Two modules down

This first month has gone by in a flash; two modules down already! This course really is full steam ahead but it's been brilliant. I've learnt so much more than I thought I would have done in such a short space of time and I've felt really engaged in the subject of Quaternary Science.

It would take me an age to describe everything I've been up to over the last few weeks, so I'll just focus on a few stand-out moments.

The first of these is a lecture the majority of our cohort attended at UCL given by Bill Ruddiman, who has formulated the 'overdue glaciation hypothesis' and the 'Early Anthropocene hypothesis'. This was a real opportunity to begin to engage with the current scene of the Quaternary science community, and thus we all jumped at the chance to attend, especially considering we had been talking a lot about these hypotheses in our lectures. Bill was a brilliant speaker - clear and concise, and obviously passionate about his work. He definitely provided some food for thought and sparked a few opinions in the room, evident from the questions asked at the end of the talk, and it was intriguing and somewhat amusing to see how the community engages in debates about current topics.

Secondly, we went on two trips over the last two weeks for the second of the compulsory modules - Sedimentology and Stratigraphy. 

The first was a field day to Hunt's Bay, South Wales for sedimentology. The day was by no means the best day of the year in terms of weather (we all got very wet!) but nonetheless we all had a good day looking at the cliff sequence and conducting analyses on different aspects of the sediments at different sections along the exposure - turns out it was more than just a bit of rock, who would've thought! So now it is our job to create sediment logs of these sequences showing analyses such as lithology and clast orientation, and to correlate each section together in terms of the sedimentologies. I'm excited to see what the final product will look like!

Hunt's Bay, looking out from the cliff.

Hard at work.

During the second week of the module, we had a two-day trip to East Anglia for the stratigraphy component of the course. Across the two days we visited seven sites, from quarries to beach exposures, in order to interpret the nature of the sediments and to take notes allowing us to go away and correlate every site together based on the nature and ages of the sediments. This is slightly different to the sedimentology trip as here we are inferring what time period each section at each site correlates to and using this information for our write-up, whereas for sedimentology we purely focus on the depositional environments of the sediments and carried out more in-depth investigations in order to interpret this.

Needless to say, the last two weeks have been incredibly tiring, but they have been an invaluable experience in our journey through this course. 

And so it begins...

This week has been the first of the MSc Quaternary Science course. It has been really enjoyable and interesting, but I sure am tired! It's been really good getting to know the other students on the course and the staff who are teaching us. 

The other students on the course are all lovely, and I think we each have something to contribute, both as student and as friends. As well as seeing everyone during lectures, most of us went to the pub after lectures one day to celebrate one of my housemate's birthday. It's really nice to wind down after a long day of concentrating and working hard, and start to really get to know one another. 

The staff are all brilliant. They are all so enthusiastic about their work and about teaching a new set of masters students. Not only that, but they seem really friendly and willing to engage in 'normal' conversation, i.e. not about Quaternary Science. They all seem really interested to learn about our opinions and to take part in discussions with us, and even just this week that enthusiasm has resulted in myself taking part in discussions I never would have done before now, and not being afraid to voice my opinion on subjects that, thus far, I don't have any specialist knowledge on. 

Now I'm going to throw in a few scientific words. This week is the first half of the module 'Palaeoclimatology'. At first I had no idea what this would involve. But I have found it a brilliant starting point for the course as it is bringing everyone up to the same point where people have come from different universities and some may have been taught more than others. Especially for the way I work I have found it useful, as I like to start from the beginning rather than having someone assume I know something, even if I do. I find the ideas and knowledge become more embedded in my mind that way, and my understanding of the subject increases. 

I have particularly enjoyed learning about the "overdue glaciation hypothesis" and the "Anthropocene hypothesis". They are both concepts I have not come across until now, but have actually stimulated my mind in to really thinking about the for and against arguments for these theories. My housemates, a few others on the course and myself have planned to go to a lecture at UCL later this month, where the speaker is William Ruddiman, who has provided the argument for the "early Anthropocene hypothesis" and the "overdue glaciation hypothesis". I think this will be an invaluable experience and will be one of the things that, for me, really shows the difference between undertaking an undergraduate degree and a postgraduate degree. 

So that's all I have for now. The course is going really well so far and I'm excited for what's to come!