From Namibia to the Neuquen Basin: an exciting November in ESE

Contents

Publications
Conferences, Lectures and Seminars
Impact and Media
Awards
Outreach
Fieldwork
Research Activity
Announcements

Publications

Berndt, T., A. R. Muxworthy, and G. A. Paterson (2015), Determining the magnetic attempt time τ0, its temperature dependence, and the grain size distribution from magnetic viscosity measurements, J. Geophys. Res. Solid Earth, 120, doi:10.1002/2015JB012283. 

Darbyshire, F.A., I.D. Bastow, A.M. Forte, T.E. Hobbs, A. Calvel, A. Gonzalez-Monteza, and B. Schow (2015), Variability and origin of seismic anisotropy across eastern Canada: evidence from shear-wave splitting measurements, J. Geophys. Res. Solid Earth, 120, doi:10.1002/2015JB012228. 

Reynolds,  C.A., Krevor, S., (2015). Characterising flow behavior for gas injection: Relative permeability of CO2-brine and N2-water in heterogeneous rocks. Water Resources Research dii:10.1002/2015WR018046  http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2015WR018046/full

Holland, R.A, Scott, K,, Flörke, M., Brown, G., Ewers, R.M, Farmer, E., Kapos, V., Muggeridge, A., Scharlemann, J.P.W., Taylor, G., Barrett, J., Eigenbrod, F., (2015). Global impacts of energy demand on the freshwater resources of nations. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1507701112

McPhee, B.W., Mannion, P.D., de Klerk, W.J., Choiniere, J.N., (2016). High diversity in the sauropod dinosaur fauna of the Lower Cretaceous Kirkwood Formation of South Africa: Implications for the Jurassic–Cretaceous transition. Cretaceous Research 59, 228–248. DOI: 10.1016/j.cretres.2015.11.006).

Martin-Short, R., Allen, R. M., Bastow, I. D., Totten, E., & Richards, M. A. (2015). Mantle flow geometry from ridge to trench beneath the Gorda-Juan de Fuca plate system. Nature Geoscience, 8, 965–968 (2015) doi:10.1038/ngeo2569.

Conferences, Lectures and Seminars

Chris Jackson shows the sky above Windhoek (Namibia) at sunset and during the day

Chris Jackson gave a talk at the Geological Survey of Namibia, Windhoek, Namibia (26th November). His talk was entitled: Geology of the 5/22-1 exploration well, Rockall Trough, offshore NW Ireland: the role of break-up magmatism on trap development and reservoir quality. This talk drew on research conducted by Craig Magee and Carl Jacquemyn. Chris was in Windhoek as part of his Visiting Lecturer role at the University of Namibia, which has just started an MSc in Petroleum Geoscience. Windhoek and Namibia in general are awesome places! 

Martin Blunt presents at symoposion for Flow and Transport for CO2 Storage

Cat Reynolds and Sam Krevor chaired the UKCCS Research Centre and QCCSRC hosted symposium Flow and Transport for CO2 Storage. The event was held at Imperial College's 58 Prince’s Gate at maximum capacity with a participation of over 50 individuals traveling from the UK, Norway, the Netherlands, and the United States. The assortment of presentations provided a platform to scrutinise our understanding of the migration and trapping of CO2 injected in storage sites. Presenters from ESE included Cat Reynolds and Martin Blunt. 

Adriana Paluszny gave an invited talk on 3 November,"Numerical modelling of fracture growth and caprock integrity during CO2 injection", at the UKCCSRC Specialist Meeting on Geophysical Modelling for CO2 Storage, held at the University of Leeds. This talk was based on work done with Saeed Salimzadeh and Robert Zimmerman, within the EPSRC-funded CONTAIN project.

Adriana Paluszny gave an invited talk on 12 November, entitled "Numerical modelling of 3D fracture propagation and fragmentation in brittle rocks", at the Technical University of Catalonia (UPC) in Barcelona, Spain.

PhD student Morteza Nejati, who is working with Adriana Paluszny and Robert Zimmerman, gave a seminar entitled "Finite element modeling of frictional contact and stress intensity factors in three-dimensional fractured media using unstructured tetrahedral meshes" at ETH Zurich on 7 October, and at the Universita della Svizzera Italiana on 9 October.

John-Paul Latham and PhD student Qinghua Lei attended the The Geology of Geomechanics held by The Geological Society London on 28th-29th October 2015, and delivered a poster presentation "Modelling rock mass failure around a repository excavation in a fractured crystalline rock using the finite-discrete element method".

Dylan Rood gave invited talks at Caltech and Oxford, entitled "Unconventional paleoseismology using cosmogenic He-3" and "Applications of cosmogenic nuclide dating in continental interiors", respectively.

Impact and Media

Robert Martin-Short, a former ESE undergraduate now working in Berkeley, USA, published a paper in Nature Geoscience entitled Mantle flow geometry from ridge to trench beneath the Gorda–Juan de Fuca plate system.  This article, which was co-authored by Ian Bastow and final-year undergraduate student Eoghan Totten, was highlighted in a News and Views article in the same volume.  The piece also attracted considerable media attention.

Chris Jackson visited the Lion Salt Works Museum on 4 November, the country’s only salt museum. The museum, based near Northwich in Cheshire, is one of only four open-pan, salt-making works in the world. It in June this year after a £10m, four-year restoration programme, thanks largely to a grant of over £5m from the Heritage Lottery Fund. Full details of the visit, a full attendees list, and some pictures can be seen here and here.

Dick Selley's research on the impact of global warming on viticulture was cited by China Radio International, broadcast & online, on 10th November.

The research team from Pore-scale Modeling Consortium and QCCSRC lead by Branko Bijeljic and Martin Blunt have Science Highlight published at the Diamond synchrotron website. These are the first dynamic studies of multiphase flow and reactive transport during CO2 injection in subsurface rock at  reservoir conditions that illuminate important trapping and reactive flow phenomena.

Awards

Chris Jackson, along with co-authors Dan Carruthers (UT Austin, now CGG), Seshane Maloh (IC, now Statoil) and Omieari Briggs (IC, now Edison) won the Wallace E. Pratt Memorial Award for the best paper published in the AAPG (American Association of Petroleum Geology) Bulletin entitled Can polygonal faults help locate deep-water reservoirs? . Note the use of a question mark. The award will be presented at the AAPG Annual Convention in Calgary, Canada in June 2016. 

Adamu Suleiman, along with co-authors Alastair Fraser and Chris Jackson, won a ‘Top 10 Poster Presentation’ prize for a poster they presented at the AAPG Annual Convention, Denver, USA. The poster was entitled: "Tectono-Stratigraphic Evolution of the Bornu Basin, Nigeria: Linking Plate Boundary and Plate Interior Geodynamics and Implications for the Opening of the South Atlantic Ocean". 

PhD student Helen Lacey, who is working with Veerle Vandeginste, Robert Zimmerman, John Cosgrove and Adriana Paluszny, was awarded an EAGE/Schlumberger travel grant to attend the 3rd EAGE Workshop on Rock Physics in Istanbul, 15-18 November. The focus was on "From Rocks to Basin’, and included talks on the use of rock physics in seismic inversion, the effect of CO2 on rock properties, as well as digital rock physics.

Outreach

Julie Prytulak gave an evening lecture to the Mole Valley Amateur Geology Association titled “The biggest volcano on Earth”. The audience was very surprised to learn it is under water! 

Fieldwork

Research Activity

Alexander Norori-McCormac visited the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (UFMG) in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, to foster collaboration and meet potential PhD students in all fields of Engineering.

Announcements

On Thursday 3 December Zita Martins will be giving the Childrens Christmas Lecture “The Universe: a journey through space and time” as part of the Imperial Fringe. The theme will include a close look at different planets and moons across the solar system, alongside live demonstrations. Further details of the event can be found here.

ESE members of the Impacts and Astromaterials Research Centre will also be at the Imperial Fringe on 3 December helping festival goers to create their own meteorite crashes and search for fragments in the desert.