Dogger Bank

• Contrary to the Brexit agreement that allowed EU fishers to fish in British waters, the UK has decided to ban sandeel fishing on the British part of the Dogger Bank.
• When the EU and the UK agreed on the terms of Brexit, a crucial element was that EU fishers could continue to fish in UK waters.
• The UK is now reneging on that agreement and will ban sandeel fishing on the UK part of the Dogger Bank from March 26 this year.
• With the Brexit agreement, Danish fishers paid dearly for access to British waters.

• The 3GW DBS projects bring together global clean energy pioneers Masdar and RWE, a leading renewable energy company headquartered in Germany.
• Today's investment in the 3GW DBS projects - almost five times as big as London Array - shows Masdar's steadfast expansion into the exciting offshore wind sector.
• Masdar has also invested in the 30MW Hywind project, which was the world's first floating offshore wind farm, and the 402MW Dudgeon offshore wind farm.
• RWE is already one of the leading companies in the field of renewable energy and offshore wind.

• The company has consistently expanded its capacity to meet accelerating demand driven by the clean energy transition.
• Since 2020, when Hitachi began its strategic investment, Hitachi Energy has increased its workforce by more than 8,000.
• "Electricity will be the backbone of the entire energy system and will help to drive the clean energy transition.
• Today’s announcement shows how we are enabling our customers to accelerate the development of the power grids that energy system requires," said Claudio Facchin, CEO of Hitachi Energy.

• Earthquakes of this nature are not uncommon in Britain (the island including England, Scotland and Wales).
• However, there are occasional earthquakes in Britain that have the potential to be destructive.
• Most earthquakes in Britain are concentrated within a north-to-south band on the west side of the island.
• This makes the tectonic plate under Ireland much less likely to deform – a process that can trigger earthquakes.

Ireland’s missing earthquakes

• Even before earthquakes were recorded by seismographs as they are today, reports of earthquakes were documented in various towns and monasteries across Britain and Ireland.
• In the mid-19th century, Robert Mallet, an Irish scientist credited with coining the term “seismology”, created earthquake maps based on these reports.

Intraplate earthquakes

• Most earthquakes happen at plate boundaries where tectonic plates converge, diverge or slide past each other.
• Earthquakes that occur in the interior of the plates are much less common and typically smaller in magnitude.
• Between 1811 and 1812, the New Madrid Seismic Zone in the central US experienced a sequence of powerful earthquakes, ranging from magnitude 7 to 8.

Through thick and thin

• Research that I co-authored in 2021 discovered previously unknown variations in the structure of the tectonic plate that both Britain and Ireland sit on.
• Tectonic plates are cold and rigid compared to the hot, slowly creeping mantle beneath them.
• Ireland has a relatively thick lithosphere (around 95-115km beneath most of the island) and very few earthquakes as a result.
• South-eastern England and eastern Scotland have a similarly thick lithosphere.