Profile

I’m from Dun Laoghaire but now I live in Drumcondra with my two best pals! I love music (my favourite band is London Grammar). I also love to cook and experiment in the kitchen, it especially helps me de-stress after a long day of working on my PhD 🙂 I love hiking and swimming in the sea and generally being out in nature, what could be better!

Peat bogs are super cool….why? Because they can capture what falls from our atmosphere right at the time it happened and then hold these bits and bobs inside them as they grow over many thousands of years. Remember the big eruption from Iceland in 2010? Lots of aeroplanes were told not to fly, and some people in Ireland even found ash on their cars! This is because when an eruption is large enough, the ash (and lots of gases) can travel very far up into the atmosphere and move across the globe! So we can record volcanic eruptions from Iceland (and other places) in Ireland! All inside our peat bogs. The reason this volcanic ash in bogs is so important is because us scientists think that when an ice cap over a volcano melts (like they are doing today due to climate change) then more eruptions will happen! Think of it like a fizzy drink, the ice cap is the bottle lid, and the magma and gases are the fizzy drink, when we remove this lid, the gases want to come out…and if we’ve shaken it, the liquid will come out too! So when we melt an ice cap maybe we are increasing the chances that magma will come out onto the earth surface through a volcanic eruption. If we want to understand how future climate change might increase volcanic eruptions we need to look at the past, when ice caps have melted before, so we can learn about it. So our bogs act as records of important volcanic activity in Iceland over thousands of years. I also use some very fancy instruments to search for volcanic chemicals in the bogs that would have been carried in the gases from an eruption. Ask me any questions you like if you’re confused 🙂

This little picture explains how melting glaciers on top of volcanoes might increase eruptions! You can see how the ash travels and falls onto a bog somewhere far away.

Here we are in the field (on a bog) using special equipment to dig inside the whole bog!

This is what the sample looks like when we pull it out of the bog and its called a ‘core’

As you can see Iceland has many ice caps and many volcanoes underneath these ice caps (little red circles in the picture)

Right now (before coronavirus), my typical day would look something like this:

1. Get into work at 10am. Read an article about work similar to mine, maybe take some notes and have a nice cup of tea or coffee.
2. Collect my peat bog samples from the big fridge and open them up in the lab, they look something like this:

This is 50 cm long and probably records about 500 years of time!

3. These samples then get split up into smaller bits and are put inside an oven overnight to calculate how much water is inside (peat bogs are very wet, think about when you walk on a bog…it’s easy to get stuck!). The next day I will have to put them into an even hotter oven to calculate how many plants are inside the bog. Plants are made of organic matter (carbon) so this burns away at really higher temperatures. The leftovers from this will be bits of rock and hopefully…..some volcanic ash!

4. I will also spend some time using this machine in the picture below. I play around with the settings so I can practice and make sure it works perfectly for when I want to find certain chemicals in the samples I collect from the peat bogs.

This machine is called an ETV and it burns my peat samples so they turn into a gas! Can you see the orange glow coming from inside the machine? This is because it is at a temperature of 2400 degrees!

5. I will finish up in the lab at around 5pm and then spend another hour writing about what I did and what I noticed when I was working the machine and how I can improve it next time.

6. 6pm, now its time to go home, do some exercise and make a nice meal! yum