Here’s one for you! What the connection between interior design in Roman Hampshire, The Open University and Warrington?

My name is Paul Hatherly, and I’m in Physics and Astronomy at the OU and along with my teaching in many areas of experimental science, I am building a research programme in the fascinating area of Heritage Science. What is this? Well, there’s no single definition, but for our purposes, it’s applying and developing methods in physical science to questions of art, archaeology and conservation. For example, you are probably aware of the idea of carbon dating, where scientists count the small number of (naturally) radioactive carbon atoms in an artefact to determine the age. There are also geophysics techniques which, by revealing sub-surface features, can help archaeologists dig in the right place. But there’s more than that. How can we tell what an artefact is made of? How can we tell how it was made in the first place? Where did the materials come from? Can we do all this without damaging or destroying the artefact? The questions are endless. But finding out about an artefact doesn’t end the story. Conservation and preservation for future generations to enjoy and study is vital, and Heritage Science has an input here too. Can we be sure that a conservation method successful now won’t, over decades, destroy the artefact or, maybe worse, so affect the artefact that studying it is worthless? Heritage Science is already helping in this area in, for example, helping the long-term conservation of the ships the Mary Rose and the Vasa.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be telling you about some of my work in Heritage Science, and hopefully finding a few answers to the question we started with. In the course of this quest, I’ll be taking you on a journey to some of the most advanced science facilities in the country and meeting the vital people who keep it all running. We will see how a physics technique developed to study nanostructures in semiconductors can be used to try and sort out what Roman painters and decorators were up to in Britain almost 2000 years ago, and perhaps get inside the minds of the artisans and their customers in a way not possible before.

Right now though, I’m approaching the end (or is it the beginning?) of a process started almost a year ago; a process from an original idea, selling that idea in the right quarters, carrying through the idea and ultimately telling the world of our discoveries. I’ll tell you more about this in my next post later this week, and I’ll explain the Warrington connection.

Until then…

Paul.

About the author

In late 2007, Paul Hatherly joined Physics and Astronomy at The Open University as a key member of the HEFCE-funded Physics Innovations Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (PCETL).

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Well, that's it until the autumn - no more overseas trips for me until then. I've just returned from a vast meeting of the International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics (IUGG) held in Perugia, Italy - a super place to visit if you don't mind steep streets.

With its hilltop-location, abundance of white stone and succession of archways it would be hard to find anywhere more evocative of Tolkien's Minas Tirith, though in place of the Tower Guard the piazza with the fountain was occupied by musicians and fans in town for the Umbrian Jazz Festival. The 'double booking'  of the town for a major international science congress and the jazz festival made accommodation hard to find, and some of my colleagues had to bus in daily from Assisi, 30 km away. Fortunately, thanks to my astute use of the internet to find myself a hotel back in April, I was staying within walking distance of everywhere - and in fact had unknowingly booked myself into the hotel 'reserved' (by the conference organisers) for IUGG officers, so I rubbed shoulders with the great and the good at breakfast.

IUGG is an umbrella organisation for several associations that usually meet independently except for this four-yearly general assembly. I belong to the International Association of Volcanology & Chemistry of the Earth Interior (which is such a mouthfull that the acronym IAVCEI is almost always spoken rather than the full name). I spent one whole day exclusively in a session about the use of remote sensing (chiefly satellite images) for assessing volcanoes, and took the opportunity to present some of my own plans for analysing volcanic terrain on the planet Mercury, which I talked about in my previous blog: Mercury or bust. It was great to catch up with colleagues, and former students, whom I had not seen for several years. One thing that struck me is the extent to which Google Earth has become part of the fabric of both research and outreach for volcanologists. Google Earth visualizations were used to illustrate several of the best talks, including one that showed the location of a volcanic ash cloud in 3-D - an important tool to helping decision-makers re-route aircraft so that their engines don't choke by sucking in airborne ash particles when they fly downwind of an erupting volcano.

An old friend of mine from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory is heading a project called the ASTER Volcano Archive to incorporate images from a satellite instrument called ASTER into Google Earth. This allows any of the world's 1500 volcanoes to be seen at a resolution of only 15 metres per pixel, using data of uniform quality and avoiding the patchwork effect common in other Google Earth visualizations that tend to use a mixed bag of air photos and satellite images to stitch together the view of the terrain. I had a play with it this morning, and it did not take me long to produce this visualization of Mt St Helens. Try it yourself - it's a lot of fun, and if you stay inside Google Earth you can change the viewing direction and rotate the image so that the topography really comes to life.

Three-dimensional view of Mt St Helens using an ASTER image recorded 26 Sept 2006
[Image by NASA, © copyright NASA/JPL-Caltech/Google Earth]

About the author

Dave Rothery is a volcanologist and planetary scientist at the Open University. His current research includes studying volcanic eruptions on the Earth and characterising planetary surfaces, especially Mercury.

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