Our own Prof. @mudwaterclimate.bsky.social giving today’s James Gregory public lecture, “Can Humanity Flourish in a Warming World?” with a cautiously hopeful message for the future.

🪨 The Accidental Geologist A lovely feature from St Andrews Alumni on our very own Dr Catherine Rose, reflecting on how she discovered Earth Sciences as a student at St Andrews and the journey that eventually brought her back. 🌍 Read the full story: alumni.wp.st-andrews.ac.uk/2026/09/07/t...

A huge welcome back to all our students – and an especially warm welcome to everyone joining us for the first time! 🌍🪨👋 Today is the first day of teaching and we’re excited to kick off a new academic year filled with fieldwork, labs, maps, mountains and, inevitably, some Scottish weather. 🥾🗺️🌧️🌱🌋

Our 4th-year BSc & MGeol students have just returned from our Alps field trip! Two weeks of camping across Italy and Switzerland, following a spectacular transect through the Alpine orogen and exploring the minerals, rocks, and structures that tell the story of mountain building. 🔨🧭🏔️🇮🇹🇨🇭

🌍🪨 Welcome to St Andrews and the School of Earth & Environmental Sciences! 🌋🌊 A huge welcome to all our new students! 👋 We’re looking forward to meeting you and kicking off the academic year together. 🎉

Counterintuitively, mixing of dry air into convecting plumes amplifies moist heat extremes. This "entrainment" effect strengthens as climate warms and dries, increasing human heat stress. Details in our new paper, led by @roshanjha.bsky.social: agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/...

Eos@eos.org · last mo.

The mixing of dry air into rising plumes of warm, moist air helps explain why extremely hot and humid days are increasing in higher-latitude regions. eos.org/research-spo...

Our very own Dr Will Hutchison featured on BBC Radio 4’s Rare Earth, talking all things volcanoes 🌋 – including some of the fantastic research happening here at St Andrews. 🎧 Listen now on BBC Sounds: www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m...

BBC Radio 4 - Rare Earth, Volcano

Helen Czerski and Tom Heap investigate the environmental impact of volcanoes.

bbc.co.uk

Happy to have contributed to Chapter 5 "The Arctic" in a section led by @drahbutler.bsky.social – featuring some discussion of an unusually early final stratospheric warming for winter 2024/25 and an unusually early sudden stratospheric warming for winter 2025/26! doi.org/10.1175/BAMS...

American Meteorological Society@ametsoc.org · 2mo ago

🚨 The 2025 #BulletinAMS State of the Climate report is here, and the findings are critical. Earth’s greenhouse gas concentrations were the highest on record and record temperatures were observed across the globe. Read here: ametsoc.org/soc #StateoftheClimate2025

Warming temperatures + decreasing relative humidity = more water being sucked from soil / reservoirs = DROUGHT. Simple physics. Europe + UK are on the frontline because they are warming so rapidly – it will get worse until 'net zero' is reached. That's my TED talk 🌍 www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/cw...

UK weather: More than two-thirds of England now in drought with conditions set to worsen

The National Drought Agency adds the East Midlands, Kent, East Sussex, and other parts of England to the areas officially in drought conditions.

bbc.co.uk

Huge congratulations to our colleagues on their well-deserved promotions! – Sami Mikhail & Eva Stüeken promoted to Professor – Nick Gardiner promoted to Reader – Tim Kinnaird promoted to Senior Research Fellow Well done all! 👏🥳

Watch Dr Claire Cousins tonight at 10pm BST on BBC Four’s The Sky At Night talking about how the rocks at North Berwick are helping us look for life on Mars! Also featured is SEES alumnus Dr Mark Fox-Powell talking about his icy moon research at The Open University 🔭📺🌌 @uniofstandrews.bsky.social

What can distant worlds tell us about our own? Ilyana Guez's thesis introduces Molecule Agnostic Spectral Clustering (MASC), a novel method for analysing exoplanet atmospheres through comparative exoplanetology. Read more here: 👇🌎🪐✨ doi.org/10.17630/sta... @earthscista.bsky.social #OpenResearch

Read the #OpenAccess article by Silvestre et al. [2026] for free on @wiley-stem.bsky.social! 🔗 doi.org/10.1029/2025... @eth-eaps.bsky.social @earthscista.bsky.social @liverpooluni.bsky.social #bluecarbon

Autogenic Shoreline Migration and Its Effect on the Storage of Carbon in Marginal Marine Successions

Autogenic shoreline migration governs where organic-rich strata are preserved in deltaic successions A simple timescale framework links shoreline migration to the subsurface extent of paleo-blue ca...

doi.org

The inaugural EUCLIDYAN workshop was hosted by the Max Planck Institute in March. It was a fantastic event, establishing new collaborations and a new community of European climate dynamics researchers. We will host EUCLIDYAN #2 @earthscista.bsky.social in 2027 🌍 mpimet.mpg.de/en/communica...

Connected Across Europe: The EUCLIDYAN Initiative on Climate Dynamics

EUCLIDYAN connects European research groups studying climate dynamics in a unique way: The initiative focuses on young researchers—and on personal connections that encourage scientific collaboration.

mpimet.mpg.de

New in #GPLetters by Mikhail et al "Mixed-paragenesis diamonds don’t need multiple growth episodes: mantle metasomatism can do it all in one go ". Read more here: buff.ly/IK1dgZN #OpenAccess @earthscista.bsky.social

Catherine Rose @earthscista.bsky.social co-led the 2026 GSA Thompson Field Forum in Namibia with @geosociety.bsky.social and @jhu.edu colleagues, celebrating the completion of the GRIND drilling program through the Ediacaran–Cambrian transition and exploring the Nama Basin's remarkable geology.

A bit belated but huge congratulations to Celeste Smith on passing her PhD viva on 15 June! Celeste is now officially an expert in micro-scale analyses and a leading volcano detective-hunter 🌋 Well done, Dr Smith, and best wishes for the exciting adventures ahead! 👏

Huge congratulations to Anna Szreter on successfully defending her PhD on “The Power of Imperfections: The Sources of Colour and Luminescence in Natural Cryolite from Ivittuut (SW Greenland)” at the University of Oslo! 🎉 We look forward to celebrating again when Anna graduates with us on 3 July.

New findings from Rika, Eva, Tony and I: We used evolutionary biology techniques to investigate how nitrogen sustained early life on Earth, and found that ammonium was key! It could have been supplied by hydrothermal activity and other planetary processes. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Abiotic sources of fixed nitrogen sustained early ecosystems for several hundred million years after the origin of life

Genomic evidence suggests early life relied on ammonium and other N molecules before biological nitrogen fixation evolved.

science.org

This afternoon, I asked faculty, staff, and research students in the School of Earth & Environmental Sciences @earthscista.bsky.social for their predictions/guesses for the highest temperature that will be recorded in the UK this week. With 34 responses, our ensemble mean is 39.2°C.

Excited to host the Land-Climate Workshop @uniofstandrews.bsky.social this week! Looking forward to ~40 talks + posters on cutting-edge research questions spanning wildfires, drought, freshwater availability, monsoons, extreme weather and much more! @earthscista.bsky.social @gabihegerl.bsky.social

Congratulations to Dr Megan Pelly for passing her PhD viva! Megan's PhD employed modelling & palaeo proxies to understand past carbon cycling, supervised by @mudwaterclimate.bsky.social. Thanks to Eva Stüeken & Malin Odalen for examining, and the team behind an excellent cake & celebratory spread! 🎉

Great to be back at @bpsc2026.bsky.social after a few years I’ve been away from the field, thanks @earthscista.bsky.social for making sure the sun was out on arrival this morning 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿😎 #BPSC2026

🚨🌋❄️Delighted to share our paper identifying Newberry Pumice tephra in Greenland ice at 686 CE, and investigating other 7th Century eruptions associated with climate cooling is now available online in Quaternary Science Reviews. 🌋❄️🚨 doi.org/10.1016/j.qu...

A pleasure to host @timwoollings.bsky.social, Ken Mylne, @hcbloomfield19.bsky.social & @drchriswhite.bsky.social yesterday for the annual @earthscista.bsky.social symposium, this year on "From dynamics to impacts: Weather in a warming world". Thank you all for visiting and giving such great talks!

A big congrats to Josh Duffield, supervised by @drmichaelbyrne.bsky.social, for passing his PhD viva today with @ruthgeen.bsky.social and me as examiners. Some fascinating work on extreme temperatures that was a pleasure to read and discuss! 🥳 @earthscista.bsky.social

Our faculty, postdocs, PhD researchers, and MSc students delivered more than 25 talks and poster presentations at #EGU26 in Vienna last week, showcasing the breadth and diversity of research happening across the School. A fantastic week all around – well done to everyone who took part!

Last day of #EGU26 but still more science from SEES! 👋 Well done everyone for a smashing week 💥

More science from SEES at #EGU26 on Thursday!

Another busy say for SEES on Wednesday at @egu.eu 2026 with four talks and two posters from across our research themes – hope to see you there!