Features

California, Brazil and South Africa have all recently experienced major drought, threatening serious disruption to supplies for major cities (‘Day Zero’ events). How can England prepare for drought without harming the environment or driving up water charges? 

Dr Matthew Ives and Mike Simpson of Oxford's Environmental Change Institute, discuss their research on strategic water planning - conducted with Professor Jim Hall and newly published  in the Water & Environment Journal. 

Many people find it hard to believe that a country so blessed with rain as England would have any need to undertake intensive water conservation measures. But, contrary to popular opinion, the United Kingdom isn’t as wet as some believe. In fact, some parts of England have rainfall rates per person as low as the world’s most arid regions, such as the Middle East.

Convincing people to use less water and investing in long-term leakage reduction solutions will be critical for the avoidance of drought-induced interruptions to water supplies for large numbers of businesses and households in England.

Additional consequences of failure to act would include high costs for new infrastructure, such as for desalination or transfer pumping, while the extra energy this uses may mean additional carbon dioxide emissions. These stark conclusions are the headline results from recently published research into future-proofing England against the spectre of severe drought.

This twin-track approach represents a bold challenge to the water engineering community. Technological and social solutions to address leakage and demand reduction already exist, with many currently implemented in the UK or overseas.

Smart metering, available on a voluntary basis in much of England, can drive down the costs of finding and managing leaks, as well as encouraging reduced use of water. Satellite and remote-sensing technologies pioneered in drier parts of the world, like Israel and California, can be used to identify leakage sites.

The sheer number of people in the relatively small urban areas of England require an enormous amount of water. Unfortunately, while many of the most densely populated areas are in the South and East, much of the rain falls in the North and West. One regularly proposed answer to this problem is to transport water across the UK, in particular from Wales and Scotland, to support temporary dry conditions in the Southeast of England. Could this pipeline idea be a solution? Maybe technologies such as desalination could be used? Or the development of a new generation of larger reservoirs? What about increasing the efficiency of our existing water system?

Developing solutions to meet England’s future water needs calls for a national perspective, which can answer strategic questions about our water infrastructure strategy. Using our purpose-built National Infrastructure Systems Model (NISMOD) we assessed all of the different investment options available to England’s water companies for future-proofing the country’s water supplies. With a twist. We included the options available to individual companies, such as reservoir extensions and desalination plants, alongside options requiring a national perspective, such as inter-company transfers and demand management campaigns. And we pitted all such options against the spectre of future uncertainty around climate change and population growth.

We termed this analysis ‘navigating the water trilemma’ as it involved finding solutions that not only provided England with future water security but solutions that were also affordable and did not put too great a strain on the natural environment. This study highlighted the value of the flexible, ‘trilemma-friendly’ options like leakage reductions and demand reductions.

Our analysis points to the unavoidable answer: leakage reduction and demand management are the most cost effective and widely applicable components of future water strategy for England. Early investment in both of these solutions would allow a sensible and frugal culture of water use to be developed without recourse to panic during the inevitable drought events, such as experienced in the summer of 1976.
When we look at the impacts of drought in places which have the resources of England but have not taken sufficient preparation, the results are clear.

In Australia, hugely expensive new desalination works were developed in response to an extended drought, with long-term costs to public finances. Over recent years in California, restrictions on water use have been seen as deeply socially disruptive. However, many Californians now see responsible water use as a normal part of daily life.

Our research and new modelling capabilities were used to great effect by the National Infrastructure Commission (NIC) in their assessment of England’s drought preparedness. Their analysis, produced on the basis of our work, proposes a dramatic and ambitious change in approach. The NIC concluded that the equivalent of an extra 4 billion litres of water per day would be needed across England in case of significant drought. The report proposed that two-thirds of this should be made available through developing efficient pipe systems as well as shifting to the lowest household water use rates in the developed world. The NIC recommended that this should be supported by transfers of water between regions and, where appropriate, new water infrastructure including reservoirs and water recycling schemes.

Without improved national co-ordination and large-scale investment in water supply, the NIC’s report suggests that large parts of the country have a one-in-four chance of having their water cut off during a drought. Emergency measures, such as road and ship tankers, could cost up to £40 billion up until 2050, while the costs of building greater resilience would cost only half this amount.

Improving water resource efficiency is a fascinating challenge with many lessons to be learned from around the world. Technological solutions including sensing and monitoring of water supplies can be complemented by social solutions such as education and identifying the factors that influence people to make better use of water. Organisations such as ECI and the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology are well-placed to influence how such ideas are researched and how this research can become reality.

With some planning and vision, water supply in England can be future-proofed and it doesn’t have to be expensive. Adequate early investment, the development of a culture of water saving and some new technological and social ideas should make our occasional long, dry summers something to look forward to. When the alternative is expensive, environmentally damaging short-term solutions and regularly running out of water, surely the choice is clear?

This article is based on research in the Water and Environment Journal (WEJ), and the National Infrastructure Commission’s report “Preparing for a drier future”

Marina Filip, Postdoctoral Research Assistant, and Feliciano Giustino, Professor of Materials, both in the Department of Materials, explain how elementary geometry and modern data analytics can be combined to predict the existence of thousands of new materials called ‘perovskites’, as shown in their recent publication in PNAS.

Perovskites are a broad family of crystals that share the same structural arrangement as the mineral CaTiO3 . The extraordinary appeal of perovskites is their unusual chemical versatility, as they generally can incorporate almost every element in the Periodic Table. This leads to an incredibly diverse array of functionalities. For example, two major scientific discoveries of our times prominently feature perovskites, high-temperature superconductivity in perovskite cuprates (Bednorz and Müller, Nobel Prize 1987) and the recent discovery of the perovskite solar cells (Snaith, University of Oxford 2012).

In our own study we wanted to understand what makes certain combinations of elements in the Periodic Table arrange as perovskite crystals and others not, and whether we could anticipate how many and which perovskites are yet to be discovered.

It turned out that Norwegian mineralogist Victor Goldschmidt asked exactly the same question in 1926. Based on empirical observations, he proposed that the formability of perovskites follows a simple geometric principle, namely: The number of anions surrounding a cation tends to be as large as possible, subject to the condition that all anions touch the cation. This statement is known as the ‘no-rattling‘ hypothesis, and essentially means that if we describe a crystal using a model of rigid spheres, in a perovskite the spheres tend to be tightly packed, so that none can move around freely. Using elementary geometry Goldschmidt’s hypothesis can be translated into a set of six simple mathematical rules that must be obeyed by the ions of a perovskite.

Goldschmidt’s hypothesis had been used in one form or another in countless studies over the last century, in order to explain the formation of perovskites in qualitative terms, but its predictive power had never been assessed quantitatively. We realized that unlike 1926, in 2018 we benefit from a century of research in crystallography, documented in publicly available databases of crystal structures, such as the Inorganic Crystal Structure Database, and more than 50,000 published scientific papers on perovskite compounds. Using internet data-mining and statistical analysis, we were able to collect and study a library of more than 2000 chemical compounds which are known to form in various crystal structures, and use them to test the predictive power of Goldschmidt’s hypothesis. We found that this very elegant geometric model is actually capable of discriminating between compounds which are perovskites and those which are not with a higher success rate than sophisticated quantum-mechanical approaches.

In our study we used this simple model to screen through nearly four million compositions, and predict the existence of more than 90,000 new perovskite materials that have not been synthesized yet. This library of predicted compounds offers the exciting challenge of uncovering the functionalities of these novel perovskites to the community working on the synthesis and characterization of new materials. Most importantly, our discovery may lead to the realization of entirely new functional materials for a broad range of technologies, from applications in energy, electronics and medicine.

The full paper can be read in the journal PNAS.

From defending a besieged castle to spying for an exiled king, a new project is discovering the untold story of female activism during the British Civil Wars...

It wasn't easy to be born female in the early modern period. The ideology of the era held that women should be controlled by their father or their husband, and that the ideal woman was obedient and quiet, concerned chiefly with domestic matters and the rearing of children.

But don't be fooled by the dominant narrative, says Dr Emma Turnbull, lecturer at Jesus College, Oxford. When you look more closely at actual women's lives, it's clear the picture is far more complicated.

As part of a Knowledge Exchange Fellowship with The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH), Emma has been working with the National Trust to take a closer look at the stories of some of the fascinating women associated with their properties. Focusing on the English Civil War and Interregnum period (1640-1660), she has been examining how some women were able to break out of the confining boundaries of their society's gender roles in this era of huge social upheaval.

Take Lady Mary Bankes, who defended Corfe Castle against the first of two Parliamentarian sieges, beginning in May 1643. Along with her maidservants and a small group of soldiers, she personally patrolled the battlements, heaving rocks and hot embers over the walls. She died in 1661, and a memorial plaque in the church where she was buried commemorates her 'courage and constancy above her sex'.

Then there was Katherine Murray, mistress of Ham House. Left behind when her husband, William Murray, a close personal friend of Charles I, went away with him to war, she was forced to rely on her wits to preserve the family property in Richmond, right beside the heart of Parliamentarian power in London.

Or her daughter, Elizabeth Murray, who took over the property after her parents' deaths. In the period of Cromwell's rule she became a kind of double agent, joining the secret royalist organisation the Sealed Knot to work towards the restoration of the monarchy, while also keeping the company of Cromwell. Later, along with her second husband, she would become one of Charles II's most trusted advisers.

What is particularly fascinating about all of these stories, according to Dr Turnbull, is how all of these women used and manipulated traditional notions of femininity to serve their own ends. This is something that has often been missed in traditional accounts of these women, which take their outward affirmation of conventional gender roles at face value.

Katherine Murray and Elizabeth Bankes, for example, claimed they were only safeguarding their children's or their husband's rights when they were defending their property. Although Elizabeth Murray was suspected several times of being a double agent, she was never intercepted. 'What she intends I have not learnt', Sir Richard Browne, Charles II's agent in Paris, reported in the autumn of 1656. Elizabeth thus skilfully exploited the inability of male agents, on both sides, to decode her political motives.

'Focusing on them as mothers or as wives or as domestic beings doesn't really do justice to the level of their engagement and activity. Often they represented themselves in a way that has led us to undermine them. And we've kind of fallen for that,' says Dr Turnbull.

It is also important to recognise that these women were a part of a wider female culture. For example, Elizabeth's later political manoeuvring would not have been possible without the example of her mother. 'It's clear that Elizabeth was learning her craft from her mother. There's a sense of continuity between strong women in the family.'

Dr Turnbull has also drawn parallels between a miniature of Katherine Murray, painted by John Hoskins in 1638 and kept at Ham House, and similar portraits of Charles I's Catholic wife, Henrietta Maria. The fact that Katherine should choose to present herself in an analogous way to the queen, despite their different faiths, suggests that there was a distinct feminine culture at court that bound women together across divisions of religion and politics.

Dr Turnbull hopes that this fresh perspective will inform how this period is presented at heritage properties in the future. Her work has already contributed to a new 'Object in Focus' tour at Ham House, telling Katherine Murray's story through her portrait miniature.

'So often women in the early modern period are presented, in heritage properties, as domestic beings,' she says. But what I wanted to emphasise in this project is that, in spite of the formal and informal barriers to their activities, women had a stake in the political conflict. Elite women, like Katherine Murray and Mary Bankes, were moving around the country, they were visible, and they had a role in protecting themselves and their property.'

Read Dr Turnbull's articles on Katherine Murray, Elizabeth Murray and Mary Bankes here and here.

Athena Hawksley-Walker and Tom Fetherstonhaugh, both second-year music students at Merton College, Oxford, are currently performing the complete Beethoven violin sonatas in a series of concerts taking place in the Holywell Music Room, Oxford. They tell Arts Blog about this unique project.

Beethoven’s ten violin sonatas, composed between 1798 and 1812, are regarded as the cornerstone of the violin and piano repertory, and are hugely important works in the western classical music canon. They are unmatched in terms of a large-scale cycle of works for a violin and piano duo. Although their composition spans a somewhat smaller time period than some of his other works – for example his string quartets – they offer a huge insight into Beethoven’s development as a composer, with Sonata No.10 in G major sitting on the cusp of his movement into his fragmentary and transcendent so-called ‘late style’.

As well as being arguably the most important single body of works for violin and piano, the pieces demand both extreme technical skill from the performers and an ability to communicate effectively with each other in order to capture and express, through music, the full range of human emotion.

The very first time we played together it was in ‘opposite formation’: Tom on violin and Athena on piano. In fact, the first piece we performed was Beethoven’s violin Sonata No. 5, ‘Spring’. Our artistic partnership continues to grow and this series is our most ambitious yet.

The first three concerts in the series have already taken place, with the remaining sonatas set to be performed across the rest of the year. Sonatas 6 and 10 will be performed on Monday 14 May, and numbers 8 and 9 on Monday 22 October. Each concert will commence at 7.30pm.

On Monday 14 May a pre-concert talk will be given by Daniel Grimley, Professor of Music at the University of Oxford. Professor Grimley is an expert on European classical music and has particular research interests in the links between music, landscape, and geographical culture, covering music from the classical period up to 20th-century works.

Click here for more information on the concerts.

Athena Hawksley-Walker studied violin and piano at the Royal College of Music Junior Department for nine years with Ani Schnarch and Neil Roxburgh, winning prizes in violin, piano and theory, both at the RCM and from the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music. In addition, she was awarded Kingston Young Musician of the Year and Richmond Young Pianist of the Year and distinction in both violin and piano dipABRSM diplomas. Athena was in the National Youth Orchestra for four years, co-leading in her final year. She now studies with Michael Foyle at the Royal Academy of Music through the Oxford Music Faculty’s RAM scheme.

Tom Fetherstonhaugh is organ scholar at Merton College, Oxford, where is he is responsible for accompanying the college choir for BBC broadcasts, concerts, tours and services. He is a busy recitalist, giving solo concerts around the UK and Europe. Alongside his organ-playing, Tom is a conductor. He founded Fantasia Orchestra, a group of London musicians whose concerts have won critical acclaim: the Arts Desk has called the strings sound ‘already a thing of wonder’. Tom is about to start his second season as conductor of the Oxford University Sinfonietta.

Gijsbert Werner, Postdoctoral Fellow and Stuart West, Professor of Evolutionary Biology, both in the Department of Zoology, explain the process of plant cooperation, in relation to their new study published in PNAS, which has shed light on why cooperative relationships breakdown.

Unseen to most of us, almost all plants form below-ground interactions with beneficial soil microbes. One of the most important of these partnerships is an interaction between plant roots and a type of soil fungi called arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi.

The fungi form a network in the soil and provide the plant with soil minerals, such as phosphorus and nitrogen. In return, the fungi receive sugars from the plant. This cooperation between plants and fungi is crucial for plant growth, including of many crops. Plants sometimes even get up to 90% of their phosphorus from these soil fungi.

In collaboration with a team of international researchers, we set out to better understand plant cooperation. We wanted to know why some relationships of plants with soil fungi flourish and others collapse.

This involved analysing a large database of plant-fungal interactions containing thousands of species and using computer models to reconstruct the evolutionary history of the partnership. We found that despite having successfully cooperated for over 350 million of years, partnerships among plants and soil fungi can break down completely.

Once we knew that that plant-fungus cooperation could fail, we wanted to understand how and why the relationship breaks down. We found that in most cases the plants were replacing the fungi with another cooperative partner who did the same job, either different fungi or bacteria. In the other cases, plants had evolved an entirely different way of obtaining the required minerals – for instance, they had become carnivorous plants which trap and eat insects.

Our study shows that despite the great potential benefits of the relationship, cooperation between plants and fungi has been lost about 25 times. It is quite crazy that such an important and ancient collaboration has been abandoned so many times. So why did this happen?

One explanation is that in in some environments, other partners or strategies are a more efficient sources of nitrogen or phosphorus, driving a breakdown of previously successful cooperation between plants and fungi.

For instance, carnivorous plants are often found in very nutrient-poor bogs. Even an ancient beneficial fungus, specialised in efficiently shuttling nutrients to their partner plants simply cannot get the job done there. So, plants evolve a different way to get their nutrients: trapping insects.

A next step is to now find out in what conditions the various different nutrient strategies are found? Where on our planet do plants keep their original fungi? Where do they go for another solution to get their nutrients? Other work focuses on the potential that some fungi evolve to become ‘cheaters’ - taking the benefit from the partnership but no longer contributing to it and ultimately driving its breakdown.