What can rocks, soil and landscapes reveal about scientific and investigative mysteries? That is what our 'CSI: Geoscience' programme set out to explore.
From 18-26 February, we ran a series of webinars and a Public Lecture in collaboration with the Forensic Geoscience Group as part of ‘CSI: Geoscience’, a public outreach initiative to explore how every contact leaves a trace. The programme was designed to welcome everyone into the world of forensic geoscience and celebrate how investigative geoscientists are making a difference to society.
Thank you to all our volunteers for their insightful, fun, and illuminating talks!
Online Public Lecture
To kick off the programme, leading forensic geoscientist Professor Dame Lorna Dawson delivered an online Public Lecture exploring how soil and related environmental information, like pollen and rocks, can assist the criminal justice system and the police. Professor Dawson traced the history and development of forensic geoscience, from its early mentions in Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, through to modern techniques addressing emerging global issues.
Over 80 people attended the ‘Natural Justice: How nature delivers to the Criminal Justice System’ Public Lecture, which prompted a lively Q&A session covering topics such as the availability of data for forensic geoscience around the world, how to engage locally, and information for prospective forensic geoscientists.
Webinars for Key Stage 3 students
For schools and home educators, we had over 190 people attend the series of webinars engaging Key Stage 3 students (ages 11-14) with forensic geoscience, demonstrating how geoscience connects across subjects in exciting and unexpected ways. The talks were also designed to support teachers in delivering elements of the Science, Geography and History curriculum. Duncan Pirrie’s fascinating exploration of ‘Forensic Soil Analysis’ for KS3 Science students included discussions of the use of soil as evidence in criminal investigations, highlighting how something so small can be incredibly important in solving problems.
The next webinar in the series, ‘How Forensic Geoscience Can Investigate History and Provide New Evidence’, was delivered by Jamie Pringle. It offered an overview of how forensic geoscience has deepened our understanding of historic events, illustrating how our knowledge of history is constantly being reshaped by new discoveries. Students were fascinated by how geoscience helped us uncover the realities of living through the Black Death.
The final webinar on ‘Forensic Geomorphology’, delivered by Alastair Ruffel, focused on the story of how forensic geoscience has developed as a subject and how modern techniques, such as satellite imagery, GPS surveys, drone surveying, and landscape characterisation, can be used for search missions.
The webinars opened students' minds to the wide applications of geoscience and expanded their horizons to new potential career ideas or fields of study.
All the talks are available to view on demand on our website or YouTube channel.