Looking to the past to see the future

Growing populations and climate change are stretching water resources to their limits. But with the sea holding 97.5% of the world’s water, there’s plenty to go round. It works out that there’s a whopping 300 billion pints of seawater for each person on the planet. Philip will discuss the challenges of separating freshwater from salty seawater and – just as important – what to do with all the salt left over from this process of desalination.

New chemical and analytical methods have revolutionised our understanding of Earth’s ecosystems. We can reconstruct food webs in exquisite detail, trace the geographical location where organisms live, track the distances they migrate and even quantify how climate change influences the life strategies of plants and animals. Yvette will explore the use of these chemical tools in modern and ancient ecosystems (ranging from microbes to lions), and give examples of the wealth of information that chemical traces preserved in rocks can provide about past environments and the life that inhabited them.