June 2016 ESE Newsletter

ESE geoscientists attend conferences worldwide

Contents

Publications
Conferences, Lectures and Seminars
Awards
Research Activity
Research Grants
Impact and Media
Outreach
Departmental Activities
PhD Vivas
Quiz Answers

Publications

Boyce, A., I. D. Bastow, F. A. Darbyshire, A. G. Ellwood, A. Gilligan, V. Levin, and W. Menke (2016), Subduction beneath Laurentia modified the eastern North American cratonic edge: Evidence from P wave and S wave tomography, J. Geophys. Res. Solid Earth, 121, doi:10.1002/2016JB012838.

Cruset, D., Cantarero, I., Travé, A., Vergés, J., John, C.M., 2016 (in press). Crestal graben fluid evolution during growth of the Puig-reig anticline (South Pyrenean fold and thrust belt), Journal of Geodynamics (available online, doi:10.1016/j.jog.2016.05.004)  

R. Blanga, M. Berman, M. Biton, F. Tariq, V. Yufit, A. Gladkich, S.G. Greenbaum, N. Brandon and D. Golodnitsky, Peculiarities of ion transport in confined-in-ceramics concentrated polymer electrolytes, Electrochimica Acta (2016) vol 28, pp. 71-79

Gilligan, A., Bastow, I.D., and Darbyshire, F.A. (2016). Seismological structure of the 1.8Ga Trans-Hudson Orogen of North America. Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems, In press

Gilligan, A., I.D. Bastow, E. Watson, F.A. Darbyshire, V. Levin, W. Menke, V. Lane, D. Hawthorn, A. Boyce, M. Liddell, L. Petrescu, Lithospheric deformation in the Canadian Appalachians: evidence from shear wave splitting, Geophys. J. Int., doi:10.1093/gji/ggw207, 2016. 

Gilligan, A., I.D. Bastow, F.A. Darbyshire, Precambrian tectonics in northernmost Hudson Bay: Insights from joint inversion of receiver functions and surface waves Geochem. Geophys. Geosyst., doi:10.1002/2016GC006419, 2016.

Maguire,R., Ritsema, J., van Keken, P.E., Fichtner, A., Goes, S., (2016). P and S wave delays caused by thermal plumes, Geophysical Journal International, 206 (2): 1169-1178, doi: 10.1093/gji/ggw187 

Nixon, C. W., McNeill, L.C, Bull, J.M, Bell, R.E. et al. (2016), Rapid spatiotemporal variations in rift structure during development of the Corinth Rift, central Greece, Tectonics, 35, 1225–1248, doi:10.1002/2015TC004026.

Jacobs, C.T., Piggott, M.D., Kramer, S.C., Funke, S.W. (2016). On the validity of tidal turbine array configurations obtained from steady-state adjoint optimisation. In Proceedings of the VII European Congress on Computational Methods in Applied Sciences and Engineering, Crete, Greece, 5-10 June 2016. Pre-print: http://arxiv.org/abs/1601.08091 Presentation slides: http://christianjacobs.uk/eccomas2016-slides 

Quesnel, B., Boulvais, P., Gautier, P., Cathelineau, M., John, C.M., Dierick, M., Agrinier, P., Drouillete, M., 2016 (in press). Paired stable isotopes (O, C) and clumped isotope thermometry of magnesite and silica veins in the New Caledonia Peridotite Nappe, Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta (available online, doi:10.1016/j.gca.2016.03.021)  

Yuxia Liu D.S. Alessi, G.W. Owttrim, J.P.L. Kenney, Qixing Zhou, S.V. Lalonde, K.O. Konhauser , Cell surface acid-base properties of the cyanobacterium Synechococcus: Influences of nitrogen source, growth phase and N:P ratios, 2016, Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta, doi:10.1016/j.gca.2016.05.023

Conferences, Lectures and Seminars

Asiri Obeysekara gave a presentation of his paper titled "Numerical Modeling of Near-Wellbore Hydraulic Fracturing and Flow Dynamics with Adaptive Mesh Refinement," in the 50th US Rock Mechanics/Geomechanics Symposium, 26 29 June, Houston, Texas. This conference paper was authored by Obeysekara, A., Lei, Q., Salinas P., Pavlidis, D., Latham., J.-P, Xiang, J. and Pain, C

Qinghua Lei gave an oral presentation of "Influence of stress on the permeability of a three-dimensional fractured sedimentary layer" in the 50th US Rock Mechanics/Geomechanics Symposium, 26 29 June, Houston, Texas. This conference paper was authored by Qinghua Lei, Xiaoguang Wang, Jiansheng Xiang and John-Paul Latham.

Carl Jacquemyn presented 4 posters at AAPG-ACE in Calgary on Quantification and surface-based modelling of Arab-D heterogeneity, 3D geostatistics of hydrothermal dolomite and lateral thickness change in reservoir analogues. And co-chaired a session on Advances in carbonate diagenesis.

Chris Jackson attended the AAPG Annual Convention and Exhibition in Calgary (19 - 22 June) to collect the William E. Pratt Memorial Award, for Best Original Article published in the AAPG Bulletin in 2015. The winning paper can be seen here.

Adriana Paluszny of the Rock Mechanics Group gave two talks at the 7th European Congress on Computational Methods in Applied Sciences and Engineering  June 5-10, Crete, Greece:   

"Fracture growth using stress intensity factor criteria evaluated on unstructured tetrahedral meshes in three dimensions”, Adriana Paluszny and Robert W Zimmerman, and "B-Spline ruled surface representation of fractures for three-dimensional isogeometric growth modelling", Adriana Paluszny and Marco Paluszny.

Members of the Rock Mechanics Group gave two presentations at the 50th US Rock Mechanics Symposium, Houston, 26-29 June: "Comparison of fracture mechanics and damage mechanics approaches to simulate three-point bending and double-notch experiments on rock samples", Thibaut Defoort, Adriana Paluszny, and Robert Zimmerman; and "Thermal effects during hydraulic fracturing in low-permeability brittle rocks", Saeed Salimzadeh, Adriana Paluszny, and Robert Zimmerman.

Members of a number of research groups attended Goldschmidt conference in Japan from 26 June to 1 July.  MAGIC group was out in force. Amelia Davies from the carbonate research group presented a talk in a session convened by Cedric John. Janice Kenney presented “Uranium Sorption to Multi-Mineral Systems Associated with Radioactive Waste Disposal”co-authored by Dominik Weiss.

Awards

Janice Kenny was winner of the Postdoc Development Centre's Postdoc Rep Award 2015/2016. Thanks go to Janice for her organization of Wednesday evening social drinks for staff and PhD students.

Qinghua Lei received 2016 "Dr NGW Cook PhD Dissertation Award" from American Rock Mechanics Association (ARMA), in recognition of the outstanding achievements of his PhD thesis "Characterisation and modelling of natural fracture networks: geometry, geomechanics and fluid flow" (supervised by John-Paul Latham). The award was presented in the Awards Banquet held on 28 June during the 50th US Rock Mechanics/Geomechanics Symposium in Houston, Texas.

Craig Magee was awarded the Murchison Fund by the Geological Society of London for his contribution as an early career scientist to hard rock geology and tectonics

Research Activity

PhD student Helen Lacey, who works in the Rock Mechanics Group with Robert Zimmerman, John Cosgrove and Adriana Paluszny, is spending three weeks as a visiting researcher in the State Key Laboratory of Earthquake Dynamics, Institute of Geology, China Earthquake Administration, Beijing. While there, she will perform a suite of lab experiments to study the effect of carbonate precipitation on fault stability, and give a departmental seminar.

Undergraduate student Mikayla Murphy, from the Civil Engineering Department at MIT, is visiting the ESE Rock Mechanics Group for eight weeks this summer, as part of the International Research Opportunities Programme (IROP). She is working with Adriana Paluszny and Robin Thomas on "Data analysis of numerical simulations of flow in fractured media”.

Rebecca Bell has joined the International Ocean Discovery Program’s Science Evaluation Panel and attended a recent meeting at MARUM, Bremen to assess and review submitted proposals.

Research Grants

Ian Bastow was awarded £12k by the Royal Society to support a new collaboration with Prof. Robert van der Hilst’s  seismology group at MIT. This work will also involve PhD students Alistair Boyce and Mitchell Liddell.

Vladimir Yufit and Nigel Brandon are co-investigators on a £ 840k EPSRC funded grant awarded to Imperial team together with University of Exeter and University of Warwick entitled “Zinc-Nickel Redox Flow Battery for Energy Storage”. The project is a collaborative research endeavour between highly experienced researchers with internationally recognised expertise in the field of electrochemical energy conversion and will investigate innovative, cost-effective and highly efficient redox flow systems for large scale energy storage applications.

Impact and Media

Craig Magee, Ian Bastow, and Chris Jackson were invited to write an LIP of the Month article on 'Lateral magma flow in mafic sill-complexes' for www.largeigenousprovinces.org based on a recent paper they and their co-authors published in Geosphere. The article can be found at www.largeigneousprovinces.org/16jun

Outreach

Amy Gilligan, Ian Bastow, Laura Petrescu and Sarah Dodd ran a successful stand - “Good Vibrations: A seismologist’s journey to the centre of the Earth” -  at the June Science Museum Lates,  complete with jigsaw to reconstruct Pangea and a seismometer borrowed from Seis-UK.    

Chris Jackson braved Zone 6 of the London Underground system to give a talk to the Essex Rock and Mineral Society (1^st June). His talk was entitled ‘The Wonder of Salt’.

Departmental Activities

The Department hosted the first ever Interdepartmental Royal School of Mines and Faculty Quiz on the 10^th June 2016. With over 100 participants, a cash prize for the winner, wooden spoons for last place and a free lunch, the event was a huge success in promoting networking between and within the different departments as well as in testing everyone’s general knowledge.

With questions ranging from naming the inventor of windscreen wipers to guessing the odd one out, competition was fierce as every team placed within 10points of each other. The winners (after an intense tie-breaker) was the team named DJSJP. Congratulations to Jan Cilliers, Daphne Salazar, Jackie Hughes, Pablo Brito Parada and Stephen Neethling for winning the ESE Head of Department first prize (we promise that it wasn’t rigged)!

If you didn’t go to the quiz, one of the rounds was called connections. Can you work out the answers? The answers are at the bottom of this newsletter.

1. In C.S Lewis's The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, the Pevensea children are called Peter, Susan, Edmund and __?
2. What is the Spanish word for Flowers?
3. Mel Giedroyc presents the Great British Bake Off with who?
4. What is the old English name for the capital of the People’s Republic of China?
5. What connects all of the above questions and which answer from this round is the odd one out? 

PhD vivas

Philipp Lang successfully defended his thesis, entitled "Multi-scale modelling of thermo-hydro-mechanical-chemical processes in fractured rocks", on 24 June. His thesis was supervised by Adriana Paluszny and Robert Zimmerman, and was funded by the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority. His examiners were Matt Jackson of ESE and Inga Berre of the University of Bergen.

Sunshine Abbot, supervised by Cedric John and Alastair Fraser, successfully defended her thesis on 21 June. 

Quiz Answers

Lucy
Flores
Sue (Perkins)
Peking
They are all fossils/Skeletons and ‘Sue’ is the odd one out because she is a Dinosaur (T.Rex) and the others are all Hominids