ESE researchers participated in Science Uncovered at the Natural History Museum, discussing CO2 sequestration and sustainable energy with the public.

Contents

Publications
Conferences, Lectures and Seminars
Outreach
Fieldwork
Department News

Publications

Almeida, T.P., Muxworthy, A.R., Kovacs, A., Williams, W. and Dunin-Borkowski, R.E. (2017). Observation of thermally-induced magnetic relaxation in a magnetite grain using off-axis electron holography, Journal of Physics : Conference Series, 902, doi:10.1088/1742-6596/902/1/012001.

Debbabi, Y., Jackson, M.D., Hampson, G.J. and Salinas, P. (2017). Capillary heterogeneity trapping and crossflow in layered porous media. Transport in Porous Media, v. 120, p. 183-206. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11242-017-0915-z

Di Chiara, A., Muxworthy, A.R., Trindade, R.I.F. and Bispo-Santos, F. (2017). Paleoproterozoic Geomagnetic Field Strength From the Avanavero Mafic Sills, Amazonian Craton, Brazil, Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems, doi:10.1002/2017GC007175.

Doughty-Jones, G., and Mayall M, Lonergan L. 2017. Stratigraphy, facies, and evolution of deep-water lobe complexes within a salt-controlled intraslope mini basin. AAPG Bulletin, 101, no. 11 , pp. 1879– 1904. DOI:10.1306/01111716046.

This paper was listed as one of 3 best abstracts of 2017 by Matt Hall on his Agile blog, an interesting read for how not to write an abstract.

Jacquemyn, C., Jackson, M.D., Hampson, G.J., John, C.M., Cantrell, D.L., Z?hlke, R., AbuBshait, A., Lindsay, R.F., and Monsen, R. (2017). Geometry, spatial arrangement and origin of carbonate grain-dominated scour-fill and event-bed deposits: Late Jurassic Jubaila Formation and Arab-D Member, Saudi Arabia. Sedimentology.https://dx.doi.org/10.1111/sed.12414.

Lasbleis, M., Waszek, L., and Day E.A. (2017). GrowYourIC: A Step Toward a Coherent Model of the Earth's Inner Core Seismic Structure, Geochem. Geophys. Geosyst. DOI: 10.1002/2017GC007149

Lei, Q., Latham, J.-P., Xiang, J., and Tsang, C.-F. (2017). Role of natural fractures in damage evolution around tunnel excavation in fractured rocks. Engineering Geology. doi: 10.1016/j.enggeo.2017.10.013

Mosser, L., Dubrule, O. and Blunt, M. J. (2017). Reconstruction of three-dimensional porous media using generative adversarial neural networks, Physical Review E, https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.96.043309

Salimzadeh, S., Paluszny, A., Nick, H.M., and Zimmerman, R.W. (2018). A three-dimensional coupled thermo-hydro-mechanical model for deformable fractured geothermal systems. Geothermics, 71: 212-214. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0375650517301013

Zhang, Z., Geiger, S., Rood, M., Jacquemyn, C., Jackson, M.D., Hampson, G.J., Moura De Carvalho, F., Coda Marques Machado, C., Machado Silva, J.D., Costa Sousa, M. (2017) A Tracing Algorithm for Flow Diagnostics on Fully Unstructured Grids With Multipoint Flux Approximation. SPE Journal. https://doi.org/10.2118/182635-PA

Philip Allen, Emeritus Professor in ESE, recently published a monograph entitled "Sediment Routing Systems: The Fate of Sediment from Source to Sink" with Cambridge University Press.

The book was released in the UK on 14 September 2017 and will follow in the US six weeks later. The book includes research results obtained over the last decade by Professor Allen and his group at Imperial.

Conferences, Lectures and Seminars

Adriana Paluszny gave an invited seminar at the University of Edinburgh on 5 October, entitled “Accurate finite element-based modelling of fracture growth and interaction in three dimensions”.

Carl Jacquemyn attended and presented a keynote talk at the first Researcher Links workshop on Prediction of Complex Reservoir Systems under Uncertainty, held in Tomsk, Russia. The presentation was titled “Surface-based reservoir modelling and simulation and its potential to preserve uncertainty” This workshop was aimed to assess uncertainty across different disciplines (geoscience, geophysics, engineering, data analysis) and initiate collaborations. Carl also gave a talk during AAPG-ICE at London Excel (15-18 Oct) entitled “My geology is too complex for my grid”, as part of a session on technologies and methodologies for reservoir characterization.

Later, Carl attended the 2017 RING meeting in Nancy organised by the RING-GOCAD consortium focussed on advancing subsurface modelling and technology for knowledge integration. He gave a presentation entitled “Grid-free surface-based modelling using NURBS surfaces: surface construction and workflow”.

Carl Jacquemyn attended a field-based workshop on carbonate reservoirs in Provence, France. It was organized by TRACS and attended by researchers from Herriot-Watt, Royal Holloway and Imperial College. The aim of the field workshop was to discuss current modelling and simulation issues in carbonates applied on world-class Shuaiba-Kharaib outcrop analogues. Carl and Zhao Zhang (HW) ran a demonstration of the Rapid Reservoir Modelling prototype.

PhD student Robin Thomas gave an invited talk at Uppsala University in Sweden on 18 October, entitled “Hydraulic transmissivity of fracture networks generated through geomechanical fracture-growth simulations“. Robin is working within the NERC-funded HydroFrame project; his PhD is supervised by Adriana Paluszny and Robert Zimmerman.

Dick Selley was invited to give a talk on shale gas at the London AAPG International Conference & Exhibition.

PhD student Ruth Davey was given a slot as a plenary speaker for the International Meeting of Organic Geochemists 2017 (IMOG) in Florence. Ruth discussed the findings of her research into carbon isotope and molecular weight fractionation in shale gas with % gas extracted. The ultimate aim of this is to generate a universal technique to interpret production data that will give a percent of total volume of gas extracted over a given amount of time. Ruth’s talk was well attended and seemed to be well received!

Jamie Wilkinson gave an invited presentation at the "Indicator Minerals" workshop at the Decennial Exploration 17 conference in Toronto, October 22-25. This conference is a 10-yearly event designed to showcase the latest developments in mineral exploration techniques. Co-authored by LODE group PDRAs Clara Wilkinson and Matt Loader, and PhD students Adam Pacey, Robert Sievwright, Lisa Hart and Emily Brugge, the presentation summarised recent developments in the use of mineral chemistry for assessing the metal endowment of porphyry copper ore deposits and for locating mineralization. The group's activities also received recognition in the plenary talk on geochemical exploration methods given by Paul Agnew of Rio Tinto.

Jamie Wilkinson was also interviewed by Robyn Williams, presenter of one of the world's longest running science programmes, The Science Show on ABC radio in Australia about the two-tonne Banded Iron Formation rock sample recently installed in one of the new Wonder Bays in the Natural History Museum's Hintze Hall. The specimen tells us about the onset of oxygenation of the Earth's atmosphere and some of the earliest life on the planet, and is also important as an example of the type of material mined for much of the world's iron ore.

On 26th October, David Wilson gave a departmental seminar at the School of Earth and Ocean Sciences, Cardiff University, with the title “Deglacial climate variability through the window of deep-sea coral geochemistry”.

Outreach

Adriana Paluszny, along with her CONTAIN project collaborators Katherine Daniels (BGS), Dimitrios Xenias (Cardiff), and Lorraine Whitmarsh (Cardiff), hosted a booth on 29 September at the Natural History Museum Science Uncovered 2017 event (http://www.nhm.ac.uk/events/science-uncovered.html). Science Uncovered is part of European Researchers’ Night, a festival where the public can discuss cutting edge research with scientists. The group spent the night discussing CO2 sequestration with members of the public, and explaining the importance of developing a clean and sustainable energy mix in the UK (see attached photo). CONTAIN is an EPSRC-funded collaboration between ESE, BGS, and Cardiff; other IC investigators include Robert Zimmerman and Vasia Tsaparli.

On 23 October, the Earth Science and Engineering Department hosted an inaugural training session for PhD students to support them in delivering outreach activities. Head of Department Prof Mark Sephton welcomed students, and underscored the importance of their contributions to the department and the skills it can provide. Three PhD students, Jonathan Rio, Jennifer Quye-Sawyer and Ruth Davey talked about their experiences being involved in societal engagement and outreach, and how they have benefited from this. Over lunch, students tried to synthesise their research project into a single sentence. To wrap things up, college representatives James Romero, Public Engagement Programme Coordinator, and Dr Melanie Bottrill signposted the support and opportunities that the College can provide.

Keeping track of outreach

Is your outreach activity not in this newsletter? We’d still like to know about it! If you have given a presentation, delivered a public engagement activity, spoken in a school or are otherwise involved in supporting societal engagement, please let us know by emailing Victoria Murphy.

Fieldwork

The Petroleum Geoscience MSc students braved storm ‘Brian’ on the weekend of 20-22 October looking at faults and fractures on foreshore at Kilve under expert guidance of Dave Sanderson. Despite inclement weather conditions, rocks are as fabulous as always. The students showed great resilience in the face of wind gusts, rain showers, hailstones and flying hard hats. For some it was their first experience of UK Atlantic condition.

Department News

Dr Xue Wan has beaten fierce competition to take a prestigious research position at the Technology and Engineering Centre for Space Utilization through the Chinese Academy of Sciences ‘Pioneer Hundred Talents Program’. The Centre for Space Utilization is the leading research institution for the space utilization system of China Manned Space program. This follows Zue Wan’s two successful years as a post doc researching advanced subpixel image analysis for civil and defence applications under Dr Liu’s supervision.

Xue achieved both completing a DSTL research project with Dr Liu and the competition for “Hundred Talents Program”, in her maternity leave; Xue delivered a lovely baby girl in July! Many congratulations to Xue!