Research seminars

Both external and internal speakers are invited to the School of Geography, Geology and the Environment to present the latest results of their research.

Everyone is invited, so please join us!

Title TBC

Tuesday 26 May 2026, Location TBC

Dr Diederick Liebrand, UCL

Details TBC

Title TBC

Wednesday 27 May 2026, Location TBC

Edoardo Dallanave, University of Milan

Details TBC

The Curiosity rover's journey across Gale Crater

Wednesday 3 June 2026, 1.00pm, Lecture Theatre B, George Porter Building

Professor Susanne Schwenzer, Professor of Planetary Mineralogy, The Open University

The NASA Mars Science Laboratory rover Curiosity has been travelling across Gale Crater since August of 2012. Through images and geochemical data returned by the rover, we now understand that a lake filled the crater for an extended period of time, with dryer and wetter periods documented in the stratigraphic record. Most recently, the rover has traversed an area called 'boxwork', where decameter-sized structures comprised of ridges and hollows dominate the landscape. The talk will give an overview of the mission, stopping at stratigraphically or otherwise important waypoints and highlighting how the mission has shifted our understanding of planet Mars's climate evolution. 

Professor Susanne Schwenzer is a planetary mineralogist, studying volatiles and water-rock reactions on Mars and Earth. She received her Masters in Mineralogy from University of Mainz, where she subsequently studied for her PhD, with much of the work on noble gases in Martian meteorites being carried out at Max-Planck Institute for Chemistry, Mainz. She then went to the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston for a post-doctoral position before coming to the UK as a postdoctoral researcher. In 2011 Prof. John Bridges from University of Leicester invited her to join him on a - successful - bid to join the Curiosity rover mission - and we have been working together on the MSL team since November of 2011. Susanne has been at the Open University since 2009, and now is a Professor of Planetary Mineralogy and the associate director of AstrobiologyOU.