Past climate change (often caused by natural changes in greenhouse gases due to volcanic activity) has been responsible for countless species’ extinctions during the history of life on Earth. But, to date, it has not been clear what factors cause species to be more or less resilient to such change, and how the magnitude of climate change affects extinction risk. The results of a new study could help to identify species most at risk today from human-driven climate change.

Researchers at the Department of Earth Sciences, University of Oxford, together with Imperial College London and Colorado State University, have revealed how mantle plumes that result in very large magmatic eruptions damage the tectonic plate but that it will heal again over time.

The Atlantic Ocean has opened and closed at least three times in its history. This study shows that the Mid-Atlantic Ridge is playing an active role in opening the Atlantic.

Researchers at the Department of Earth Sciences, together with an international group of collaborators, have found a way to use earthquakes generated by the sudden release of strain at the base of an ice sheet to directly observe the movement of a Antarctic glacier for the first time – here on named icequakes . Their results have been published in Nature Geoscience.