Welcome to My world
The sun is my father, the earth my mother,
the world is my country and all men are my family.
John Toland (1670-1722)
Welcome indeed, to a bit of my world anyway. Stay as long as you
like and have a wander around. This page mainly concentrates on my research
and other musings
If you have comments or suggestions, email me at
hht@aber.ac.uk
My research focuses mainly on geochemical signatures locked within
earth materials, shells, bones, sediments and rocks and the light that these
signatures can cast on past and future environments.
Published papers here
I also have a keen interest in marine biology especially the life cycle and depositional environment of marine molluscs, particularly the bivalve mollusc Arctica islandica (Linnaeus, 1767) and its cousins Mercenaria mercenaria (Linnaeus, 1758) and Mercenaria campechiensis (Gmelin, 1791)
I am currently working with The Tana Project, based in the Institute of Geography and Earth Sciences, at the University of Wales in Aberystwyth.
Lake Tana in northern Ethiopia is the source of the Blue Nile. The Blue Nile contributes ~66% of the total Nile discharge and most of the sediment that reaches Egypt and the Mediterranean. Climatic changes in the Blue Nile headwaters therefore have a profound effect on the main Nile, and are likely to have influenced ancient Egyptian civilizations.
The aim of the project is to obtain detailed lake-sediment records of Holocene and late Quaternary, environmental change from Lake Tana and other lakes in the Blue Nile catchment. An objective from earlier studies was to uncover evidence of drought in the Ethiopian highlands 4200 years ago, at the time of Egyptian Old Kingdom collapse. We travelled to lake Tana in January 2007, where we managed to extract, under difficult conditions, over 80m of core, to a depth of 100m, some of the team are due to return to Lake Tana in January 2008 for further fieldwork.