British Geological Survey

The image staring back at me intently is Conquest Man, a meticulously reconstructed visage based on a 1,000-year-old skeleton found at the Church of St. Peter's in Barton-on-Humber.

The face of Conquest Man has been revealed thanks to a research project combining the expertise of English Heritage, Historic England, the Crick Institute, the British Geological Survey, the University of Southampton, MUVIS, and Face Lab, and it has revealed some surprising results.

I had a chat with Kevin Booth, English Heritage's head curator of collections, to find out what their research has uncovered about the people living in Britain and their lives at the time of the Norman Conquest.

Hello, Kevin.

The image staring back at me intently is Conquest Man, a meticulously reconstructed visage based on a 1,000-year-old skeleton found at the Church of St Peter's in Barton-on-Humber.

The face of Conquest Man has been revealed thanks to a research project combining the expertise of English Heritage, Historic England, the Crick Institute, the British Geological Survey, the University of Southampton, Muvis and Facelab.

And it has revealed some surprising results.

I had a chat with Kevin Booth, English Heritage's Head Curator of Collections, to find out what their research has uncovered about the people living in Britain and their lives at the time of the Norman Conquest.

So where do they look?

They utilized data from the British Geological Survey's Eskdalemuir Observatory.

It's this very quiet station in Scotland, far away from major city interference, and they analyzed a massive decade-long data set spanning from 2012 to 2022.

10 years of continuous planetary data? I cannot even fathom the sheer volume of noise in a data set like that.

12-year journey in finance then for yourself is that right?

Yeah so I started here at Next as a kind of halfway through my accountancy career so I'd started to study a previous place which it was so a place called the British Geological Survey big shout out to them because they were a wonderful place to be yeah up near Nottingham but you know you're in a work environment where finance isn't the key thing for you it isn't you're looking around at your colleagues and they're all kind of geologists kind of going up through and they're at the pinnacle of their career you know they're doing the things that they really want to do and for me it wasn't really kind of ticking those boxes so i thought now's the time to kind of make a change applied for a few different places next came up i did one of those assessment centers that we often do you got me up there in a big group exercise yeah uh talking uh i think we had a group exercise which was something along the lines of you've crash landed on the moon and you've got to rank these things in order of what you kind of salvage first and to kind of help you survive and it's all very intimidating because you don't know whether I need to kind of jump out and kind of be really kind of

extrovert and kind of get my opinion across early or do I sit

in the back and but then you're worrying that oh do I've forgotten to say anything and so anyway it's a very kind of nerve-wracking thing but went through the process fortunately got offered a role so it was in our credit risk business So early infancy of our finance business.

You just register for a count, and it has all sorts of things that you can do.

You can have the British Geological Survey, maybe a dashboard of polar bears spotted in the air that they've done.

But every council has it, the Department of Work and Pensions.

You can do... citizen apis um you can get to drive a dvla i can never say authentication i don't know why i even try and say it every time i ever say the office for national statistics they have the geography there's so much stuff on there it's insane what you can do all free of charge i say ai is brilliant for connecting that together and and then doing the data visualizations

How, how straightforward has that been?

Well, I suppose what it really started out with is that myself and colleagues from the British Geological Survey, what we did was we undertook a survey to, to assess the damage that the coins were doing in the first place.

We suspected there was damage, but we weren't entirely sure.

So by looking at the coins, where they are, what's happening around them, as you've already mentioned, we were able to assess that there was physical and chemical damage to the Causeway itself.

How, how straightforward has that been?

Well, I suppose what it really started out with is that, um, myself and colleagues from the British Geological Survey, what we did was we, we, we undertook a survey to, to assess the damage that the coins were doing in the first place.

We suspected there was damage, but we weren't entirely sure.

So by looking at the coins, where they are, what's happening around them, as you've already mentioned, we were able to assess that there was physical and chemical damage to the Causeway itself.

So the setup is a double coronal mass ejection, two CMEs, combined with a high-speed solar wind stream all heading our way.

Forecasters, including the British Geological Survey, are predicting G1-to-G2-level geomagnetic storming, so minor to moderate on the scale that runs up to G5.

And the timing.

When's this actually supposed to arrive?