In this paper, we study the growth of fine Selmer groups in two cases. First, we study the growth of fine Selmer ranks in multiple $\mathbb{Z}_{p}$-extensions. We show that the growth of the fine Selmer group is unbounded in such towers. We recover a sufficient condition to prove the $\unicode[STIX]{x1D707}=0$ conjecture for cyclotomic $\mathbb{Z}_{p}$-extensions. We show that in certain non-cyclotomic $\mathbb{Z}_{p}$-towers, the $\unicode[STIX]{x1D707}$-invariant of the fine Selmer group can be arbitrarily large. Second, we show that in an unramified $p$-class field tower, the growth of the fine Selmer group is unbounded. This tower is non-Abelian and non-$p$-adic analytic.

We prove that the essential dimension of central simple algebras of degree $p^{\ell m}$ and exponent $p^{m}$ over fields $F$ containing a base-field $k$ of characteristic $p$ is at least $\ell +1$ when $k$ is perfect. We do this by observing that the $p$-rank of $F$ bounds the symbol length in $\text{Br}_{p^{m}}(F)$ and that there exist indecomposable $p$-algebras of degree $p^{\ell m}$ and exponent $p^{m}$. We also prove that the symbol length of the Kato-Milne cohomology group $\text{H}_{p^{m}}^{n+1}(F)$ is bounded from above by $\binom{r}{n}$ where $r$ is the $p$-rank of the field, and provide upper and lower bounds for the essential dimension of Brauer classes of a given symbol length.

In this paper we study the p-rank of Abelian prime-to-p covers of the generic r-pointed curve of genus g. There is an obvious bound on the p-rank of the cover. We show that it suffices to compute the p-rank of cyclic prime-to-p covers of the generic r-pointed curve of genus zero. In that situation, we show that, for large p, the p-rank of the cover is equal to the bound.