ESE June Newsletter

Year 3 geology undergraduates on their field trip to Sardinia

An overview of the recent publications, events and exciting work that's been happening in the Department of Earth Science and Engineering.

Contents

Publications
Conferences
Awards
ESE Conference
Outreach and Impact
Fieldwork
PhD Vivas
Alumni Activities

Publications

Cordell, D., Unsworth, M. J., Diaz, D., Reyes?Wagner, V., Currie, C. A., & Hicks, S. P. (2019). Fluid and Melt Pathways in the Central Chilean Subduction Zone Near the 2010 Maule Earthquake (35–36° S) as Inferred From Magnetotelluric Data. Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems. DOI: 10.1029/2018GC008167

Conference Talks, Lectures, Seminars

Prof. Robert Zimmerman gave an invited seminar entitled "The Effect of Pore Structure and Pore Fluids on the Elastic Moduli and Wavespeeds in Porous Rocks" in the Department of Engineering at the University of Cambridge, on 17 May.

Three PhD students from the Rock Mechanics Group, Jordan Schofield, Beni Setiawan, and Robin Thomas, gave poster presentations at the London SPE May meeting on 28 May. The three posters were focused on some aspect of unconventional hydrocarbon resources: gas flow mechanisms (Schofield), borehole stability in shales (Setiawan), and fracture growth (Thomas). 

PhD student Jude Osamor participated in the Geologist Association Student Symposium 2019 on 17 May 2019 at Burlington House London. He presented a poster about his research on understanding magnetic enhancement in hydrocarbon reservoirs, which was awarded the 2^nd prize.

Awards

Congratulations to Prof. Robert Zimmerman, who won the AGU’s 2018 Editors’ Citation for Excellence in Refereeing - JGR-Solid Earth.

Undergraduate ESE student Arman Sarjou won the award for Wellbeing Representative of the year, at the annual Imperial College Union Awards dinner. The hard work that he has put this year as the ESE Wellbeing Rep. has been fantastic, as he has supported many initiatives and events that have really helped to build a community. 

Chloé Lewis, also an undergraduate in the department, won a Colours Award at the Imperial College Union Awards dinner. This prize recognizes her work as the RSM Welfare Officer.

Congratulations to all!

ESE Conference

ESE PhD Conference took place on the 12 June, with over 50 PhD students and Postdocs in attendance! More than 20 first year PhD students presented posters, while another 15 second to fourth year PhD students gave a variety of interesting talks about the research they are undertaking in the department. 

Congratulations to Zoe Hodges, Javier Cudeiro and Ruth Davey, who won the prizes for talks, as well as Joshua Rasera, Paulina Quintanilla and Thomas North, who won the prizes for posters!

The conference also featured workshop sessions on academic writing, held by the Centre for Academic English and career progression from PhD to postdoc, held by teaching staff from ESE. 

Outreach and Impact

Three members of the deparment, Benjamin Maunder (Postdoc), Kartikeya Sangwan (PhD) and Lior Suchoy (PhD), organised a 3 days outreach event to the general public as part of the Pint of Science festival. They invited the public to a pub to listen to the latest scientific developments from some of the best scientists in the UK. Among the speakers were Dr. Stephen Hicks, Dr. Ian Bastow and Prof. Chris Jackson from the ESE department. Sian Evans (PhD) also took part in the event as an organiser for Imperial College. The event took place between 20 - 22 May at the Stane Street Syndicate pub near Clapham Common.

Chris Jackson's talk was entitled ‘How to look inside a volcano’, and showed how 3D seismic data can reveal magma migration paths below active volcanoes, as well as how this magma deforms the surrounding host rocks.

Chris Jackson also attended the Cheltenham Science Festival to contribute to a panel discussion entitled, “Erupt: Living with Volcanoes” (9 June). The panel discussed why people live near volcanoes, how do we research these volcanoes, and how are the risks surrounding volcanoes calculated and communicated?

Stephen Hicks was recently interviewed for BBC Radio 4’s Inside Science programme on the Surrey earthquakes. You can listen to him here! 

Fieldwork

Over the end of May, Mark Sutton led the 3^rd year Geology undergraduates on the Sardinian fieldtrip alongside Chiara Petrone and a team of GTAs. The students got their structural eye in analysing the complex multiphase Hercynian deformation of Paleozoic sediments. For the sedimentologists a range of different margin and terrestrial sediments showcased the environmental evolution of the Sardinian block over the Phanerozoic. 

GTA Chetan Nathwani led a minor expedition to research the possibility of adding an old copper porphyry mine to the trip. Finally, the Cenozoic closure of the Mediterranean has produced a diverse suite of different volcanic and volcaniclastic rocks, including a highly intact scoria cone and multiple mantle xenolith bearing localities. This is an invaluable educational experience for the students, and at present they are writing up their observations and conclusions into short papers on topics as diverse as mine remediation and tetrapod burrowing.

For many of the students this may be their last ever experience of geology in the field. The departmental drone also got a number of outings so as to develop 3D models of the outcrops to bring Sardinia back to the RSM (hopefully with the food and weather). Thank you to Ado Farsi, Ruth Davey, Alex Lipp and Chetan Nathwani for their help as GTAs!  

PhD Vivas

Congratulations to (Dr!) Robin Thomas who successfully defended his PhD thesis, "Permeability of fracture networks generated through geomechanical fracture-growth simulations", on 20 May. His thesis was supervised by Dr. Adriana Paluszny and Prof. Robert Zimmerman, and the examiners were Prof Ann Muggeridge (ICL) and Prof Veronique Lazarus (Paris). Robin will be staying in ESE as a postdoctoral researcher, working on two projects funded by NERC and BP.

Alumni Activities

Metals and Energy Finance dinner

On 12 June 2019, Professor Dennis Buchanan welcomed Metals and Energy Finance alumni and current MSc students to their annual dinner. The event was an opportunity to network and share experiences, as well as hear from alumnus Dr Graham Birch, whose after dinner speech highlighted the value thinking flexibly and looking to the long term – and featured a 1000 g of gold!