Plastic pollution in riverbeds fundamentally affects natural sand transport processes

Over the past 50 years, rivers have become increasingly important vectors for plastic pollution. Lowland riverbeds exhibit coherent morphological features including ripple and dune bedforms, which transport sediment downstream via well-understood processes, yet the impact of plastic on sediment transport mechanics is largely unknown. Here we use flume tank experiments to show that when plastic particles are introduced to sandy riverbeds, even at relatively low concentrations, novel bedform morphologies and altered processes emerge, including irregular bedform stoss erosion and dune “washout”, causing topographic bedform amplitudes to decline. We detail i) new mechanisms of plastic incorporation and transport in riverbed dunes, and ii) how sedimentary processes are fundamentally influenced. Our laboratory flume tank experiments suggest that plastic is not a passive component of river systems but directly affects bed topography and locally increases the proportion of sand suspended in the water column, which at larger scales, has the potential to impact river ecosystems and wider landscapes. The resulting plastic distribution in the sediment is heterogeneous, highlighting the challenge of representatively sampling plastic concentrations in river sediments. Our insights are part of an ongoing suite of efforts contributing to the establishment of a new branch of process sedimentology: plastic – riverbed sand interactions.</p

Open Research Week 2024: Monday, 26 February, Introduction

Opening address / Prof Dan Parsons, Pro Vice-Chancellor for Research and Innovation, Loughborough UniversityDan Parsons obtained his PhD at the University of Sheffield in 2004 and has been an academic in Earth Sciences at the Universities of Leeds, Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Hull. He was the founding and inaugural Director of a University-wide Energy and Environment Institute (EEI) in 2017. The Institute grew under his leadership, bringing together a multidisciplinary team of more than 180 researchers to conduct impactful research on the global challenges presented by environmental change. Professor Parsons joined Loughborough University in September 2022 as the Pro Vic-Chancellor for Research and Innovation.Global academic publishing: where will experimentation lead? / Mark Hahnel, VP of Open Research at Digital Science, Founder of FigshareMark Hahnel is the VP Open Research at Digital Science. He is the founder of Figshare, which he created whilst completing his PhD in stem cell biology at Imperial College London. Figshare currently provides research data infrastructure for institutions, publishers and funders globally. He is passionate about open science and the potential it has to revolutionize the research community. Building a grassroots community: the role of a URKN local network lead / Dr Sarah Gunn, Lecturer in Clinical Psychology, local UKRN network lead, University of LeicesterSarah is a clinical psychologist and lecturer in clinical psychology at the University of Leicester. She has been the local network lead for a little under two years, and she’s enjoying working with UKRN and with the UoL team to promote open research as a grassroots lead. Her research interests are clinically-orientated, which brings up specific challenges around supporting people to do open, robust research in clinical populations and settings. </p

Open Research Week 2024: Monday, 26 February, Introduction

Opening address / Prof Dan Parsons, Pro Vice-Chancellor for Research and Innovation, Loughborough UniversityDan Parsons obtained his PhD at the University of Sheffield in 2004 and has been an academic in Earth Sciences at the Universities of Leeds, Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Hull. He was the founding and inaugural Director of a University-wide Energy and Environment Institute (EEI) in 2017. The Institute grew under his leadership, bringing together a multidisciplinary team of more than 180 researchers to conduct impactful research on the global challenges presented by environmental change. Professor Parsons joined Loughborough University in September 2022 as the Pro Vic-Chancellor for Research and Innovation.Global academic publishing: where will experimentation lead? / Mark Hahnel, VP of Open Research at Digital Science, Founder of FigshareMark Hahnel is the VP Open Research at Digital Science. He is the founder of Figshare, which he created whilst completing his PhD in stem cell biology at Imperial College London. Figshare currently provides research data infrastructure for institutions, publishers and funders globally. He is passionate about open science and the potential it has to revolutionize the research community. Building a grassroots community: the role of a URKN local network lead / Dr Sarah Gunn, Lecturer in Clinical Psychology, local UKRN network lead, University of LeicesterSarah is a clinical psychologist and lecturer in clinical psychology at the University of Leicester. She has been the local network lead for a little under two years, and she’s enjoying working with UKRN and with the UoL team to promote open research as a grassroots lead. Her research interests are clinically-orientated, which brings up specific challenges around supporting people to do open, robust research in clinical populations and settings. </p

Drainage and erosion of Cambodia's great lake in the middle-late Holocene: The combined role of climatic drying, base-level fall and river capture

We provide evidence for a large-scale geomorphic event in Cambodia’s great lake, the Tonlé Sap, during the middle Holocene. The present-day hydrology of the basin is dominated by an annual flood pulse where water from the Mekong River raises the lake level by c. 8 m during the monsoon season. We present new subsurface geophysical data, allied to new and past core studies, which unequivocally show a period of major mid-Holocene erosion across the entire Tonlé Sap basin that is coincident with establishment of the lake’s flood pulse. We argue that this widespread erosion, which removed at least 1.2 m of sediment across the lake’s extent, was triggered by up to three, likely interacting, processes: (1) base-level lowering due to mid-Holocene sea-level fall, leading to (2) capture of the Tonlé Sap drainage by the Mekong River, and (3) a drying climate that also reduced lake level. Longer-term landscape evolution was thus punctuated by a rapid, river capture- and base-level fall- induced, lake drainage that established the ecosystem that flourishes today. The scale of change induced by this mid-Holocene river capture event demonstrates the susceptibility of the Tonlé Sap lake to ongoing changes in local base-level and hydrology induced by anthropogenic activity, such as damming and sand mining, within the Mekong River Basin. </p

Conversations on grief and hope: a collaborative autoethnographic account exploring the lifeworlds of international youth engaged with climate action

This paper explores the lifeworlds of international youth involved in climate and/or environmental social action, narratives that have been largely absent from a literature that has tended to focus on ‘traditional’ youth activists located in the urban Global North. Written as a novel collaborative autoethnography involving youth as co-authors, the paper a) collectively reflects on the stories of youth from different countries and cultures on their journeys towards climate action, and b) foregrounds an emotional framing to examine these experiences. The youth co-authors, whose experiences are the focus of this paper, form part of innovative international Youth Advisory Board, set up to provide peer support to youth new to climate and environmental social action, as part of our British Academy Youth Futures-funded participatory action research project. We examine the youth’s narratives exploring opportunities and barriers they have navigated, their inspirations and the intersections with a range of other socio-cultural factors.</p