NERC Isotope Geosciences Laboratory

There are concerns that in the future changes in climate might increase the spread of diseases and threaten human health. A new NERC-funded project involving Plymouth, Birmingham and Nottingham Universities along with the NERC Isotope Geosciences is examining the changes in climate that took place at the same time as the Plague of Justinian. The team will use evidence of past climate preserved in lake muds. The muds at the bottom of Nar lake in central Turkey are annually-banded, similar to tree rings, which offers the chance to reconstruct year-by-year variations in climate. Sediment core samples from Nar show that the onset of the plague coincided with a very large switch from a drier to a wetter climate. The wetter climate would have increased the numbers of rats and other rodents which carry fleas, which in turn carry the plague bacterium. In order to test this idea more rigorously, they will measuring climatic indicators in the cores for each individual annual layer during the critical time period around the start and end of the plague, then using the chemistry of the lake sediment layers to reconstruct how fast the climate changed and whether there was any lag between this and spread of the disease. The cores will also tell them, indirectly, about the consequences of the plague for rural agriculture, via the different types of pollen that are preserved.

The project is being led by Prof Neil Roberts (University of Plymouth) in collaboration with Dr Warren Eastwood (Birmingham), Dr Matt Jones and Jonathan Dean (Nottingham) as well as Prof Melanie Leng (BGS).

At the BGS please contact Prof Melanie Leng for further information.

This recently funded NERC grant will shed light on a key stage in the evolution of life on Earth. The advent onto land of limbed vertebrates (tetrapods) was an event that shaped the future evolution of the planet, including the appearance of humans. The process began about 360 million years ago, during the late Palaeozoic, in the early part of the Carboniferous Period. Within the 20 million years that followed, limbed vertebrates evolved from their essentially aquatic and fish-like Devonian predecessors into fully terrestrial forms, radiating into a wide range of body forms that occupied diverse habitats and ecological niches. We will use stratigraphical, sedimentological, palynological, geochemical and isotopic data to establish the conditions of deposition that preserved the fossils, the environments in which the organisms lived and died, and the precise times at which they did so.

This project is headed by Jenny Clack (Cambridge) in collaboration with Nick Fraser and colleagues (NHM), Dave Millward and Tim Kearsey (BGS), John Marshall (Southampton), Sarah Davies and Cary Bennett (Leicester) and Melanie Leng (BGS/Leicester).

NIGL have secured a NERC Standard Grant in collaboration with other scientists at Nottingham University and University College London to investigate the impact of recent environmental change and anthropogenic pollution on Lake Baikal, Siberia.

Lake Baikal is the world's oldest lake in south eastern Siberia that began to form over 20 million years ago. A key feature of Lake Baikal is the high degree of biodiversity with over 2,500 flora and fauna, the majority of which are endemic. Such high levels of endemicity have led to the lake being cited as the "most outstanding example of a freshwater ecosystem" and resulted in the site being designated a World Heritage Site in 1996. Industrial development and changes in catchment land-use since the 1950's, however, pose real and serious threats to the stability of the lake's ecosystem with pollution entering the lake from major conurbations, industrial centres, mining and agricultural practises.

This project will develop the application of silicon isotope measurements in Lake Baikal to provide information on changes in biogenic nutrient utilisation in association with forcings such as: global warming, increases in water temperatures, ice cover and ice thickness.

Further information from Matt Horstwood and Melanie Leng

Congratulations to Dr Naomi Sykes (Nottingham University), Dr Jane Evans (NIGL) and Prof Alan Hoelzel (Durham):

Visit any stately home and you will find a herd of European fallow deer (Dama dama dama). These elegant animals are one of natural history's puzzles because, despite their name, they are not of European origin: they are native to Turkey from where people have gradually transported them around the globe. The distribution of fallow deer is thus a direct record of human population movements, trade and ideology with the potential to provide cultural evidence of the highest quality and relevance for a range of disciplines and audiences. There are many publications devoted to fallow deer but these largely recycle 'received wisdom'. In fact, astonishingly little is known about fallow deer; their history is obfuscated by ambiguous linguistic, textual, iconographic and archaeological evidence. To rectify this situation we carried out a pilot study, The Fallow Deer Project, whose results have challenged established theories about the species' history and provided new insights into Roman, Anglo-Saxon and Norman society. It also highlighted the scarcity of scientific work on fallow deer and demonstrated how a new dataset will enable us to explore some of the highest-profile issues in European archaeology: e.g. the nature and spread of the Neolithic in the eastern Mediterranean and the structure and worldview of societies in the Bronze Age Aegean, Iron Age Greece and Gaul, and the Roman, Byzantine, Islamic and Norman Empires.

To realise this potential, our transdisciplinary team will employ methods proven by our pilot study - e.g. the integration of archaeology, history, geography and anthropology with genetics, stable isotope analysis and osteological research - to answer the following questions:

1. Were fallow deer domesticated?
2. Under what circumstances were fallow deer established across Europe?
3. Did the collapse of the Roman Empire cause extirpation of fallow deer?
4. Did the Normans reintroduce fallow deer via Islamic influence?
5. 5) How do human-Dama relationships reveal worldview?

• For more information contact Dr Jane Evans

Thomas F.D. Mason, Dominik J. Weiss, John B. Chapman, Jamie J. Wilkinson, Svetlana G. Tessalina, Baruch Spiro, Matthew S.A. Horstwood, John Spratt, Barry J. Coles. Zn and Cu isotopic variability in the Alexandrinka volcanic-hosted massive sulphide (VHMS) ore deposit, Urals, Russia Original Research Article. Chemical Geology, Volume 221, Issues 3-4, 5 October 2005, Pages 170-187.

• More information

The oxygen isotope composition of phosphate: a potential tool in UK freshwater studies?

High concentrations of phosphate are a primary cause of 'eutrophication' in water: an over-enrichment in nutrients leading to excessive growth of algae, which can be very damaging to the aquatic environment. Many rivers in the UK, and other parts of the world suffer from this problem because phosphate-rich waters from sewage works or from farming activities are pumped or drain into the rivers. Dealing with this problem involves knowing where the phosphate comes from, and understanding what happens to it when it gets into the river.

The project is headed by Tim Heaton (NIGL), with Daren Gooddy and Dan Lapworth (BGS), and Roland Bol and Steve Granger (Rothamsted Research).

The phosphate ion contains oxygen atoms which can be of different isotope types: oxygen of atomic mass 18 and oxygen of atomic mass 16 (both are naturally-occurring, non-radioactive isotopes). Preliminary studies have shown that the proportions of these two isotopes differ depending on where the phosphate came from (e.g. sewage compared with agricultural fertilizer), and that changes in the proportion of the two isotopes indicate the way in which the phosphate is being used in the water. However, this preliminary work has been mainly done in saline waters in estuaries and coastal areas, and we want to see if it might work in fresh water environments in the UK.

The plan is therefore two-fold:

1. to analyse the proportions of oxygen-18 and oxygen-16 in phosphate from a small number of sewage and agricultural effluents, to see if they differ. If they do, we may be able to use such measurements to determine where phosphate pollution is coming from
2. to see if the proportions of oxygen-18 and oxygen-16 in phosphate coming from a point-source (e.g. the outfall of a sewage works) change as the phosphate is carried downstream. If they do, we may be able to use such measurements to determine the phosphorus demand or 'limitation' of the system — an important factor in controlling eutrophication.