Tag: Mining

Posted on

Progress by Dr Katy Roscoe

In mid-2021 The Sciku Project teamed up with the Literature and Science Hub at the University of Liverpool to run the ‘Research in Verse Poetry Competition’, open to staff and postgraduate research students across the university to submit poems about their research subject. The competition saw poems addressing all sorts of topics, ranging from gravity to slavery to life in the lab.

Second prize was won by Dr Katy Roscoe for her poem ‘Progress’:

Progress

The scratching and scraping of steel on rock,
In concert our muscles, they crunch and creak.
Slow inch by inch we chisel out the dock,
Ankles bound in irons, the hulls in teak.

Wiping sweat from my brow, I gaze afore:
I’m dazzled – bright sun, blue sky, white lime.
Ocean’s eternity returns ashore,
An excess of brightness ¬– like hope – can blind.

Night falls, men drive us into beached ships,
Dank air, sodden bodies, yellow fever.
Vessels for human cargo turned crypts,
If my body holds out, I will leave here.

Will I be able to retrieve the past,
Or will that monolith be all that lasts?

Background

My research is about convicts who quarried stone to build the naval dockyard at Bermuda, an Atlantic archipelago. Around 9,000 British and Irish men, many poor and starving, were transported there from 1842-63. Prisoners slept in decommissioned ships (hulks) which were dirty and crowded. Over 1200 men died there from effects of hard labour and yellow fever. Some went temporarily blind (opthamalia) from sunlight reflecting off limestone. “Retrieve the past” is a quote from a convict’s letter (1857). He hoped to be released under a “Ticket-of-Leave” in Australia, where he could earn an honest living, rather than return home.

Dr Katherine (Katy) Roscoe is a historical criminologist at the University of Liverpool with research interests centred on global mobilities, unfree labour and racial inequalities, with a particular focus on mid-nineteenth century crime and punishment in Britain and its former empire. You can connect with her on Twitter here: @KatyARoscoe

Posted on

Winter driving

Safe winter driving.

Does the bad outweigh the good?

Costs of studded tyres.

 

Studded tyres are commonly used in many countries in winter to increase road safety when driving in icy and snowy conditions. Yet there are increasing concerns over the costs of using studded tyres.

Research by Furberg et al (2018) examined the impacts of studded tyres, across their whole lifecycle, from production to usage. Impacts of studded tyres measured were the number of lives saved, particulate emissions during use, emissions whilst the tyres are being produced, accidents during the mining of cobalt used in the studs, as well as casualties as a result of conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo where the cobalt mining occurs and which the revenues of mining effects.

When taken together the researchers found that using studded tyres cost far more lives than they saved: in Sweden it’s estimated that studded tyres save between 60 and 770 life-years, whilst the costs are between 570 and 2200 life-years. In particular, whilst the benefits of studded tyres are primarily found in the countries that use them, 23-33% of the costs are found outside of those countries.

Original research: http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/ijerph15081774

Posted on

Flocks of new markers

Little white sponges,

filtering in mining zones:

Flocks of new markers.

 

New species are being discovered all the time and even the most innocuous can be important. A new species of sponge has been discovered and recorded by Lim et al (2017) at a depth of 4000m on the abyssal seafloor of the central Pacific Ocean. Morphologic and genetic analysis of the sponges (Plenaster craigi) has revealed they are a new genus, currently placed within the family Stelligeridae.

The region where the sponges are found is rich in polymetallic (metal-rich) nodules and may well be subjected to deep-sea mining. The sponges could be useful indicators of the impacts of such mining efforts – they are abundant on the nodules, are easily identified and are filter-feeders so sensitive to changing conditions.

The Latin name Plenaster is due to the abundance of star-shaped microscleres within their bodies, whilst the species name of craigi is in honour of the Chief Scientist on the expeditions that sampled the species Professor Craig R. Smith of the University of Hawaii.

Original research: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14772000.2017.1358218