The GeoX Suite: Environmental cells for NERC research using in situ imaging

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Improving our understanding the natural world; how it has evolved, how it continues to evolve, and how it responds to human impacts and climate change are the main goals of all earth and environmental researchers. This work allows improvements in global stewardship, hazard mitigation, and more sustaiable resource management.In recent years the development of very powerful x-ray imaging techniques allows us to see inside our samples without destroying them; meaning we understand the internal structures of rocks, soils, ice, plants, animals and man-made materials better than ever before. However, the most cutting edge systems allow us to collect images in just fractions of a second and allow us to put experimental equipment inside the imaging equipment. This means that with the right experimental equipment we could improve our understanding of the processes themselves: by watching them happen. Imaging our geological samples under the relevant geological conditions could help us answer some of the outstanding challenges in earth and environmental research: working at high temperatures we could capture how bubbles drive volcanic eruptions; using pressurised fluid cells we could look at how corals adapt to changing ocean conditions; by imaging while we compress rocks under very high loads we could improve our understanding of fracture propagation during earthquakes; by working at low temperatures we could identify the processes controlling glacier movement or greenhouse gas release from melting permafrost, by imaging soil during wetting and drying we can understand how structure controls nutrient supply and drought resistance in plants; and if we combine pressure and temperature and deformation we can investigate how best to identify, extract and manage critical subsurface resources such as oil, gas, water, metals, minerals, and heat. This proposal will deliver the GeoX suite of experimental apparatus to do just that; allowing earth and environmental researchers to gain new insight and understanding into how the planet works. The GeoX suite includes aparatus that lets us heat and cool our samples, lets us deform them till the break, lets us inject fluids into them or extract fluids from them, or do all of these thindgs at the same time. This means we can investigate almost every environment we are interested in. The reserach done using the GeoX suite could ultimately help us improve our food and energy security, move towards a low carbon and low waste economy, reduce the impact of pollution in soils and sediments, preserve fragile ecosystems and environments, mitigate the effects of climate change, build more sustainable cities, and improve our ability to forecast and manage the risks and effects of natural events such as extreme weather, volcanic eruptions and earthquakes.