We have a new visitor in our lab these days, plastering, drilling and cutting handsamples of limestone blocks. Tereza Kamenikova is a Masters by Research student, doing research at Lancaster University supervised by Dr. Mark Hounslow. She also studies for a second Master’s degree at Charles University in Prague (Czech Republic). The project she is working on in Prague is called ‘Cyclicity and sedimentation rate analysis of the oldest pro-delta deposits in the Most Basin’. During her bachelor degree, she worked on the nature of magnetic anomalies on the Moon, by studying the Apollo 15 samples of lunar rocks.

Tereza is now in the field in South Cumbria, with Mark Hounslow and Courtney Sprain, to obtain more samples of Carboniferous limestones. This project aims to constrain the geomagnetic polarity of the lower Carboniferous, in order to gain a better understanding of the behaviour of the geomagnetic field during this time. South Cumbria has good exposures of lower Carboniferous limestones in abandoned quarries, of which Tereza is taking handsamples. The Carboniferous limestones in this region have been quarried for centuries, and are used as building stones, decorative stones, or are crushed to become rubblestone.

There has been practically no scientific research on these rocks over the last two decades, and we are hoping that Tereza’s project will enthuse a new generation of scientists to study these outcrops.