Zoom into Soil: Contaminated Soils and the Impact on Human Health
Graham O’Mahony, Chair of the UK Asbestos Training Association (UKATA), and Margaret Oliver, BSSS Honorary Member, discuss contaminated soils and the impact on human health.
We welcome Dr Ria Mitchell from the University of Sheffield to present Palaeosols (fossil soils) as records of environmental, climatic and evolutionary change through geologic time and Lynne Gardiner from Wardell Armstrong LLP to present What lies beneath?: Putting the senses back into the past.
Fossilised soils, or palaeosols, are preserved in the geologic rock record for the past ~3 billion years. Therefore, they provide insight into ancient environmental, climatic, and evolutionary changes over this time and have become a well documented proxy in the literature. They provide a unique perspective of these Earth-wide processes because they form at the interface between the lithosphere, the hydrosphere, the atmosphere, and the biosphere, often preserving specific geochemical signatures of conditions at their time of formation. Dr Ria Mitchell’s talk is in two parts: the first detailing the geological record of palaeosols, and the second highlighting some specific time periods in the evolutionary history of life on land and how it is linked with soil/palaeosol evolution.
Environmental archaeology is an umbrella term for a suite of specialisms within archaeology. In her presentation, Lynne Gardiner provides an overview of the most common ones utilised within commercial archaeology. This overview will be the precursor to a more in-depth look at what materials may be present in the soils and sediments. By using examples of some of her projects, Lynne shows how this ecofactual material enables us to examine the palaeoecology of our landscapes.
Graham O’Mahony, Chair of the UK Asbestos Training Association (UKATA), and Margaret Oliver, BSSS Honorary Member, discuss contaminated soils and the impact on human health.
In this webinar, Sarah George, BSSS Outreach Committee Member, and Olivia Azevedo, PhD student at the University of Stirling and Forest Research, discuss the benefits of natural processes in relation to soils.
Professor Jenni Dungait, Editor-in-Chief of the European Journal of Soil Science, and Dr Cristina Arias-Navarro, Scientific Project Officer at the EU Soil Observatory, discuss the European Journal of Soil Science and EU-funded soil projects.