Greetings blogosphere,
This post updates you on the latest happenings in the WEG group at Waikato University. It’s been a busy few months.
Rutherford Discovery Fellowship
Yes, there I am, looking rather pleased with myself. But with good reason having just received a Rutherford Discovery Fellowship for my work on cave systems, speleothems and palaeoclimate. The Fellowship award provides me with the chance to focus on this research for five (count em’) years! It’s a very exciting time in the group and we’re looking forward to making some serious headway in this work which aims to develop new proxies (surrogates) of past climatic and environmental change from speleothems. See recent media on the RDF here.
Visiting researcher: Dr Sebastian Breitenbach (Project QUEST)
Our first visitor as part of project QUEST, Dr Sebastian Breitenbach, visited Beth Fox and I for the last three weeks of September. Seb and I go way back. It was absolutely brilliant having Seb here, and boy, we learned a lot! Seb is an expert on caves and all that goes into the development of climate records from stalagmites. We managed to survey our monitoring site at Waipuna Cave, organise sampling of speleothems for U series dating, Seb gave a seminar, and heaps more.. It was a blast, and it’s only a pity he couldn’t stay longer. Next time South Island, Seb!
Lincoln University – visit to Dr Niklas Lehto
Most recently, I paid a visit to my friend and collaborator Niklas Lehto at Lincoln University to get updated on the PhD project of Zicheng Yi (Michael). This was my first visit to Lincoln, and I was really impressed with the facilities and great commeraderie there among the academics. I gave a seminar on the PhD research of Mahdiyeh Salmanzadeh, which examines the topic of cadmium (Cd) accumulation in soils by using stable isotopes of Cd to figure out how much Cd in soil originates from fertilizers used in the 20th Century. Looking forward to doing more on this topic with Nik and Claudine Stirling (U Otago).
Ok Cheers for now,
Adam (Cambridge, NZ)
Waikato Environmental GEOCHEMistry 