Some fantastic awards for ESE this month!

Publications
Conference Talks and Lectures
Awards
Research Grants
Research Activity
Workshops and Courses
Impact and Media
Outreach Activities
Fieldwork

Publications

Almeida, T. P., Muxworthy, A., Williams, W., Kasama, T., Dunin-Borkowski, R. E. (2014) Hydrothermal synthesis, off-axis electron holography and magnetic properties of Fe3O4 nanoparticles. Journal of Physics: Conference Series. Doi:10.1088/1742-6596/522/1/012062.

Greve, S., Paulssen, H., Goes, S., Van Bergen, M. (2014) Shear-velocity structure of the Tyrrhenian Sea: Tectonics, volcanism and mantle (de)hydration of a back-arc basin. Earth and Planetary Science Letters. Doi: 10.1016/j.epsl.2014.05.028.

Lomberg, M., Ruiz-Trejo, E., Offer, G., and Brandon, N. P. (2014). Characterization of Ni-Infiltrated GDC Electrodes for Solid Oxide Cell Applications. Journal of the Electrochemical Society. Doi:10.1149/2.0501409jes. 

Petvipusit, R., Elsheikh, A., Laforce, T., King, P. and Blunt, M. [2014] Robust optimisation of co2 sequestration strategies under geological uncertainty using adaptive sparse grid surrogates. Computational Geosciences. Doi:10.1007/s10596-014-9425-z.

Royo-Torres, R., Upchurch, P., Mannion, P.D., Mas, R., Cobos, A., Gasco, F., Alcala, L. and Sanz, J.L. (2014) The anatomy, phylogenetic relationships, and stratigraphic position of the Tithonian–Berriasian Spanish sauropod dinosaur Aragosaurus ischiaticus. Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society. Doi: 10.1111/zoj.12144.

Conference Talks and Lectures

Trevor Almeida attended the 10^th Santa Fe Conference on Rock Magnetism where he presented his work ‘Direct visualisation of the effect of oxidation and temperature on magnetic recording fidelity in pseudo-single domain magnetite particles’.

The Basins Research Group (BRG) turned out mob-handed for the Geometry and Growth of Normal Faults conference, which was held at the Geological Society of London (23rd-25th June) in memory of Juan Watterson, the god-father of modern thinking on normal faulting. Thilo Wrona, Craig Magee and Chris Jackson gave oral presentations, and Antje Lenhart, Han Claringbould, George Fischer, Stephen Watkins, Olly Duffy, Lewis Ryan, David Reader and Tom Barling all presented posters. George, Stephen, Lewis, David and Tom deserve special mention as their posters arose from work completed as part of their MSci degrees.

Zita Martins was a session convener at the Goldschmidt conference (USA). She also gave a talk at the meeting.

Rocio Negrete Cadena and Adam Booth presented AVA Hydrocarbon Indicator from Least-Squares Inversion based on a Quadratic Form of Zoeppritz’s Equations at the 76^th EAGE Conference and Exhibition in Amsterdam, 16-19 June 2014.

Dick Selley gave talks at shale gas conferences in London on problems of communicating science to non-scientists and on what the UK can learn from the US shale gas experience. 

Robert Zimmerman delivered the opening keynote plenary lecture, entitled "The Past, Present and Future of Rock Mechanics", at the 48th US Rock Mechanics Symposium in Minneapolis on 1st June. The symposium, attended by over 500 scientists and engineers, is the largest rock mechanics conference in the world.

Awards

Philippa Mason has been given the Rectors Award for Teaching Excellence for 2014, and has been nominated  by the UG students as the ESE lecturer of the year for 2014. As the ESE lecturer of the year, Philippa's nomination now goes forward to the Faculty of Engineering competition which is due to be announced at the Faculty Barbeque in September.

Nigel Brandon has been awarded the 2014 Francis Bacon Medal from the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. He collected his medal in Boston. The Francis Bacon Medal Award is given in honor of Francis Thomas Bacon, the British engineer who developed the first practical hydrogen-oxygen fuel cells, which convert air and fuel directly into electricity through electrochemical processes. A graduate of Eton College and of Trinity College, Cambridge (B.A., 1925; M.A., 1946), Bacon became intrigued with fuel cells while working for the electrical company C.A. Parsons & Co. Ltd. in Newcastle-on-Tyne (1925-40). The Francis Bacon Medal recipient must have demonstrated fundamental and applied scientific and engineering contributions to the field of fuel cell science and technology as evidenced by academic and/or industrial publications, patents, documented technology improvements and/or successful commercial products. He/she also must have contributed to the technical community via education and outreach and provided leadership in national and international technical societies, conferred fellowships, service to educational institutions (primary and higher learning), formal or informal teaching, and/or success in technology or knowledge transfer. The recipient must have achieved international recognition through the development of technical and educational collaborations between institutions of learning, research laboratories and industry.

The Imperial College EAGE (European Association of Geoscientists and Engineers) Student Chapter won the “Best Student Chapter Award” at the 76th Annual EAGE Conference in Amsterdam. The award was presented to the chapter in recognition of their contribution to the promotion of Geosciences and the specific branches of Geoscience, as well as the overall variety, success and participation of the EAGE student activities and events. Along with the honour of receiving the award, the student chapter has been presented with a €2000 prize fund to be spent on even more successful events for the next coming year. A big congratulations to all undergraduate and post-graduate committee members!

Research Grants

Sam Krevor is the PI for a grant awarded from the UK CCS Research Centre for £299,000 to research multiphase flow and dissolution of CO2 into brine in reservoir rocks for CO2 storage in the UK. Martin Blunt is a co-Investigator in addition to Gareth Williams and Sam Holloway from the British Geological Survey.

Sam Krevor is a co-Investigator for a grant awarded by the EPSRC call Research Challenges in Carbon Capture for CCS. The award is £250,000 from a total project award of £1.25M to research systems integration in energy systems that include conventional and renewable energy and CCS. The PI is Niall MacDowell in the Centre for Environmental Policy. The proposal includes additional investigators from the Department of Chemical Engineering and the Business School.  

Duna Rado and Alex Whittaker received a NERC grant to fund the costs of 15 ¹⁰Be analyses of samples from the Southern Apennines (a total of £13,120), that will be analyzed in the SUERC (Scottish Universities Environmental Research Center) laboratory by Duna and SUERC staff next winter.

Research Activity

Chris Jackson visited Jean-Marc Daniel and Fadi Nadar at IFP Energies Nouvelles in Paris (13th June) to discuss results arising from an ongoing collaborative project focused on the salt tectonics of offshore Lebanon. Petroleum Geoscience MSc student Ciprian Verdes is currently analysing the stratigraphy and structural style of Messinian salt, with a particular emphasis on intrasalt deformation.

Geochemistry’s annual flagship conference – Goldschmidt – was held in Sacramento, California from June 9^th to 13^th. ESE presented a truly diverse range of research with attendees including John MacDonald and Veerle Vandeginste, who both presented work on clumped isotopes with a poster and talk, respectively. Dominik Weiss gave a talk on zinc efficiency in rice and Raquel Ochoa Gonzalez chaired a session on air pollution. Julie Prytulak gave a talk and chaired a session both on the topic of stable isotope fractionation in magmatic systems. An almost magmatic average temperature of 39 degrees Celsius throughout the week certainly was a change from our temperate London climate!

Workshops and Courses

James Hammond led a short course titled ‘Introduction to Seismology and Earth Structure’ for students and staff from the Eritrea Institute of Technology, Asmara, Eritrea. The four day course covered aspects of earthquake and global seismology, plate tectonics and the internal structure of the Earth. 

Chris Jackson, ably assisted by Adamu Suleiman, Idrus Puasa, Clara Rodriguez and Han Claringbould, gave a Seismic Interpretation Techniques short course to PhD student members of the British Sedimentological Research Group (BSRG) (14th-15th June). The weekend was only tainted by England's capitulation to The Azzuri...

Impact and Media

Adam Booth gave an interview for ENCA News, explaining the use of geophysical surveys in the search in Portugal for missing toddler Madeleine McCann.

Dick Selley was the lead signature of a letter in the Guardian signed by 50 academics from IC and across the UK in support of the hydraulic fracturing of shale for gas & oil production.  

Outreach Activities

Adam Booth gave a departmental seminar in Durham University’s Department of Earth Sciences, on 13^th June, entitled “A Story of Spitfires: Geophysics in Support of Conflict Archaeology.”

On Monday 30^th June ESE hosted 60 sixth form students as part of the Headstart Engineering Summer School. The students undertook activities designed to showcase the department and to give them a flavour of the engineering applications of the Earth Sciences. Workshops on mineral exploration and mineral separation were run by Emma Passmore, Gareth Morris and Pablo Brito-Parada, and assisted by PhD student Alex Norori-McCormac, and undergraduates Tom Mulqueen (newly graduated), Stuart MacGowan, Abigail Trice and Emma Crewdson. The event was overseen by Emma Passmore. Many thanks to all those who assisted.

Fieldwork

After teaching on the 2^nd year undergraduate field trip to Scotland, John MacDonald and Craig Magee stayed in the NW Highlands to undertake 10 days of detailed mapping and sample collection in the Lewisian Gneiss Complex. This formed the field component of their Research Collaboration Project, to which they are grateful to the department for financial support, with remaining analysis to be carried out by two MSci students in the autumn semester. The project is aimed at testing the effect of polyphase rock deformation on zircon geochronology.

Julie Prytulak saw some beautiful eclogites on a June pre-Goldschmidt fieldtrip to the Franciscan complex in California – the type locality for ‘metamorphic melanges’. Melanges are exhumed metamorphic rocks originating from a complicated mix of sediments and ocean crust that were mangled, squeezed, heated and generally squashed during plate subduction. This stunning ecolgite results from subjecting oceanic crust (i.e. basalt) to high pressures and temperatures in a subduction zone. Red pyrope garnet, green omphacite clinopyroxene and stunning blue glaucophane amphibole can be clearly identified. Photo credit: Julie Prytulak

Duna Rado, Mitch D'Arcy and their supervisor Alex Whittaker just came back from a 22-day field campaign in the Southern Apennines (Campania, Basilicata and Calabria). They collected grain size data from active channels and from Pleistocene and Holocene deposits, and also characterised the volumes and grain size distributions being supplied by different lithologies and by landslides present in the studied catchments. This field data will be used for Duna’s PhD to quantify the controls of sediment supply (volumes, rates and grain size distributions of the sedimentary fluxes) from normal fault-bounded catchments, using fault throw rates and lithology as the main variables. During the field campaign, they also collected sand and gravel samples from active channels for ¹⁰Be analysis to quantify erosion and sediment supply rates.