December / January ESE Newsletter

A grant was won to fund a PhD studentship in fuel cell design and we welcome three new members of staff.

Publications

Blumenfeld, R., Jordan, J.F., Edwards, S.F. (2012) Interdependence of the volume and stress ensembles and equipartition in statistical mechanics of granular systems. Physical Review Letters. doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.109.238001. Article available online.

Blumenfeld, R., Edwards, S.F., Walley, S.M. (tba 2013) "Physics of granular systems - where to go from here?". The Oxford Handbook of Soft Condensed Matter, Oxford University Press.

Lambelet, M., Rehkamper, M., van de Flierdt, T., Xue, Z., Kreissig, K., Coles, B, Porcelli, D., Andersson, P. (2013) Isotopic analysis of Cd in the mixing zone of Siberian rivers with the Arctic Ocean – New constraints on marine Cd cycling and the isotope composition of riverine Cd. Earth and Planetary Science Letters. doi: 10.1016/j.epsl.2012.11.034. Article available online.

Sena, C.M., John, C.M. (2012) Impact of dynamic sedimentation on facies heterogeneities in Lower Cretaceous peritidal deposits of central east Oman. Sedimentology. doi/10.1111/sed.12026. Article available online.

Almeida, T. P., Fay, M. W., Zhu, Y., Brown, P. D. (2012) Controlling Role of pH and Temperature on CoFe2O4 Nanostructures Produced by Hydrothermal Synthesis. Journal of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology. doi: 10.1166/jnn.2012.6468. Article available online.

Almeida, T. P., Fay, M. W., Zhu, Y., Brown, P. D. (2012) Hydrothermal Synthesis and Near In Situ Analysis of NiFe2O4 Nanoparticles. Journal of Nanoscience and Nano technology. doi: 10.1166/jnn.2012.6467. Article available online.

Stork, A. L., Stuart, G. W., Henderson, C. M., Keir, D., Hammond, J. O. S. (2013) Uppermost mantle (Pn) velocity model
for the Afar region, Ethiopia: An insight into rifting processes. Geophysical Journal International. doi:10.1093/gji/ggs106. Article available online.

Jacobs, C.T., Collins, G.S., Piggott, M.D., Kramer, S.C., Wilson, C.R.G. (2013) Multiphase flow modelling of volcanic ash particle settling in water using adaptive unstructured meshes. Geophysical Journal International. doi: 10.1093/gji/ggs059. Article available online.

Larner, F.*, Sampson, B., Rehkamper, M., Weiss, D.J., Dainty, J.R., O'Riordan, S., Panetta, T., Bain, P.G. (2013) High precision isotope measurements reveal poor control of copper metabolism in Parkinsonism. Metallomics. doi:10.1039/c3mt20238k. Article available online. *Fiona Larner completed her PhD in ESE in 2012 and is now a PDRA in low temperature isotope chemistry at the University of Oxford.

Bijeljic B., Raeini, A. Mostaghimi P., Blunt, M.J. (2013) Predictions of non-Fickian solute transport in different classes of porous media using direct simulation on pore-scale images. Physical Review E. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevE.87.013011. Article available online.

Carreras, J., Cosgrove, J. W. & Druguet, E. (2013) Strain partitioning in banded and/or anisotropic rocks: Implications for inferring tectonic regimes. Journal of Structural Geology. doi: 10.1016/j.jsg.2012.12.003. Article available online.

Elmore, R.D., Muxworthy, A. R., Aldana, M. M.,Mena, M. (2013) Remagnetization and chemical alteration of sedimentary rocks. Geological Society of London, Special Publication 371, pp 290. Online bookstore.

Muxworthy, A. R., M.E. Evans (2012) Micromagnetics and magnetomineralogy of ultrafine magnetite inclusions in the Modipe Gabbro. Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems. doi:10.1029/2012GC004445. Article available online.

Research Grants

Raphael Blumenfeld has received The Alan Howard Scholarship for a PhD student to work on "Predictive model for the design of fuel cell porous electrodes and membranes". The grant value is £270,000.

Research Awards

Ian Bastow had a successful application to the NERC Geophysical Equipment Pool accepted for the loan of broadband seismological equipment.  The equipment loan has an equivalent commercial of value £144k, and will be used throughout 2013-2015 in SE Canada in a major collaborative experiment with Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory and the universities of Montreal and Rutgers.

Al Fraser has been invited to become the Shell AAPG Distinguished Lecturer for 2013-2014. He will give talks on 'Arctic Oil & Gas Exploration and Production' and 'Angola Oil Exploration: Past, Present and Future'.

Matthew Reeve (4th year MSci student) has received the Tectonic Studies Group student oral presentation prize at the 2013 AGM in Leeds. Matthew presented work which he completed in an 8 week UROP summer student project supervised by Rebecca Bell and Chris Jackson investigating the influence of Caledonian structures on Late Jurassic faulting offshore western Norway using 3D seismic reflection data. Matthew unanimously won this award despite stiff competition from international MSci and PhD students.

Research Activity

Robert Zimmerman gave an invited talk entitled "The history and role of the cubic law for fluid flow in fractured rocks", at the fall Annual Meeting of the American Geophysical Union, San Francisco, 3 December 2012.

Jan Cilliers, Jamie Wilkinson and PhD students William Brownscombe, Edward Spencer, Matthew Loader and Simon Kocher from the LODE group attended the Mineral Deposits Studies Group AGM at the University of Leicester on 2-4th January. Jan Cilliers presented a keynote address entitled "Particles at Interfaces: the effects of shape and contact angle". All the presentations were very well received but Edward Spencer took the honours by winning the Rio Tinto prize for best student talk. At the same time, Adam Pacey, also from the LODE group, gave an invited talk at the Tectonic Studies Group AGM in Leeds on his Masters project and scooped the Shell award for best student talk and overall presentation. Congratulations to the team on some well earned success.

Ian Bastow started a new collaboration with the Departamento de Geofísica, Universidade Federal do Rio Grando do Norte - UFRN.  He delivered a seminar at the university there; they also began work on a new seismological project together. 

Zita Martins was an invited speaker on the Workshop "Cosmochemistry of primitive bodies: the need for MarcoPolo-R - a European sample return space mission", Paris, France, December 2012. She was also an invited speaker and co-chaired a session on the 4th MarcoPolo-R Symposium, Barcelona, Spain, January 2013.

PhD Vivas

Colin Leung passed his viva on his thesis entitled "Modelling the Flow and Transport Properties of Two-Dimensional Fracture Networks, including the Effect of Stress", on 27 November 2012. His supervisor was Robert Zimmerman, the internal examiner was John Cosgrove, and his external examiner was Dave Sanderson of the University of Southampton.

Stacey Emmerton passed her viva for her thesis entitled "Investigating the relationship between magnetisation and oil geochemistry". Her supervisors were Adrian Muxworthy, Mark Sephton and. Wyn Williams (University of Edinburgh). The PhD viva was conducted by Al Fraser and Antony Morris (University of Plymouth). Stacey is now working at Shell UK E&P as an Asset Geophysicist.

New Staff

The MAGIC group welcomes two new members of staff: David Wilson who will be a PDRA working with Tina van de Flierdt, and Roland Stumpf who will be a PDRA working with Mark Rehkamper.

Fraser Wigley will start in a new role as Head of Technical Support for the Departments of Bioengineering, Earth Science & Engineering, and Materials. He will provide building-wide management of facilities for the three departments, including leading the technical support team, interfacing with Facilities Management, and acting as user-coordinator for maintenance and capital projects.

Impact, Outreach, Media

The New Zealand Herald of 9th November printed Dick Selley's comments on the notorious Gasland film 'documentary' extracted from a report on shale gas by Todd Energy for the New Zealand Government.</

Reporter

DR KATIE COLE
Department of Earth Science & Engineering

Contact details

Email: press.office@imperial.ac.uk
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