives on historic episcopalism.

Results from my MA project revealed that in the later medieval period (c. 1100 - c. 1450) the houses of the Bishops of Durham assumed multiple different roles, and that these changed over time. Through the synthesis of documentary data, faunal remains and standing buildings evidence it is clear that some residences assumed niche roles connected to resource production (i.e. swan and horse rearing), pleasure and elite activity (i.e. hunting parks and gardens) and defence (i.e. castles). Moreover, the pattern that emerges from this dataset reveals that in the earlier centuries the bishops were highly mobile and occupied many residences, while bishops during the later centuries appeared to adopt a more fixed routine, choosing to spend the majority of their time in only a few sites. Coeval with these changes, the most intensively occupied sites received substantial investment, with large ranges constructed which profoundly altered their spatial arrangement. I argue that through these elaborate building efforts the bishops were expressing power and prestige and reinforcing social status through rigid spatial segregation. In previous centuries, I suggest that these same concepts were projected through large travelling entourages.

These results prove the value of adopting a holistic, inter-disciplinary approach to reveal new insights into the lives of the bishops. Therefore, this approach is being used to further understand the changing role of the bishops during the unsettled period around the Reformation, Civil War, Bishop’s Wars and Commonwealth.

MCR Research Article At this time, the bishop’s role was drastically redefined, yet their houses remained a constant fixture throughout. It is hoped that through their study, we may gain a more nuanced perspective on the episcopal role, which will ultimately feed into wider narratives on the nature of religion, power and the interface between the two.

Footnotes [1] Smith, C., Graves, C.P., Claydon, M. and Randerson, M. Forthcoming. En Route and In Residence: Integrating Documentary and Archaeological Evidence for the Itineraries and Residences of the Medieval Residences of the Bishops of Durham. In: Rollason, D.W. (ed.). 2017. Princes of the Church and the Palaces. London: Routledge.

An examination of the human propensity to acquire and collect through archaeological museums Brittni Bradford Department of Archaeology David Hume wrote that “acquiring goods and possessions for ourselves and our nearest friends, is insatiable, perpetual, universal, and directly destructive of society” (1739, p. 214). One must then ask: is society being bettered or slowly destroyed through the human acquisition of things? Are cultural institutions like museums then, acting as storehouses of societal collections, somehow inadvertently destroying society through the cannibalism of culture? Can collecting be as creative as it is destructive, or is it in our own nature as individuals to collect and ultimately consume to the point of self-destruction? This article explores the human propensity to collect things, the motivations and extremes of personal collecting, what kind of social and psychological impacts of collecting, and what kind of impact(s) archaeological museum collections have on society.

The nature of archaeological study surrounds the idea that humans have not only been creating and destroying things for a long time, but also acquiring and discarding these things along the way. While archaeologists strive to discover and collect cultural items for institutions like museums, museums themselves arguably play a role in preserving and connecting the public to these items (and through them, the past and culture). This concept of collecting things is not new to humans as a species; humans tend to enjoy collecting things, whether temporarily or infinitely. Like anything, collecting can be taken to extreme levels. The extremes of personal collecting,

such as hoarding (Gilliam/Tolin 2011), and inversely compulsive decluttering (sometimes called Spartanism), can be arguably seen as destructive in nature to society – just as Hume asserts. “In extreme cases of hoarding, clutter poses a safety hazard… (and risks) fire, poor sanitation, and medical problems” (Gilliam/Tolin 2011, p. 126). Though this highlights the extreme possibilities of personal collecting, general personal motivators for collecting can vary across populations. Motivators for initial collecting can include everything from sentimental attachment and connective memory to aesthetic pleasure and even symbolism of economic status and power (Belk 1988, p 548-553). Though most of these are understood to be positive or neutral in nature, some can be arguably destructive. Is the nature of archaeological collection then a productive or destructive process, and what roles do museums play in nature of these collections once discovered and later stored?

Photo Credits: Richard Bruce

12

Quaesitum Van Mildert College Scholarly Journal

The human propensity to collect brings with it a compulsion to display these collections, arguably influencing both the creation and nature of museums.

Negative examples of early public collection for display were the Triumphs of Rome; these were directly destructive to some societies, producing displays of collections to promote ego, power, and dominance.

Though some argue archaeologists (and in turn museums) of the past were destructive through the looting and removal of objects from their societies of origin, modern museums strive to play a much more positive role through the display of collections to educate, inspire, and promote research into the past; through this, archaeological collections have effectively become resources for the future, rather than burdens of past items. These and related productive themes have become the mission of the modern museum; to deter this process of collecting for the sake of collecting and bring a more productive, rather than destructive, group of objects from the past to help society learn and grow for humanity’s collective future. Hume may have been right to say the nature of acquisition is “insatiable, perpetual, (and) universal”, but thanks to archaeological museums, collections are able to now do more - turning the human propensity to create and collect into a positive product of human development rather than something inherently destructive to society.

Acknowledgement This article was prepared from an essay written for the Museum and Artefact studies programme in the Department of Archaeology at Durham University.

Photo Credit: Richard Bruce

References Belk, R. 1988. Collectors and collecting. In: Advances in Consumer Research. University of Utah Press. P. 548-553.

Gilliam, C. & Tolin, D. 2011. Compulsive hoarding. In: Clinical Obsessive-Compulsive Disorders in Children and Adults. Cambridge University Press. P. 122-137.

Hume, D. 1793. A Treatise of Human Nature. 1893 ed.

Oxford: Clarendon Press. P. 214

‘The sole unquiet thing’: the behaviour of silence in Romantic poetry Sraddha Venkataraman Department of English Silence has always been prominent in the preoccupations of the Romantics. Indeed, Coleridge’s ‘Frost at Midnight’, from which the title of this article has been taken, concedes that it ‘still flutters there’. The actual line works across a stanza break: ‘Only that film, which fluttered on the grate// Still flutters there, the sole unquiet thing.’1

13

The film being representative of a fragment of a complete, idealized whole, towards which the poem consistently drives has been profitably investigated in both, modern and traditional critical debate.2 The film is symbolic of the poem’s restless persistence for (and, consequently, the undoing of such potential) an undisturbed ideal, but it need not be restricted to remaining the object of these lines.

MCR Research Article In viewing it through its own subjective capacity, it may be seen as the ‘unquiet thing’ that enables the silence the poem consciously and continuously engages with. The example here can be extended to discourse surrounding the Romantics more generally. Critical engagement focuses too often on the obvious presence of silence in this form of poetry whilst underestimating what a reading considering the behavior of silence will have to offer. Behind the carelessly unimportant ‘thing’ lies a caressing ‘sole-ness’, and Coleridge draws on the film’s unique ability - through its own lack of ‘quietness’3 - to make the creatively energizing silence visible.4 To make silence visible may seem counter-intuitive.

Critics like Susan J. Wolfson have devoted productive critical attention to aural aspirations of the Romantic poem, considering the sound of silence to be one of them. While the aural readings of silence are of great use in appreciating the full effect of a poem as a verbal product, it does little to exemplify the role of silence in the fabric of the lines itself. In other words, in order to explore how silence functions in a poem, it’s production and the resulting poetic power, it must be considered an active part of the text itself. This is somewhat easier in modern poetry, where the presence of silence hinges on a textual symbol that brings silence with it. The likes of Seamus Heaney and Paul Muldoon (both of whom arguably display great strains of Romanticist thought) both use gaps in their sonnet lines to invoke a sense of silent, unmarked absence. Such cues are largely amiss in Romantic poetry,5 and therefore the physical markers are subtler (but equally rewarding in terms of poetic achievement) and rely largely on a lexical presence - through the developed conceits that enclose actual mentions of silence.

As suggested in this article, my research attempts to locate the presence and behaviour of silence as a textual element of Romantic poetry, while dwelling on how this develops across the three generations of the Romantics. It situates itself in a critical landscape saturated with brilliant readings of silence in poems as an atmospheric and aural presence, but largely ignore from its capacity as a creative enabler or poetic mood and achievement through its active presence in the poem’s text. Taking inspiration from Wordsworth’s poetry, this study hopes to investigate the ‘strange half-absence’ of silence in Romantic poetry and the critical conversation that enshrouds it.6

References Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, ‘Frost at Midnight’, Samuel Taylor Coleridge: The Major Works, ed. H. J. Jackson, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 87.

Keats, John, John Keats: The Complete Poems, ed. John Bernard, (London: Penguin, 2006), p. 344.

Wordsworth, William, William Wordsworth: The Major Works, ed. Stephen Gill, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 45.

Fulford, Tim, Coleridge Bulletin: The Journal of the Friends of Coleridge, 2013 Winter; 42: 1-14.

Janowitz, Anne, ‘Coleridge’s 1816 Volume: fragment as rubric’, Studies in Romanticism, 1985 Spring; 24 (1): 21-39.

Rubenstein, Jill, ‘Sound and Silence in Coleridge’s Conversation Poems’, English: The Journal of the English Association, 1972; 21: 54-60.

Wolfson, Susan J, ‘Sounding Romantic: The sound of sound’, Soundings of things done: The poetry & poetics of sound in the Romantic ear and era, ed. Susan J. Wolfson, Romantic Circles Online, chp. 1.

Footnotes [1] Samuel T. Coleridge, ‘Frost at Midnight’, Samuel Taylor Coleridge: The Major Works, ed. H. J. Jackson, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 87.

[2] See Anne Janowitz, ‘Coleridge’s 1816 volume: Fragment as Rubric’, Studies in Romanticism, 1985 Spring; 24 (1): 21-39, and Tim Fulford, Coleridge Bulletin: The Journal of the Friends of Coleridge, 2013 Winter; 42: 1-14.

[3] Cf. Keats’s magnificent use of this in ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, in John Keats: The complete poems, ed. John Bernard, (London: Penguin, 2006), p. 344.

[4] Modern critics like Rubenstein have productively stretched this function of silence to reflect on the solipsism (and, according to Rubenstein, the somewhat rarer occurrences of the opposite) of Romantic poetry. However, this once again moves silence into the capacity of an object upon which solipsism acts, which, in the reading offered here, the poem hesitates to do.

[5] An exception to this would be the tendency to have lines split across verse forms, a technique used to full effect by Byron.

[6] William Wordsworth, ‘The Discharged Soldier’, William Wordsworth: The Major Works, ed. Stephen Gill, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 45.

14

Quaesitum Van Mildert College Scholarly Journal

Using mangroves to reconstruct Holocene sea-level changes Juliet Sefton Department of Geography For my PhD, I will be focussing on improving our understanding of fossil mangrove deposits, with the aim of reconstructing sea-level changes over the late Holocene.

Gaining a reliable picture of sea-level change during the Holocene is vital for improving our understanding of the relevance of current and future sea-level rise. A major challenge is that robust estimates of these past changes are often elusive due to complex ice-earth feedbacks and tectonic uncertainties. However, low-latitude, tectonically stable regions situated far from former ice sheets can produce high-precision sea-level records (Milne & Mitrovica, 2008). Mangrove forests are widespread in these tropical low latitudes, and are sensitive to changes in sea-level (Ellison, 2008).

Fossil mangrove deposits provide a means to investigate Holocene sea-level changes, but they can be difficult to interpret because of problems with dating, poor fossil preservation and biological disturbance (Woodroffe et al., 2015). I seek to resolve these issues through a study of sedimentological and biological processes in modern mangrove forests, in the hope to improve their reliability as indicators of past ice-equivalent sea-level changes.

Field work will be conducted in the mangrove forests of the western Indian Ocean and the western Caribbean Sea, where glacio-isostatic influences on sea-level are considered to be minimal. This will involve observations of the modern mangrove environment, as well as collection of cores targeting the palaeo-record.

This project is supervised by Dr Sarah Woodroffe, Prof.

Antony Long, and Dr Charlotte Bryant.

References Ellison, J. C. (2008). Long-term retrospection on mangrove development using sediment cores and pollen analysis: A review. Aquatic Botany 89(2): 93-104.

Milne, G. A. and J. X. Mitrovica (2008). Searching for eustasy in deglacial sea-level histories. Quaternary Science Reviews 27(25-26): 2292-2302.

Woodroffe, S. A., Long, A. J., Punwong, P., Selby, K., Bryant, C. L., Marchant, R. (2015). Radiocarbon dating of mangrove sediments to constrain Holocene relative sea-level change on Zanzibar in the southwest Indian Ocean. Holocene 25 (5): 820-831.

Biography I completed a BSc in Geography and Geology at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, in 2012 and gained a passion for palaeoclimate science. I studied towards an MSc in Geology researching Pliocene sea-level, which I completed in early 2015.

After my MSc, I worked as a Research Assistant at Victoria University of Wellington on a number of projects in Antarctic science, palaeoclimate and modern climate change. I was also a teaching assistant for a variety of undergraduate courses in earth sciences and geography.

15

Van Mildert College Trust Scholars’ Introduction

Examining the distribution of Baryonic and Dark Matter using Gravitational lensing Sut Ieng Tam Department of Physics My PhD project is using new imaging from the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) to compare the distribution of baryonic and dark matter using gravitational lensing.

The aim of this project is to study the property of dark matter by tracking the movement of these particles during galaxy cluster and galaxy-galaxy mergers.

Dark matter consists of hypothetical elementary particles outside the Standard Model and would be the major matter component in our Universe—making up around five-sixths of the Universe’s total mass. A lot of observational evidence tends to confirm the existence of dark matter, such as the star rotation curve in galaxy’s disks. Nevertheless, dark matter remains a mystery to astrophysicists and particle physicists.

In recent years, several dark matter models have been developed, involving cold (Davis et al. 1985), warm (Boyarsky et al. 2009) and self-interacting (Spergel &

Steinhardt 2000) particles. Different models predict different mass distributions. If dark matter interacts through non gravitational forces, the infalling dark matter substructures will decelerate relative to inflating (Harvey et al. 2014). I thus look for these key observational signatures in HST data and compare our observational results to Durham’s state-of-the-art supercomputer simulations of structure formation (such as EAGLE, Schaye et al. 2015) in order to find out which model best explains those observed phenomena.

It is vital for us to understand the intrinsic property of the dark matter and how galaxies evolve along with their dark matter halo.

This project is supervised by Dr Mathilde Jauzac and Dr Richard Massey.

Biography I completed my BSc in Physics from National Taiwan University (NTU) in 2014. In the same year I continued into my MSc degree in Physics at NTU and worked in Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics (ASIAA), supervised by Dr Keiichi Umetsu.

The project is focussed on the Subaru weak lensing analysis of the CLASH galaxy cluster sample (Cluster Lensing And Supernova survey with Hubble). Thanks to the generosity of the Van Mildert College Trust, I started my PhD at Durham University in October 2016, supervised by Dr Mathilde Jauzac and Dr Richard Massey. Currently I am working on the strong lensing analysis and mass modelling of the Hubble Space Telescope Frontier Fields Data.

16

Quaesitum Van Mildert College Scholarly Journal

Tracking small-scale pollutant flows across the Ganges Plains Max Smyth Department of Geography Towards the end of September 2015 I travelled to the city of Kanpur on the banks of the Ganges in India to conduct my undergraduate dissertation fieldwork.

After a short internal flight I was picked up from the airport in Lucknow (the closest city with an airport) by Jawahar who is the driver for the Earth Sciences Department at the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur (IIT-K). As we left the somewhat orderly airport it was quickly apparent that you were in India; the lack of seatbelts in the cars coupled with the frenzied driving down the wrong side of the road and the potholes which were only just less hazardous than the cattle and buffalo sitting in the middle of the road.

After a 2 hour journey we made it to the IIT-K visitor’s guesthouse where I would be staying for the next two weeks. It was on the nice side of basic with good air-conditioning which would be a saviour in the days to come as the temperatures rose into the mid-40s.

The purpose of my fieldwork was to collect high resolution topographic data to enable the tracking of small scale pollutant flows across the Ganges Plains.

Assessing the extent to which pollution can be transported across the area is highly important as the Ganges River is revered throughout India playing a crucial role in supporting agricultural and industrial activity in Northern India in a region with a population in excess of 400 million people. The wider Ganges Basin is rapidly urbanising and as the population increases further, issues of sustainable development will be exacerbated. The overall effect is an unprecedented pressure on water quality and quantity creating a quandary implicating food security, water security, economic growth and health for not only the poor, who are usually the victims, but the entire population.

My first couple of days were spent preparing for the data collection by checking that the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) that is owned by IIT-K (and the only one in India) was functioning correctly. This included: updating the software that it operates with, calibrating the camera correctly for both colour images (RGB) & near infra-red (NIR) and adjusting the wing flaps which had come out of place over the series of multiple previous flights. On my third day, Dipro (who is a PhD

17

student at IIT-K and helped me for the two weeks I was there) and I took the UAV for a test flight at IIT-K’s airfield. Unfortunately there was a software bug which halted our plans, which we spent the rest of the day resolving, but then successfully flew a test flight the next day.

We were now ready to go and fly in the field. The area I selected to study was the rural area of Bithoor to the north of Kanpur which is predominantly agricultural fields and small villages. In this area there is no sensitive infrastructure, and actually relatively little infrastructure at all, which made flying the UAV easier from a permissions point of view. It is also an area where pollutants originate from and have the most effect on poor people living and working around them.

On our first day out in Bithoor we found an unused field with lots of open space around and a good strip of flat land for landing the UAV on. It wasn’t long before heads started popping up in fields and the locals started gravitating towards us. It was hard to tell if they were more fascinated by the UAV or me. A couple possessed some basic English skills which was surprising and we managed to converse with the aid of facial expressions, hand gestures and the occasion interjection from Dipro or Jawahar who had translated what one of us had said. The friendliness of the people was surprising and this increased when we (meaning Dipro as my Hindi is non-existent) explained what we were doing.

Although many of these people were uneducated farmers, and may not have understood the finer workings of the science, all of them understood why we were doing this and cared deeply for their land to the extent that they tried to help wherever possible. They would disappear off into the fields and then reappear with armfuls of corn and other food. They then started fires on the ground near us to cook this food on. I was more surprised when I found out that they were doing this solely for us and couldn’t help feeling a slight irony in being provided with food by some of the poorest people in the region.

Travel Bursary Report Sadly there was a mechanical failure with the launching mechanism which halted flying as it failed to launch 4 times and then on the 5th, broke. However, not all was lost and the tool kit (a hammer and screw driver) was broken out and, with a bit of Indian make-do-and mend spirit, we managed to fix it in under an hour. However, with all of the delays the light had gotten too low so we only had enough time for one more flight meaning that we would need to come back to finish flying the area.

When we returned to the same spot to finish flying on the weekend we were quickly spotted again and the word got out. All of the children who had, earlier in the week, been at school gathered around and were very inquisitive about the equipment and also did a lot of staring at me. They were also equally helpful and always offered to carry equipment or would clear the livestock out of the field so that we could take off or land. We successfully finished all of the flights that day but it was a very long, exhausting day, not helped by the extreme temperatures and lack of breeze or shade so I was happy to stay inside the next day and read up on pollutant sources in the area.

In order to make the topography models, produced with imagery from the UAV, more accurate, Ground Control points are needed. These were collected using a differential GPS. This is linked to a base station which sends the GPS error corrections making it more accurate. The only issue was that the study area was so large (~10km2) that the signal wasn’t strong enough to stay connected for the whole distance. We spent 3 days trying to configure the GPS system so that it would transmit across the mobile network or using internet signal but ran into many technical issues including the Indian Government’s control of airwaves. In the end we opted for a low-tech option which was to use the roof of a 3-storey house in order to gain elevation to broadcast the signal further. This worked perfectly and made us lament the fact that we had spent the last three days trying to think through the problem when there was a novel solution there all along. We were, however, glad that it all worked in the end and managed to cover the whole area in a day.

As we left, Jawahar realised that the car window had become jammed and wouldn’t go back up, so on our way back we stopped by a mechanic to try and get it fixed. This was an enlightening experience; what would have taken 2 days, a courtesy car, a stack of paper work and insurance forms, not to mention the significant lightening of your wallet, took one man and his two children 20 minutes with a screwdriver and a hammer.

It was great to see this as it just sums up how different India is. Working in India there are the obvious

language barriers, cultural differences and very different climate and things always take time and Indian bureaucracy. But there is freedom in the absence of red tape and it opens you up to new ways of thinking. Similarly the people, even if some stop and stare at the white man, they are all very friendly, welcoming and also very honest. So overall I went purely for research and, sadly, there was little time to do anything more touristy, but I do feel like I came away with a cultural experience alongside my hard drive full of data that has influenced my perspectives and values in some ways.

An RGB colour image taken from the UAV

A Near Infra-Red image taken from the UAV of the same location

18

Quaesitum Van Mildert College Scholarly Journal

Fieldwork in Roman Israel Donald MacLennan Department of Classics My visit to Israel, kindly funded by Van Mildert College and the Faculty of Arts and Humanities, allowed me to visit sites, museums, and academics important to my ongoing doctoral research.

I began in Tel Aviv, making day trips to Jerusalem and its surroundings from there. In this phase of the trip, I visited the historic port city of Jaffa, the Israel Museum, and a prominent academic in my field attached to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

reconsider its importance in the topography of the city.

My trip to Caesarea Philippi was notable not only for the staggering natural beauty of the site, which is now a nature reserve, but also for the inscriptions in the main religious centre. A cave, dedicated to Pan, is surrounded by ornate niches cut into the rock face. We can identify the statues that once stood in these niches primarily from inscriptions cut into the rock.

The Israel Museum is home to a great number of inscriptions, documents, and coins relevant to my research. In particular, the rare ‘Judaea Recepta’ Roman issue from Jerusalem or Caesarea, AD 70, was worth seeing and, more importantly, photographing. I was also able to transcribe and photograph an important inscription that tells us about Pontius Pilate’s political role in the first province of Judaea.

I was, very graciously, invited to the home of a prominent academic in the fields of papyrology and epigraphy. There, I was able to ask important questions relating to my work, about the role of language in the composition and interpretation of material texts, and about a particular unpublished document. She was also able to put me in touch with a PhD student of her’s working on a similar area to my own.

Photo Credit: Donald MacLennan Inscription found at the Tiberium in Caesarea: …[T]iberium |…[Pont]ius Pilatus | …[praef]ectus Iudaea[e]. Israel Museum

I was based in Haifa for the second part of the trip.

From there, I was able to visit the important Herodian Roman cities of Caesarea Maritima, founded by Herod the Great in c.AD 20 on the coast between modern Netanya and Haifa, and Caesarea Philippi, founded by Philip in 3 BC to the northeast of the Sea of Galilee. Both of these well preserved sites are important to my work.

Seeing them provided me with an important sense of context.

Of particular note was the so-called promontory palace in Caesarea Maritima. The Herodian palace, which later became a Roman praetorium, occupied the most prominent point on the coast and should have been visible from anywhere in the ancient city. The prominence, and size, of the palace was not clear to me from archaeological reports; visiting it has led me to

19

Photo Credit: Donald MacLennan The ‘Promontory Palace’ at Caesarea, view from the ‘upper palace’, the Roman era praetorium.

Travel Bursary Report Some of the inscriptions were so high up the cliff face that they were very difficult to see from the ground. I have since thought about the purpose of these inscriptions and whether worshippers were supposed to read them at all, or if they served a more ceremonial purpose.

Haifa was also the home of the National Maritime Museum, where I was able to see and photograph a number of interesting and potentially useful statues and inscriptions. The museum is home to artifacts recovered from the eastern coast of the Mediterranean ranging from the Hellenistic period through to the era of the crusades.

Although the vast majority of my source material is available in print and online, it was invaluable to be able to see it in context. It has been increasingly impressed upon me that the physical context in which the ancient societies I study existed was crucial to their organisation, religion, and behaviour. The topography and climate of these regions profoundly affected the people who lived there. It was of great academic interest to visit and a great pleasure as well; I am immensely grateful to the College for helping fund my trip.

Photo Credit: Donald MacLennan Niches cut into the rock by the shrine to Pan at Baneas National Park.

20

Quaesitum Van Mildert College Scholarly Journal

Social Movements in European Perspectives: Past-Present-Future Asli Kandemir School of Government and International Affairs With generous support from the Van Mildert Conference Attendance Fund, I attended the Summer School ‘Social Movements in European Perspectives: Past-Present-Future’ between 21-25 September 2015, which was organised by the Institute for Social Movements of the Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany.

Within this Summer School, I had the opportunity to approach the field of social movements from international and interdisciplinary perspectives and actively engaged in discussions on current positions of research and challenges of social movements with national and international scholars and activists. In the framework of the Summer School, I explored different aspects of social movements and their manifold forms of appearance such as labour, environmental, women‘s or anti-TTIP movements among others.

As I am pursuing an academic career and thus, planning to undertake PhD research on the issue of social movements, I chose to attend this particular Summer School. As a Sociology graduate from Turkey and holder of an MA degree in International Relations (Europe) from Durham University, I aim to approach my research with a more international and interdisciplinary manner. This Summer School was a great success in gathering different scholars with different backgrounds and from different European universities as well as appealing to a variety of both

German and non-German students. Therefore, not only were the lectures and presentations from the scholars quite fruitful but also the discussions in the seminars were so satisfying as to exchange distinctive ideas and knowledge on the same issues. Moreover, the speeches by the representatives of real activist groups nourished my theoretical knowledge with the perspective of the individuals’ real field experiences.

As a result, I can sincerely say that this Summer School has fulfilled my target by helping me enhance my knowledge of both the theoretical and practical elements of social movements. It also enabled me to improve my personal skills by undertaking the given tasks in the workshops. I was quite successful in all of them as my fellows gave me a lot of credit with highly positive feedback. I also had the opportunity to practice my German language skills; by interacting with local people and German students, I practised my language skills and realised that my level of German was higher than I had anticipated.

I would like to thank Van Mildert College and its funding committee for giving me this opportunity. It has been invaluable to my personal and professional development.

Van Mildert College Trust Conference Attendance Fund The Van Mildert College Trust Conference Attendance Fund assists undergraduate and postgraduate students with conference attendance, which may enhance their academic career. Awards are available to cover conference registration costs, travel, accommodation or subsistence. Calls for applicants occur throughout the year, with awards of up to £250 available per applicant. Priority is given to those students who are presenting their own research and those without funding support for such activities.

For further information about the scheme, please contact the Development Officer at vm.development@durham.ac.uk.

A dedicated Van Mildert College Scholarships and Bursaries Pamphlet is available upon request.

21

Conference Report

International Geoscience Programme 653: Onset of the Great Ordovician Biodiversification Event Dr Alycia Stigall University of Ohio Van Mildert College hosted the opening meeting of International Geoscience Programme 653: Onset of the Great Ordovician Biodiversification Event (GOBE) from 25 September - 1 October 2016. This project, funded by UNESCO, brings together geoscientists from around the globe to collaboratively investigate the reasons behind the GOBE, which includes a series of diversifications centered around 450 million years ago that completely modified marine food webs and that, for the first time in geological times, established modern marine ecosystems. A diverse set of biotic and abiotic drivers have been proposed to facilitate this diversification, but testing of most of these requires an international effort to improve data quality and quantity. The Van Mildert meeting is the first step in that direction.

Highlights of the conference included scientific sessions with synthesis talks on the state of knowledge in ocean modeling, reconstructing ancient continental positions, estimating biodiversity rates and levels, climate models, and geochemical proxies, plus new research presentations, and active discussion amongst nearly 40 scientists from nearly 20 countries. A conference banquet in Durham Castle capped off the on-campus events.

ushers in a new phase of international collaboration, which promises many exciting developments to come as the scientific community progresses in gathering new data, new analyses, and new insights into this exciting period in Earth history.

Photo Credit: Richard Bruce

Next the international group headed to the Lake District to investigate Ordovician age rocks in person. As expected, the weather of the Lake District provided a few challenges, but geologists are a hearty group and persevered in their study even in the face of pea-sized hail.

Dubbed “Ordovician by the Lakes� due to the proximity of the conference room to Van Mildert College lake and the field excursion to the English Lake District, participants certainly had plenty of water to contemplate both from the conference settings and the Ordovician seas. Excellent discussions, plans for future and ongoing collaborations occurred. This meeting

Photo Credit: Alycia Stigall

22

Quaesitum Van Mildert College Scholarly Journal

A geological mapping project on the Isle of Raasay, Scotland Andrew Knott Department of Earth Sciences Raasay is a small Scottish island situated between the Scottish mainland and the Isle of Skye. On 13 August 2015, I set out on a six week fieldtrip to the island. The overall aim was to produce a geological map of the area and gather the necessary data upon which to write an in-depth geological history of the area. This will then form the basis of my dissertation.

each other. Particular attention was paid to how this interacts with the lay of the land, therefore allowing deductions to be made about structural features and what happens at depth. Ultimately this will allow me to deduce a detailed geological history of the region.

The island of Raasay is just 40 km2 in area and only accessible via a short ferry trip from Skye. This, coupled with its decreasing population of approximately 160, makes the island a very remote and tranquil place. I chose to conduct my fieldwork here due to its wonderfully diverse variation in geology. There are many geological phenomena to observe from many different fields of geology, and all occurring within such a uniquely small area.

During my six week stay, I spent 6 days per week in the field. These days consisted of traversing the land, looking at in situ rock outcrops in detail and relating them to adjacent outcrops. Close examination of individual outcrops and features within them can lead to deductions about the processes that led to the rock’s formation and any subsequent deformation that may have influenced the rock’s properties.

Methods

As the written report on my findings is still a work in progress, I may use collected rock samples to create thin sections for microscope analysis; allowing for more accurate mineralogical compositions to be deduced and for the observation of small scale features that cannot be seen with the naked eye.

After a brief reconnaissance on day one, I decided to map an area from Oskaig up the west coast to a kilometre or so above Glam, and then across their respective latitudes to the east coast. However the entirety of the east coast is a steep cliff face so it had to be omitted from my area for safety reasons.

Preliminary results

Fig. 1: A geological map of my mapping area: central Raasay.

Sourced from BGS.

Aims The main aim of the fieldtrip was to construct a geological map of a 22 km2 area of central Raasay, examining the rock types and their relationships with

23

The north-western extent of my mapping area, around Glam, consisted of an 11 km2 area of red sandstone, deduced to be a quartz arenite. A number of structural and sedimentary features were found across the outcrops providing evidence of its environment of deposition. Numerous lenses of a much coarser, almost conglomeritic sediment were observed. They showed a large variation in clast size, implying textural immaturity and close proximity to the source rocks, this is also supported by the clast angularity. Clast orientations, coupled with cross bedding readings from

Principal’s Award Report elsewhere, imply an eastward flow direction and that the environment was fluvial/alluvial with bar switching of sedimentary and structural festures were found across the outcrops providing evidence of its environment of deposition.

models. This is sometimes due to lack of exposure or because faulting has made some areas rather complex.

The most widespread structure seen in this sandstone was soft sediment deformation, which is associated with rapid rates of deposition and indicate an environment of deposition that broadly agrees with that above. I have concluded that this sandstone is part of the Torridonian Sandstone Group, which makes up some of the oldest rocks in the UK at over 1,100 Ma (Stewart, A.D., 2002). It has been faulted up against the southerly rocks by a large sub-vertical fault running NE-SW, known as the Screapadal Fault.

On the other side of the fault plane lays a different sandstone, this one is light grey in colour and fossiliferous in places. It is highly calcareous, resulting in honeycomb weathering across most outcrops. The fossil content in this lithology is mainly fragmented bivalves, but there are also trace fossils, most likely the remains of burrows in the sediment created by small worm-like organisms.

Overlaying the aforementioned sediment is an extensive field of a mafic igneous rock.

Compositionally it is a fine-grained, aphanitic basalt that contains phenocrysts of quartz, olivine, chalcopyrite and pyroxene, with varying degrees of presence across the whole area. Geological evidence such as cooling joints, its textural properties and the presence of pillow structures (Fig 2) mean that this is an extensive lava field. The island’s most prominent feature, standing at a height of 1,457 feet, Dun Caan is a part of this lava field (Fig 2). The basalt extends from Dun Caan up the east coast to the northern extent of my mapping area.

Fig. 2: Field photograph of the 'onion skin' effect seen in the basalts.

Fig. 3: Field photograph of Dun Caan, taken from the west.

Lastly, the most extensive lithology that I encountered was a large intrusive body of granite. It consisted of coarse grained crystals of feldspar (plagioclase and orthoclase), quartz, and biotite suspended in a fine-grained grey coloured matrix. This gives it a slight porphyritic texture. Baked and chilled margins prove that this has intruded into the country rock around it. It appears that the body is either a small pluton (such as a laccolith or lopolith) or a large sill.

Conclusions My findings largely agree with work previously done on the island, with the exception of some lithological boundaries differing from the currently accepted

Fig. 4: Field photograph of the view from the peak of Dun Caan.

24

Quaesitum Van Mildert College Scholarly Journal

Acknowledgements

References

I would like to thank my dissertation supervisor, Prof.

Mark Allen, for his advice and support on the project. I would also like thank Raasay House for accommodating me over the course of the fieldtrip.

And finally, I am extremely thankful to Prof. David Harper and the Van Mildert College Principal’s Award. Without the financial support that this has offered, my trip to Raasay would not have been possible.

BGS compilation by A.J. Highton and M. McCormac is based on original survey, a partial resurvey by T.R.M. Lawries in 1939 and unpublished manuscript maps by Dr N. Morton (Birbeck College, University of London).

Geikie, A. 1897. The Ancient Volcanoes of Great Britain (London: Macmillan).

Stewart, A.D. 2002. The Later Proterozoic Torridonian Rocks of Scotland: their Sedimentology, Geochemistry and Origin.

Geological Society Memoir 24, London, 106-108.

Van Mildert College Principal’s Award The Van Mildert College Principal’s Award is presented to students wishing to undertake research activities broadly in line with the Principal’s research interests (Geology/Palaeontology/Climate Change). Awards are provided to current students of outsanding academic merit, both undergraduate and postgraduate, who wish to undertake fieldwork as part of a high calibre research project. The research should lead to a dissertation, thesis or publication.

For further information about the award, please contact the Development Officer at vm.development@durham.ac.uk.

A dedicated Van Mildert College Scholarships and Bursaries Pamphlet is available upon request.

Photo Credit: Victoria Brown

25

Photo Credit: Chris Darvill

Quaesitum Van Mildert College Scholarly Journal

Phytoplankton: the driver of marine ecosystem evolution Prof. Thomas Servais Van Mildert College and Institute of Advanced Study CNRS, UMR 8198 Evo-Eco-Paléo, Université de Lille, France How can we measure the fossil record of biodiversity since the arrival of animals in the marine environments some 600 million years ago? This question has received different answers during the past centuries. Was it a series of catastrophes that shaped the world, as believed Georges Cuvier (1769-1832), the famous French naturalist who is considered to be the ‘father of palaeontology’? Or was it a continued adaptation of life to environmental change as proposed by Cuvier’s rival, Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck (1744- 1829), who was one of the first to propose the concept of evolution? In England, Adam Sedgwick (1785-1873, a Yorkshire man from Dent) was one of the first to recognize the major geological eras as early as 1840. Still today, we divide the Phanerozoic Eon (541 million years to the present) of Earth History into the Palaeozoic (541 to 252 Ma), the Mesozoic (252 to 66 Ma) and the Cenozoic (66 Ma to the present) eras, basically because of an entirely different fossil content of these geological periods.

Palaeontologists try to understand the broad patterns exhibited by the fossil record of biodiversity, and it was the sophisticated studies of Sepkoski (1981) that helped us to better understand how the marine ecosystems evolved. Fig. 1A illustrates the generally accepted view: the diversity of families of marine invertebrates increased rapidly during the Cambrian and Ordovician to reach a Palaeozoic “plateau.” The most important mass extinction followed, at the Permian-Triassic boundary, before a second major radiation during the Mesozoic and Cenozoic, interrupted by a major mass extinction at the Cretaceous/Tertiary boundary (with the extinction of the dinosaurs).

Fig. 1: (A) The classical “Sepkoski” diversity curve of marine invertebrate families through Phanerozoic time, documenting the Cambrian, Paleozoic, and Modern Evolutionary Faunas, the Great Ordovician Biodiversification Event (GOBE), and the “Big Five” mass extinctions of marine invertebrates.

(B) Model of continental spreading with the supercontinents Rodinia and Pangaea.

(C) Phanerozoic global sea-level curve.

(D) Abundance of tropical shelf areas over Phanerozoic time (from Servais et al., 2009).

Ecological-Evolutionary Units (EEUs): C1-2 - Cambrian; P1-4 - Palaeozoic; M1-3 - Modern.

Geological periods, from left to right: C - Cambrian; O - Ordovician; S - Silurian; D - Devonian; C- Carboniferous; P - Permian; T - Triassic; J- Jurassic; C - Cretaceous; T - Tertiary.

27

IAS Fellow’s Article What drove the evolution of the marine biosphere and how can the Phanerozoic fossil record of marine biodiversity be explained? Many different scenarios have been proposed. Most likely a broad range of factors, physical and biological, interrelated or acting synergistically, shaped the marine diversity over time.

The physical factors surely include climate and sea-level change, habitat area, and continent-ocean configurations. Among the biological factors are microand macro-evolutionary parameters and phylogenies associated with extinction and subsequent recovery.

Fig. 1B indicates that continental configuration most probably played an important role; the two major radiations of marine life are correlated with the splitting of a supercontinent into numerous microcontinents. The Palaeozoic radiation took place after the break-up of the supercontinent Rodinia, while the Mesozoic-Cenozoic radiation parallels the break-up of Pangaea. Sea level was also important; during the Ordovician Period (in the Palaeozoic) and during the Cretaceous Period (in the Mesozoic) sea levels were very high (Fig.1C), with continental shelves flooded, in particular near the equator (Fig.1D), turning these large epicontinental platforms into “biodiversity hotspots” or “species-pumps.”

probably also the case during the different geological periods.

However, the fossil record of the phytoplankton is dramatically incomplete, in particular for the smaller fraction (< 20 µm), because this part is usually too tiny to be observed, even with an optical microscope (Fig.2).

Nevertheless, the known fossil record of the informal groupings of microphytoplankton (> 20µm) broadly parallels the Phanerozoic evolutionary faunas (Fig. 3).

Acritarchs, that most probably represented the cysts of phytoplanktonic organisms, dominated during the Palaeozoic, whereas the three most common groups of Modern phytoplankton, the coccolithophorids, the dinoflagellates, and the diatoms, began to dominate during the Mesozoic (Fig.3). We therefore believe that the acritarchs most probably fuelled the lower Palaeozoic radiation of marine life, while the coccolithophorids, dinoflagellates, and diatoms triggered the Mesozoic radiation.

Fig. 3: Phanerozoic diversity of the major phytoplankton groups (acritarchs in the Palaeozoic ; dinoflagellates, coccolithophores and diatoms in the Mesozoic and Cenozoic) plotted against the sea-level curve, and the evolution of pCO2.

Fig. 2: Microphotograph (scanning electron microscopy) of a phytoplankton cyst of the Silurian (ca 425 million years, Ma) of Gotland, Sweden. Note the scale : 20 micrometer (µm).

One factor which has received relatively little attention in the understanding of the evolution of marine ecosystems is that of food. We know that the phytoplankton are at the base of the marine trophic chains in modern oceans. Phyplankton serve as food for the larger zooplankton, but also for numerous filter feeding organisms in the benthos. This was most

Two major tectonic cycles reflect not only sea-level, but also phytoplankton evolution. See text for explanation. Note the very high sea-levels during the Ordovician and Cretaceous, and the extremely high pCO2 levels during the Lower Palaeozoic.

The Palaeozoic includes the Cambrian (C), Ordovician (O), Silurian (S), Devonian (D), Carboniferous (Mississipian, M, and Pennsylvanian, IP) and Permian (P). The Mesozoic includes the Triassic (Tr), Jurassic (J), and Cretaceous (K). Time is in million years (Ma). (from Servais et al. 2016).

28

Quaesitum Van Mildert College Scholarly Journal

Acknowledgements

References

This short note was written whilst undertaking a Visiting Fellowshop at the Institute of Advanced Study (IAS), Durham University. I would like to acknowledge Van Mildert Collge for housing me, and in particular Van Mildert’s Principal, Prof. David A.T. Harper, for inviting me to Durham, and for many hours of stimulating discussions.

Sepkoski, J.J.,1981. A factor analytic description of the Phanerozoic marine fossil record.

Paleobiology 7, 36-53.

Servais, T., Harper, D. A. T., Li, J., Münnecke, A., Owen, A. W. and Sheehan, P. M. 2009. Understanding the Great Ordovician Biodiversification Event (GOBE): Influences of paleogeography, paleoclimate, or paleoecology? GSA Today, 19 (4/5). 4-10.

Servais, T., Martin, R. E. and Nützel, A. 2016. The impact of the ‘terrestrialization process’ in the late Palaeozoic: pCO2, pO2, and the ‘phytoplankton blackout’. Rev. Palaeobot.

Palynol. 224, 26-37.

Photo Credit: Chris Darvill

29

COFUND Fellow’s Article

Challenging the agricultural transition models of prehistoric human health change: Insights from infants and children from diverse environments Dr Siân Halcrow Department of Anatomy, University of Otago, New Zealand COFUND Senior Research Fellow and Van Mildert College Dr Andrew Millard Department of Archaeology For nearly 2.5 million years of the history of the genus Homo, there was little change in social organisation, subsistence and general way of life1,2. The innovation and intensification of agriculture was a revolutionary turning point for human society3. The change to agricultural subsistence allowed greater security of food supply, leading to population growth, increasing social complexity, the development of new technologies, and changes in settlement patterns.

Despite the obvious advantages of food security, this development coincided with a major deterioration in human health in some parts of the world1,4. Ultimately, the changes in human society led to the development of overcrowding, malnutrition, sickness and poor living conditions, which still affect a significant proportion of the world's population today6,7. Women and children experience a greater burden of these problems, which affects population survival. To advance our understanding of the agricultural transition we can probe the lives of past peoples through bioarchaeology, the study of people from archaeological skeletal remains4,5,8-10.

period and earlier return of regular ovulation after birth11.

The model of prehistoric health change suggests that wherever and whenever a transition from hunting and foraging to agricultural dependence took place, it had major implications for diet, with an increase in infectious disease and decrease in general quality of life8-10.

An increase in fertility followed from the increased availability of carbohydrate staples suitable for weaning foods, resulting in a shorter breastfeeding

Photo Credit: Siân Halcrow Fig. 1: Excavation of a Bronze Age infant from the Northeast Thai site of Ban Non Wat (photo by Nigel Chang).

30

Quaesitum Van Mildert College Scholarly Journal

.

The deterioration in general health was caused by increased population density and unsanitary living conditions when people developed a more sedentary lifestyle4,5,10,11. Deterioration in health has also been associated with changes in the natural and social environment, including the introduction of novel diseases from close contact with domestic animals and the migration of people4,5,10.

Although a transition to agriculture occurred in many places around the world, the model of prehistoric health change is based primarily on research in Europe and North America. Recent bioarchaeological work in other parts of the world, by the authors and others, is challenging the applicability of this model. We find that human responses to agriculture are more complex and regionally specific than the model implies5,12-14. The study of stress and disease in infants and children has recently been recognised in bioarchaeology as being a sensitive barometer of population-level health15,16, and is extending our ability to understand variation in the impact of agricultural adoption and intensification (Figs. 1 and 2).

Our recent research in Thailand has shown that it is not until the Iron Age that there are significant changes in infant mortality indicating a change in population demography due to increased fertility and/or poor health, and an increase in infant and child pathology17-19.

This change coincides with major natural and social environmental changes occurring in the region including the intensification of wet-rice agriculture and associated changes in the water management that probably increased infection and mortality from waterborne infections19-20.

Our new research in the Atacama Desert in Northern Chile examines the same question of the effects of the start of agriculture. By working in the driest place on Earth we can test the effects of severe environmental constraints in these past populations during this transition (Fig. 2). Our work on diet and weaning behaviour through bone and tooth chemistry (isotopic analysis) is finding that the dietary diversity of pre-agricultural populations was retained in early agricultural populations, probably because environmental constraints determined subsistence choices21. We also find that infants and children had high rates of metabolic disease as the result of dietary restrictions, as well as physiological stress22-23. Further work assessing individual weaning histories through new isotopic sampling methods and dental wear patterns coupled with skeletal pathology will create a more nuanced picture of the impact of the transition to agriculture.

31

Photo Credit: Siân Halcrow Fig. 2: Gail Elliott and Anne-Marie Snoddy (PhD students at the University of Otago) visiting the Black Mummy statue at the mouth of the Camarones Valley in the Atacama Desert, which is famous for the earliest artificial mummification practices in the world.

Acknowledgements We would like to thank Prof. David Harper and the staff and students at Van Mildert College for their hospitality. We acknowledge the support of the Department of Archaeology at Durham University and received a Durham Senior Research Fellowship co-funded with European Union under grant agreement number 609412.

Our research is funded by the New Zealand Royal Society Marsden Fund, a NZ Rutherford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship, a University of Otago Health Science Division Career Development Postdoctoral Fellowship, and University of Otago Research grants.

We also thank our many collaborators on our Thai and Chilean projects including Bernardo Arriaza, Charlotte King, Charles Higham, Vivien Standen, Nancy Tayles and Rachanie Thosarat.

COFUND Fellow’s Article Footnotes [1] Price, T.D., Feinman, G.M. (eds.) (1995) Foundations of Social Inequality. New York: Plenum Press.

[2] Price, T.D., Gebauer, A.B. (eds.) (1995) Last Hunters, First Farmers: New perspectives on the prehistoric transition to agriculture. Santa Fe, New Mexico: School of American Research Press.

[3] Richerson, P.J., Boyd, R., Bettinger, R.L. (2001) Was agriculture impossible during the Pleistocene but mandatory during the Holocene? A climate change hypothesis. Am Antiquity 66: 387-411.

[4] Larsen, C.S. (2015). Bioarchaeology: Interpreting behaviour from the human skeleton. 2nd Edition.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

[5] Pinhasi, R., Stock, J. (2011) Human Bioarchaeology of the Transition to Agriculture. Hoboken, New Jersey: Wiley Blackwell.

[6] World Health Organisation (2013) World Health Statistics 2013, A Wealth of Information on Global Public Health. Switzerland: WHO Press.

[7] Food and Agriculture Organization (2011) The State of Food Insecurity in the World 2011.

[8] Bocquet-Appel, J.P., Naji, S. (2006) Testing the hypothesis of a worldwide Neolithic demographic transition. Curr Anthropol 47: 341-365.

[9] Cohen, M.N. (2008) Implications of the NDT for world wide health and mortality in prehistory. In: Bocquet-Appel, J.-P., Bar-Yosef, O. (eds.). The Neolithic Demographic Transition and its Consequences.

Dordrecht, Netherlands: Springer, pp. 481-500.

[10] Larsen, C.S. (1995) Biological changes in human populations with agriculture. Ann Rev Anthropol 24: 185-213.

[11] Sellen D.W., Smay, D.B (1999) Relationship between subsistence and age at weaning in "preindustrial" societies. Hum Nature INT BIOS 12: 47-87.

[12] Tayles, N., Halcrow, S.E., Domett K. (2007) The people of Noen U-Loke. In: Higham, C.F.W., Kijngam, A., Talbot, S. (eds.) The Origins of the Civilization of Angkor Vol II The Excavation of Noen U-Loke and Non Muang Kao. Bangkok: Thai Fine Arts Dept, pp. 243-304.

[13] Eshed, V., Gopher, A., Pinhasi, R., Hershkovitz, I. (2010) Paleopathology and the origin of agriculture in the Levant. Am J Phys Anthropol 143: 121-133.

[14] Halcrow, S.E., Harris, N.J., Tayles, N., Ikehara-Quebral, R., and Pietrusewsky, M. (2013) From the mouths of babes: dental caries in infants and children and the intensification of agriculture in mainland Southeast Asia. Am J Phys Anthropol 150: 409-420.

[15] Halcrow, S.E., Tayles, N. (2008) The Bioarchaeological Investigation of Childhood and Social Age: Problems and Prospects. J Archaeol Method Th 15(2): 190-215.

[16] Lewis, M. E. (2007) The Bioarchaeology of Children: Perspectives from biological and forensic anthropology.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

[17] Halcrow, S. E. (2006) Subadult Health and Disease in Late Prehistoric Mainland Southeast Asia. PhD thesis, University of Otago.

[18] Halcrow, S. E., Tayles, N., King, C. (2016) Infant and child health in prehistoric Southeast Asia. In: Oxenham, M., Buckley, B. (eds.). Bioarchaeology of Southeast Asia and the Pacific. London: Routledge Handbook Series, pp. 158-186.

[19] Tayles, N., Halcrow, S.E., Domett, K. (2007) The people of Noen U-Loke. In: Higham, C.F.W., Kijngam, A., Talbot, S. (eds.). The Origins of the Civilization of Angkor, Volume 2: The Excavation of Noen U-Loke and Non Muang Kao. Bangkok: The Thai Fine Arts Department, pp. 243-304.

[20] King, C.L., Halcrow, S.E., Tayles, N., Shkrum, S. (under review) Human biology, social structure and agriculture in prehistoric mainland Southeast Asia: an Iron Age ‘Agricultural Transition’? Archaeological Research in Asia.

[21] King, C.L., Halcrow, S.E., Millard, A.R., Gröcke, D.R., Standen, V.G., Arriaza, B.T. (in press) Dietary Diversity during the Agricultural Transition of the Northern Atacama Desert. PLoS ONE. [22] Snoddy, A-M. E., Halcrow S.E., Buckley, H.R., Standen, V. and Arriaza, B. (under review) Scurvy at the Agricultural Transition in the Atacama Desert (3,600-3,200 BP): Periodic Famine and Nutritional Stress at the Maternal-Foetal Interface. Int J Paleopathology.

[23] King, C.L., Halcrow, S.E., Millard, A.R., Gröcke, D.R., Standen, V.G., Arriaza, B.T. (2016) Dietary Diversity during the Agricultural Transition of the Northern Atacama Desert. 9th World Congress on Mummy Studies, Peru, August.

32

Quaesitum Van Mildert College Scholarly Journal

College Fellow, Prof. Sir Arnold Wolfendale, presents a portrait of Robert Hooke to Van Mildert College after an SCR Public Lecture, 9 December 2015 Photo Credit: Martin Brader

Chancellor Sir Thomas Allen, aluma Miss Bridget Tomlinson and The New Tyneside Orchestra perform at Opera by the Lake, part of Van Mildert Collegeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s 50th Anniversary celebrations, 11 July 2015 Photo Credit: Phoenix Photography

Academic Life at Van Mildert

Lord Malloch-Brown delivers the seventh annual Van Mildert College Trust lecture, ‘Small World, Big Problems: Why we need multilateralism more than ever’ on 17 November 2016 Photo Credit: Richard Bruce

Undergraduate Patrick Ribeiro performs prior to an SCR Public Lecture by Prof. Peter Doyle, “Kitchener’s Army and the Somme” 29 November 2016 Photo Credit: Richard Bruce

Quaesitum Van Mildert College Scholarly Journal

The Rocks on the Roof of the World Prof. David A. T. Harper Van Mildert College and Department of Earth Sciences Mount Everest is the most magnificent natural feature on Earth. This iconic mountain rises majestically 8,850 metres above sea level, its ascent marks a true pinnacle of human achievement; many have reached the summit but sadly many have floundered on its slopes. It’s unique biota and climate has attracted the term, the planet’s ‘third pole’. The region is also home to many distinctive and endemic cultures, adapted to conditions on the high Himalayan plateau. Nevertheless, access to the Everest Range is difficult, both logistically and politically. But what age and type of rocks lie on its summit?

these rocks in any great detail, their precise age and where they were deposited during the Ordovician.

Fortunately these rocks can be traced westwards where they crop out at lower, more accessible altitudes in the Nyalam Region, not far from the border with Nepal (Fig. 3).

Fig. 2: Location of Nyalam and Everest within the greater Himalaya (From Myrow et al. 2009, Bull. Geol. Soc. Amer. 121, 323-332).

Fig. 1: Main structural and stratigraphic units on Mount Everest; the shelly faunas are from the limestones on the summit (photograph courtesy of Professor Rick Law).

Initial reports by some of the early Everest climbing expeditions in the 1930s suggested that the limestones on the summit of Everest were Permian in age, but expeditions led by geologists from the Chinese Academy of Sciences in the mid 1970s established an up-to-date stratigraphic framework for the northern slope of the mountain, comparing the limestones on the summit with Lower and Middle Ordovician strata elsewhere in the world, such as South China. The entire upper part of Everest (Fig. 1), above the distinctive Yellow Band, consists of these Ordovician carbonates over 200 m in thickness and assigned to the Chiatsun Group. These rocks are thus about 460 million years old and were deposited under several hundred metres of seawater and are now located in the Greater Himalayan Belt (Fig. 2). But we still know little of the biotas from

35

In the latter stages of my career in the University of Copenhagen I had focused on a key event in Earth history, the Great Ordovician Biodiversification Event (GOBE), when the planet’s biotic diversity escalated over a relatively short interval of time; this programme involved many field seasons working on Greenland and a long track-record of research with my Chinese colleagues, in South China. A joint collaborative programme between China and Denmark (largely sponsored by the Danish Innovation Center, Shanghai) offered the opportunity to develop a new research multidisciplinary project (involving botany, geology and zoology) between our respective colleagues together with staff and students in the Tibetan University in Lhassa. During a couple of weeks of driving across some of the most hair-raising passes, reaching altitudes of some 5,000m, absorbing some of the most amazing scenery on the planet, we sampled a number of key localities, equivalent to those on the summit of Everest itself, the most interesting and productive occurring along the Friendship Highway (Fig. 4). Our new investigations, including detailed study of our fossils collections, have revealed moderately diverse shelly faunas dominated by

SCR Research Article collision of India with Eurasia that formed the Himalayas.

1

Photo Credit: David Harper Fig. 3: The yellow band and overlying Ordovician limestones at Nyalam in distance.

brachiopods (Fig. 5), commonly in shell concentrations and deposited within nearshore carbonate environments. The new fossils confirmed some of the previous Middle Ordovician correlations for this unit but our new collections also initiated monographic description of the brachiopods and interpretation of their palaeoecology, permitting a more precise correlation of this part of the Chiatsun Group. In addition, some stratigraphically higher units within the group were also sampled, providing a greater age range for the group than previously reported.

Biogeographical analysis of the fauna suggests it may be related to the low-latitude, Toquima-Table Head province that extended around the margins of the ancient continent of Laurentia (North America) at that time. This implies that a similar tropical belt was developed on the Tibetan margin of the continent of Gondwana during the Mid Ordovician.

Conodont and crinoid fauna

Youngest brachiopod fauna

Photo Credit: David Harper

3

2

Photo Credit: David Harper

Photo Credit: David Harper

Fig. 5: Clockwise from top: 1. Middle Ordovician brachiopod-dominated shell bed 2. Ventral valves of Orthambonites and Dactylogonia 3. Dorsal valve of Aporthophylina

Our new data, however, are also developing new models or the diversity of the marine animals, their habitats and environmental conditions together with the precise location of this part of Tibet on the globe during the Ordovician. The GOBE is a global event that also affected the Tibet margin of Gondwana in the shallow-water tropical conditions that prevailed at the time. But what a great opportunity to work on the roof of the World, visit the many unique temples and villages on the Tibet plateau, embedded in a unique culture surrounded by an ancient Ordovician seafloor.

References Donovan, S.K., Harper, D.A.T., Zhan Renbin, Stemmerik, L., Liu Jianbo & Stouge, S. 2012. A primitive cladid crinoid from the Jiacun Group, Tibet (Darriwilian, Middle Ordovician).

Geological Journal 47, 653-660.

Photo Credit: David Harper Fig. 4: Key localities samples along the Friendship Highway (in the middle distance) in the Ordovician limestones.

What did our new geological investigations really achieve? We confirmed that indeed the summit of Everest and adjacent areas was part of an ancient seabed some 460 million years ago that was thrust and uplifted into its present position during the more recent

Harper, D.A.T., Zhan, R., Stemmerik, L. , Li, J., Donovan, S. & Stouge, S. 2011. Ordovician on the roof of the World: Macroand microfaunas from tropical carbonates in Tibet.

Publicaciones del Instituto GeolĂłgico y Minero de EspaĂąa. Serie: Cuadernos del Museo Geominero 14, 215-220.

Zhan Renbin, Harper, D.A.T., Jin Jisuo, Liang Yan, Liu Jianbo, Stemmerik, L. & Stouge, S. 2014. Middle Ordovician Aporthophyla brachiopod fauna from the roof of the World, Southern Tibet. Palaeontology 57, 141-170.

36

Quaesitum Van Mildert College Scholarly Journal

Late Holocene earthquakes in Alaska evidence from Shuyak Island Dr Martin Brader Department of Geography At 5.36 pm on 27 March, 1964, Prince William Sound in south-central Alaska experienced one of the largest earthquakes ever recorded by modern instrumentation (Magnitude 9.2). Landsliding and a tsunami resulted, with the earthquake and associated hazards causing loss of life (129 fatalities) and property damage (est. $2.3 Bn) throughout the region (Brocher et al., 2014).

In order to assess future earthquake and tsunami risk, it is necessary to establish the frequency with which similar events occur. Palaeoseismological study is therefore important, with coastal wetlands having excellent potential to record past seismic activity due to their sensitivity to changes in relative sea level (RSL) and low energy depositional environment. Within these sediment sequences, the 1964 Great Alaska Earthquake acts as a useful horizon against which to test other possible earthquake signals. The 1912 Katmai tephra (volcanic ash) is also a prominent chronological marker horizon, which is well preserved in coastal wetland environments. Reconstruction of deformation associated with earthquakes can provide useful constraints for models of rupture zones.

Anchorage

Girdwood

Prince William Sound

Shuyak Island

Kodiak

Fig. 1 - Sites mentioned in the text in south central Alaska, USA. Base Image Source: Google Earth.

Previous coastal wetland research in Alaska has identified peat-mud couplets, which can result from rapid subsidence of coastal wetlands into the intertidal zone (e.g. Shennan et al., 2008; 2014). Not all peat-mud couplets result from submergence associated with earthquakes however, and must be distinguished using microfossil (diatom) evidence, which have strong association with salinity. Five essential criteria for the identification of seismic events have been developed, including lateral extent of peat-mud couplets with a sharp upper contact, replicable â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;suddennessâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; of emergence of submergence and the spatial pattern of submergence/emergence (see Nelson et al., 1996 and Shennan et al., 2016).

along the Alaskan coastline in order to assess the spatial patterns of earthquake subsidence/emergence (Fig. 1).

Coastal wetland research in Girdwood has provided evidence for multiple past earthquakes from peat-mud couplets, with events at ~900, ~1500, ~2100, ~2500, ~3200 and ~3800 a BP (Shennan et al., 2008). Similar studies have been undertaken at a number of locations

The work will establish the spatial extent of evidence for multiple earthquakes on Shuyak Island, which forms the eastern limit of the Kodiak segment. This will add to our existing knowledge of earthquake signals in south central Alaska.

37

In this project, samples are being analysed from Shuyak Island (Fig. 1). Sediment samples have been extracted from a series of coastal lowlands, including Bear Trail Marsh (see bottom right, page 38). Modern surface samples have been collected to allow the further development of a transfer function model for the region. In turn, fossil sediment samples have been extracted from sections and sediment cores to provide possible evidence of former earthquakes. Samples will undergo sediment geochemical and diatom analyses to identify possible signatures.

SCR Research Article Experiences of fieldwork on Shuyak Island, Alaska Data collection for this research project involved fieldwork on Shuyak Island, Alaska, which was accessed via float plane (see right) from the US mainland. The field team, comprising three researchers, was based at an Alaska State Parks Public Use Cabin (right), from which individual sites were accessed on foot or packraft. Shuyak Island is densely forested with abundant mosses, and so coastal wetlands were visited using the network of trails crossing the island.

Fieldwork in Alaska has particular considerations, including local wildlife, which must be borne in mind whilst working in the field. Other than a brief interaction with the park ranger, pilot and a group of visiting fisherman, we had no other human interaction over the ten day fieldwork period.

Food and equipment supplies were transported on the float plane, with plentiful emergency rations in case of bad weather. Our meals were predominantly freeze-dried including ice cream!

Photo Credit: Martin Brader

Acknowledgements This project is funded by USGS Earthquake Hazard Program Grant (the veiews and conclusions contained in this document are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as necessarily representing the official policies, either expressed or implied, of the US Government). Prof. Ian Shennan, Department of Geography, Durham University and Dr Natasha Barlow (Leeds) are the Principal Investigators.

Photo Credit: Martin Brader

References Brocher, T. M.; Filson, J. R.; Fuis, G. S.; Haeussler, P. J.; Holzer, T. L.; Plafker, G. and Blair, J. L. (2014) The 1964 Great Alaska Earthquake and tsunamis - a modern perspective and enduring legacies US Geological Survey Fact Sheet 2014-3018 6p.

Nelson, A. R.; Shennan, I. and Long, A. J. (1996) Identifying coseismic subsidence in tidal-wetland stratigraphic sequences at the Cascadia subduction zone of western North America Journal of Geophysical Research Vol. 101 Pg. 6115-6135

Photo Credit: Martin Brader

Shennan, I.; Barlow, N. and Combellick, R. (2008) Paleoseismological records of multiple great earthquakes in south central Alaska: a 4000 year record from Gridwood In, Freymueller, J. T.; Haeussler, P. J.; Wesson, R.; Ekstrรถm, G. (eds.)

Active Tectonics and Seismic Potential of Alaska, AGU, Washington DC, Pg 185-199 Shennan, I.; Barlow, N.; Carver, G.; Davies, F.; Garrett, E. and Hocking E. (2014) Great tsunamigenic earthquakes during the past 1000 yr on the Alaska megathrust Geology Vol. 42 Pg. 687-690 Shennan, I.; Garrett, E. and Barlow, N. (2016) Detection linits of tidal-wetland sequences to identify variable rupture nodes of megathrust earthquakes Quaternary Science Reviews Vol. 150 Pg. 1-30

Photo Credit: Martin Brader

38

Quaesitum Van Mildert College Scholarly Journal

Worms, shellfish and snails: charting the rapid rise of animal diversity Dr Martin Smith Department of Earth Sciences The Cambrian Explosion is one of the most profound evolutionary events in the history of life, representing a step change in the complexity and of life and its impact on the planet. Before the explosion, 550 million years ago, macroscopic organisms essentially inhabited the interface between water and sediment. As their complexity increased during the explosion, so did their interactions with the environment, fundamentally transforming the earth system: particle feeders cleared muddy and oxygen-depleted oceans; sponges pumped air into deep waters; shell-forming organisms transformed seawater chemistry and burrowers churned up sea floor sediments (Butterfield, 2011).

These ecological innovations transformed the composition of seawater, the availability of oxygen, the stability of sea floors—and, in turn, created new ecological opportunities that were quickly exploited by rapidly diversifying animal communities.

Untangling the effects of the Cambrian explosion from its causes requires a precise timeline of evolutionary events and environmental changes. The fossil record of this pivotal period is, alas, rather thin—largely because most of the key players lacked fossilizable components.

My interest is in one of the first groups to evolve mineralized skeletons, the Trochozoa (Fig. 1), which include a rogue’s gallery of shellfish and worms. If early fossils assigned to this group could be identified with particular living groups, then they could be used to measure the pace of the Cambrian explosion, determining whether trochozoan diversity arrived with a whimper or a bang Just as ancient records are key to resolving a family’s genealogy, the deepest relationships of the animal kingdom are best addressed by the fossil record, which preserves ‘missing links’ since pruned by extinction, often characterised by undecipherable combinations of morphological features (Budd & Jensen, 2000). Many trochozoan fossils (Fig. 1), however, represent palaeontological paradoxes that have only now begun to tell a coherent story.

39

Fig. 1: Trochozoan phyla. b, Nemertea; b, Phoronida; c, Brachiopoda; d, Mollusca (Conchifera); e, Mollusca (Aculifera); f, Annelida; g, Sipunculida

My small contributions to this emerging picture include a comprehensive re-evaluation of Wiwaxia (Fig. 2b), one of the iconic problematica from the famous Burgess Shale, a fossil site renowned for its exceptional preservation. This new view on Wiwaxia overturned the idea that molluscs evolved from a simple shell-bearing animal like a hyolith (Fig. 2d).

High-resolution optical and electron microscopy, alongside mathematical analysis, showed that the fossils’ teeth and scaly armour exhibit molluscan properties (Smith, 2014; Yang, Smith, Lan, Hou, & Zhang, 2014), making Wiwaxia a candidate model for the morphology of the ancestral mollusc.

New Wiwaxia-like fossils from China even suggest that a

SCR Research Article scaly armature arose long before the earliest molluscs, perhaps even in ancestors of the annelid and brachiopod lineages (Zhang, Smith, & Shu, 2015).

The suggestion that that hyoliths are not ancestral molluscs raises the question of where they do fit in life’s tree. My most recent work has shown that these widespread fossils are not molluscs at all, instead belonging to the brachiopods, based on the characteristic tentacles with which they feed—revealed for the first time in some new and quite exquisite fossil material (Moysiuk, Smith, & Caron, 2017). This reveals an unexpected twist in the establishment of the brachiopod body plan, and fits in to an emerging picture that shows that the two simple shells that define this group emerged from complex ancestors that lived in a tube of intermeshed cones and plates (Fig. 1c) (Holmer, Skovsted, & Williams, 2002; Skovsted, Brock, Holmer, Topper, & Larsson, 2015).

Individually, each of these fossil organisms illuminates a particular point in the early history of Trochozoa.

Together, they can speak more generally to the origins of complexity and diversity in the group. I am now working to build a robust ‘family tree’ that will resolve Trochozoan relationships, which will allow the fossil record to speak to when, and how quickly, the modern body plans were put together. This will ultimately lead to an improved understanding of the pace and direction of the Cambrian explosion, the most profound radiation in our shared evolutionary history.

Fig 2: Problematic Cambrian trochozoans. a, Halkieria (halkieriid), b, Wiwaxia (wiwaxiid), c, Kulparina (tommotiid, from Skovsted et al. 2015), d, Haplophrentis (hyolith)

References Budd, G. E., & Jensen, S. (2000). A critical reappraisal of the fossil record of the bilaterian phyla. Biological Reviews, 75(2), 253–295.

Butterfield, N. J. (2011). Animals and the invention of the Phanerozoic Earth system. Trends in Ecology and Evolution, 26(2), 81–87. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.tree.2010.11.012 Holmer, L. E., Skovsted, C. B., & Williams, A. (2002). A stem group brachiopod from the lower Cambrian: support for a Micrina (Halkieriid) ancestry.

Palaeontology, 45(5), 875–882. http://doi.org/10.1111/1475-4983.00265 Moysiuk, J., Smith, M. R., & Caron, J.-B. (2017). Hyoliths are Palaeozoic lophophorates. Nature, In production.

Skovsted, C. B., Brock, G. A., Holmer, L. E., Topper, T. P., & Larsson, C. M. (2015). The early Cambrian tommotiid Kulparina rostrata from South Australia.

Journal of Paleontology, 89(6), 920–932. http://doi.org/10.1017/jpa.2016.5 Smith, M. R. (2014). Ontogeny, morphology and taxonomy of the soft-bodied Cambrian “mollusc” Wiwaxia.

Palaeontology, 57(1), 215–229. http://doi.org/10.1111/pala.12063 Yang, J., Smith, M. R., Lan, T., Hou, J.-B., & Zhang, X.-G. (2014). Articulated Wiwaxia from the Cambrian Stage 3 Xiaoshiba Lagerstätte. Scientific Reports, 4, 4643. http://doi.org/10.1038/srep04643 Zhang, Z.-F., Smith, M. R., & Shu, D.-G. (2015). New reconstruction of the Wiwaxia scleritome, with data from Chengjiang juveniles. Scientific Reports, 5, 14810. http://doi.org/10.1038/srep14810

40

Photo Credit: Martin Brader

SCR Research Article

The Ordered Universe: a unique interdisciplinary project Prof. Brian K. Tanner Department of Physics When interdisciplinary work between arts and humanities scholars and scientists is mentioned, most people imagine a project where, for example, the scholar interprets the inscriptions and origins of a coin while the scientists measure its magnetic properties1.

Such collaborations are extremely valuable, such as identifying the origin of inks on medieval manuscripts through analysis of their composition by micro-Raman spectroscopy, but strictly speaking these are multidisciplinary projects. To engage in genuinely interdisciplinary research, scholars and scientists with a range of expertise must focus on a single problem, not several parallel, though inter-related, ones.

The Durham-led Ordered Universe project2 is achieving genuine interdisciplinarity by focusing its activity on the small number of scientific treatises written by the 13th Century polymath, Robert Grosseteste (c.

1170-1253). It uses a technique of collaborative reading in which the team, including linguists, historians, palaeographers, physicists, a psychologist and engineers, read together the newly translated text line by line, word by word. While expensive in time, it has

proven to be a hugely stimulating and non-linear process. There are two primary rules. The first is a willingness to ask open and honest questions – there are no stupid questions during collaborative reading. Any individual will not have expertise outside of at most two or three disciplines and there is no embarrassment engendered by asking a question, the answer to which is obvious to someone in a different discipline. The second is that trespassers will be welcomed. Rather than setting out disciplinary demarcation, members welcome constructive suggestions from “non-experts”.

Grosseteste, who became Bishop of Lincoln in 1235, is much less well-known than his disciple, Roger Bacon. In a period between approximately 1200 and his appointment as tutor to the Franciscans in Oxford in 1228, he wrote 13 scientific treatises. The later treatises were based on the recently rediscovered scientific works of Aristotle. Grosseteste’s arguments are highly mathematical in structure, although he did not use mathematical symbols. The late treatise on light, De luce, is an excellent example of where the methodology used by modern scientists has been applied to elucidate features of Grosseteste’s thinking that are not apparent to scholars without such scientific training. In order to explain why solid materials are stable and have three-dimensionality, Grosseteste postulated that it was light that gave form to matter. From a point, light expanded instantaneously into a sphere, dragging matter with it until a minimum density was reached, at which point the first of Aristotle’s heavenly spheres was formed. Once the limit of the Universe had been reached, light was reflected back towards the centre of the Universe, compressing matter until another threshold was reached at which another perfected sphere was formed. The sequence continued until all nine spheres were formed, leaving the final tenth imperfect sphere of the elements. The physicists on the team saw immediately that Grosseteste’s argument could be translated into modern mathematical notation.

The result was the simulation of the “Medieval Big Bang” described by Grosseteste, showing that indeed his arguments did result in the formation of a universe such as he described, subject to limitations on the parameters used in the simulation3,4,5.

42

Quaesitum Van Mildert College Scholarly Journal

The study of medieval science using this methodology has not only shown that the roots of the scientific method extend much farther back than the Scientific Revolution of the 17th Century, but has, fascinatingly, stimulated new science. As a result of the study of Grosseteste’s interpretation of the rainbow through his colour model, we have shown that rainbows from different size rain droplets and under different lighting conditions can be modelled using spiral colour coordinates, incorporating modern understanding of the scattering of light from small particles6.

Footnotes [1] Ferromagnetism in ancient copper-based coinage D W MacDowall, R L Smith, I B MacCormack and B K Tanner, Nature 280 (1979) 46-8 [2] www.ordered-universe.com [accessed 9.11.2016]

[3] A Medieval Multiverse, T. C. B. McLeish, R. G. Bower, B. K. Tanner, H. E. Smithson, C. Panti, N. Lewis and G. E. M. Gasper, Nature 507 (2014) 161-163 [4] A Medieval Multiverse?: Mathematical Modelling of the 13th Century Universe of Robert Grosseteste, R. G. Bower, T. C. B. McLeish, B. K. Tanner, H. E. Smithson, C. Panti, N. Lewis and G. E. M. Gasper, Proc. Roy. Soc. Lond. A 470 (2014) 20140025 [5] Unity and Symmetry in the De Luce of Robert Grosseteste, B.K. Tanner, R.G. Bower, T.C.B. McLeish and G.E.M. Gasper in “Robert Grosseteste and the pursuit of Scientific Learning in the Middle-Ages” Eds. Jack P. Cunningham & Mark Hocknull (Springer 2016) pp 3-20.

[6] A color coordinate system from a 13th century account of rainbows, H. E. Smithson, P. S. Anderson, R. Fosbury, G. Dinkova-Bruun, G. Gasper, P. Laven, T. C. B. McLeish, C. Panti and B. K. Tanner, J. Optical Soc. America A 31 (2014) A341-A349

Climate, black gold and a view to the future Dr Howard A. Armstrong Fellow, Van Mildert College Shales are newsworthy as a consequence of the shale gas revolution and fracking. The basic science is that the target shale is rich in organic matter that on burial into the crust transforms into hydrocarbons - and at temperatures above 150oC gas. Shales are the known source of the bulk of the world’s hydrocarbons. Shales of the Kimmeridge Clay Formation are the primary source of North Sea oil (Fig. 1). So what are shales, how and where do organic-rich shales form and what can the analysis of shales tell us about earth surface processes in deep time?

Shales are found in a wide range of depositional environments from lakes, deltas and continental shelves into the deepest parts of the oceans. Shales are fine grained rocks (typically mineral grains are <0.06mm) predominantly composed of clay minerals and variable percentages of subsidiary minerals including quartz, calcite, feldspar and organic matter. Shales contain roughly 95% of the organic matter in all sedimentary rocks. However, this amounts to less than 1% by mass in an average shale, rising to 5% or greater in oil source rocks. Organic-rich (“black”) shales represent major perturbations in the global carbon cycle and are recurrent throughout geological time. It is now known

43

that thick shale successions can provide high resolution archives of extreme climate and ocean change.

Photo Credit: Howard Armstrong

Fig. 1: Spectacular shale cliffs at Kimmeridge Bay, Dorset.

This formation extends eastwards into the North Sea and northwards to the Arctic Ocean. Throughout this area these shales are rich in organic matter and are major oil and gas source rocks.

SCR Research Article The research challenge for understanding marine black shale distribution, thickness and - importantly internal variations in deep time is to better constrain the processes that controlled the location and variability of organic carbon production and burial, and their relationship with atmospheric circulation, ocean currents and dynamic depositional conditions.

There is a general consensus that in shallow marine settings organic carbon accumulated in oxygen-deficient water and resulted from a complex interplay between primary productivity, preservation and sediment dilution. The relative contribution of each of these factors is debated but each is directly or indirectly linked to atmospheric circulation, through nutrient supply via fluctuations in continental weathering intensity, precipitation and runoff, wind-driven oceanic upwelling, and large scale surface current systems. My current research is based on a number of case studies from the Cambrian, Carboniferous and Jurassic periods. The recently published case study described below was part of collaborative project between earth scientists and climate modellers at Bristol, Newcastle, and Durham universities and Getech.

Kimmeridge Clay case study

There is a consensus that the KCF in the Wessex Basin of the UK was deposited in a shelf environment below fair-weather wave base but close to storm wave base.

Fluctuations in water column stratification and bottom water redox are indicated by sedimentology, ichnology and, bulk organic and inorganic geochemistry and biomarkers. These independent lines of evidence support highly variable seawater redox conditions, from fully oxic to anoxic and euxinic (anoxic-sulphidic).

New climate simulations using the HadCM3L model with a paleogeography of the Late Jurassic (Kimmeridge - Tithonian stages, ca. 150 Ma) and atmospheric carbon dioxide levels 4x pre-industrial, indicate warm and wet tropical-like conditions reached as far north as the UK sector of the Jurassic Boreal Seaway (~35oN; Fig. 2). This is associated with a northern hemisphere Jurassic Hadley cell and an intensified subtropical jet stream which both extend further north than in the modern >20o (July-September).

Orbital-scale modulation of organic carbon burial primarily in the long eccentricity (400-kyr) power band combined with a clear positive correlation between %TOC carbonate-free and the kaolinite/illite ratio from the Kimmerdige Clay (Fig. 3) supports peak organic carbon burial under the influence of very humid climate conditions, similar to the modern tropics.

Fig. 2: Modelled precipitation, location of the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ, red line) during the deposition of the Kimmeridge Clay Formations based on HadCM3L model, a paleogeography of the Late Jurassic and 4x pre-industrial atmospheric carbon dioxide. Upper map is boreal summer (June, July, August), and lower map is boreal winter (December, January, February). During Boreal summer the ITCZ lies in a more northerly location than at the present day placing the Boreal sector of the NW European seaway temporarily under tropical-like conditions. The green line shows the approximate 1mm/day precipitation contour, whose position is influenced by the location of the descending limb of the Hadley Cell and the subtropical jet.

Fig. 3: Relationship between kaolinite/illite and percentage total organic carbon (carbonate-free) with depth. The depth scale has also been tuned to the long eccentricity (400-kyr) orbital cycle. Peaks in kaolinite/illite correspond to periods of high rainfall, tropical weathering conditions and high run-off. There is a peak to peak correlation with high organic carbon burial. Superimposed on the long-term (million year) trend are distinct higher-frequency and high-amplitude fluctuations at ~40m (long eccentricity, 400-kyr) and ~10m (short eccentricity 100-kyr)-scales.

44

Quaesitum Van Mildert College Scholarly Journal

This re-interpretation of large-scale climate relationships has profound implications for atmospheric circulation patterns, changing oceans and organic carbon burial at elevated levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide. At pCO2 levels 4x pre-industrial; the Late Jurassic world was ice free and the tropics extended to at least 35oN of the equator. Large areas of the low-mid-latitude continental shelves were covered with seawater that was anoxic at depth. We are now living in a 400 ppm carbon dioxide world, values approximately twice pre-industrial levels and not previously experienced since the Miocene, 20 million years ago.

References Armstrong, H. A., T. Wagner, L. G. Herringshaw, A. J. Farnsworth, D. J. Lunt, M. Harland, J. Imber, C. Loptson, and E. F. Atar (2016), Hadley circulation and precipitation changes controling black shale deposition in the Late Jurassic Boreal Seaway, Paleoceanography, 31(8), 1041-1053.

Photo Credit: Chris Davrill

45

Photo Credit: Martin Brader

Cover Photo Credit: David Harper

Van Mildert College Mill Hill Lane Durham DH1 3LH

Principal: Deputy Principal: Editor:

Prof. David A.T Harper Dr Victoria H Brown Mr Richard Bruce