July/August 2014 ESE Newsletter

A bumper edition of summer News!

Publications
Conference Talks and Lectures
Awards
Research Grants
Research Activity
Impact and Media
Outreach Activities
Fieldwork
New Staff

Publications

Ala, M. (2014) Marking 100 years of petroleum related education at Imperial College. Journal of Petroleum Geology, 37(3), 313-322.

Blumenfeld, R., Jordan, J.F. and Edwards, S.F. (2014) Granular statistical mechanics: volume-stress phase space, equipartition and equations of state. Powders and Grains 2013, 325-328. DOI: 10.1063/1.4811933

Brusatte, S.L., Butler, R.J., Barrett, P.M., Carrano, M.T., Evans, D.C., Lloyd, G.T., Mannion, P.D., Norell, M.A., Peppe, D.J., Upchurch, P. and Williamson, T.E. (2014) The extinction of the dinosaurs. Biological Reviews. DOI: 10.1111/brv.12128.

Campbell, L.S., Compston, W., Sircombe, K.N. and Wilkinson, C.C. (2014). Zircon from the East Orebody of the Bayan Obo Fe-Nb-REE deposit, China, and SHRIMP ages for carbonatite-related magmatism and REE mineralization events. Contributions to Mineralogy and Petrology, 168(2). DOI: 10.1007/s00410-014-1041-3. 

Duffy, O.B., Brocklehurst, S.H., Gawthorpe, R.L., Leeder, M.R. and Finch, E.  (2014) Controls on landscape and drainage evolution in regions of distributed normal faulting: Perachora Peninsula, Corinth Rift, Central Greece. Basin Research, DOI: 10.1111/bre.12084

Go, J., Bortone, I., Muggeridge, A. and Smalley, P.C. (2014). Predicting vertical flow barriers using tracer diffusion in partially saturated, layered porous media. Transport in Porous Media. DOI: 10.1007/s11242-014-0369-5.

Hedjazi, F. and Monhemius, A.J. (2014) Copper–gold ore processing with ion exchange and SART technology. Minerals Engineering, 64, 120–125.

Jacobs, C.T., Collins, G.S., Piggott, M.D. and Kramer S.C. (2014). Multiphase flow modelling of explosive volcanic eruptions using an adaptive unstructured mesh-based approach. In: Proceedings of the jointly organized 11^th World Congress on Computational Mechanics (WCCM XI), 5^th European Congress on Computational Mechanics (ECCM V), and 6^th European Congress on Computational Fluid Dynamics (ECFD VI), Barcelona, 20-25 July 2014, 7406-7417.

Lang, P.S., Paluszny, A., Zimmerman, R.W. (2014). Permeability tensor of three-dimensional fractured porous rock and a comparison to trace map predictions. Journal of Geophysical Research - Solid Earth. DOI: 10.1002/2014JB011027

Matsushima, T. and Blumenfeld, R. (2014) Universal structural characteristics of granular packs. Physical Review Letters, 112.

Matsushima, T. and Blumenfeld R. (2014) Microstructural characteristics of planar granular solids. Powders and Grains 2013, 1186-1189. DOI: 10.1063/1.4812149.

Monhemius, A.J. (2014) A Changing Environment: Reflections on 50 Years of Hydrometallurgy. Proceedings, 7^th International Symposium on Hydrometallurgy, Asselin, E. et al. (eds), 1, 33.

Osagiede, E., Duffy, O.B., Jackson, C.A-L., Wrona, T. (2014) Quantifying the growth history of seismically imaged normal faults. Journal of Structural Geology. 

Sena, C.N.H., John, C.M., Jourdan, A.L., Vandeginste, V. and Manning, C. (2014) Dolomitization of Lower Cretaceous peritidal carbonates by modified seawater: constraints from clumped isotope paleothermometry, elemental chemistry and strontium isotopes.  Journal of Sedimentary Research, 84, 552-566. DOI:10.2110/jsr.2014.45.

Tang, X.H., Paluszny, A., Zimmerman, R.W. (2014). An impulse-based energy tracking method for collision resolution. Computer Methods in Applied Mechanics and Engineering. DOI: 10.1016/j.cma.2014.05.004

Conference Talks and Lectures

Zita Martins was an invited speaker at the UCL Symposium on the Origins of Life, and also at the American Chemical Society (ACS) meeting.

Pablo Brito-Parada attended the 10^th European Conference on Foams and Applications in Thessaloniki, 7-10 July 2014, where he presented his work, 'Predicting bubble size distribution and surface bubble bursting in overflowing 2D foams'.

Gaurav Bhutani presented his work, ‘Modelling polydispersed flows using population balances in an adaptive mesh finite element framework’, at the 6^th European Conference on Computational Fluid Dynamics held in Barcelona, 20-25 July 2014. This work was part of his PhD research at the Rio Tinto Centre for Advanced Mineral Recovery, ESE.

Adriana Paluszny gave a seminar at the Department of Earth Sciences, ETH Zurich, Switzerland, on 13 August, ‘Numerical Modelling of Fracture Propagation and Fragmentation in Brittle Rocks’.

PhD student Morteza Nejati gave a talk at the 11^th World Congress on Computational Mechanics, Barcelona, 20-25 July 2014, ‘Use of Uzawa algorithm for simulating frictional contact between crack faces in a body containing randomly oriented cracks’.

In June John Monhemius gave the Plenary Lecture at Hydrometallurgy 2014, Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. His talk was entitled, ‘A Changing Environment: Reflections on 50 Years of Hydrometallurgy’. John Monhemius and Farhang Hedjazi presented their paper, ‘The application of geometallurgy at Anglo Asian Mining’s Gedabek gold mine in Azerbaijan’, at Geometallurgy 2014, 9-10 June,  IOM3, London. 

Awards

SEG awarded Mike Warner, Jo Morgan and several other Imperial authors the best paper award in the journal Geophysics. Their award-winning paper is: Warner, M., Ratcliffe, A., Nangoo, T., Morgan, J., Umpleby, A., Shah, N., Vinje, V., Stekl, I., Guasch, L., Win, C., Conroy, G., Bertrand, A. (2013) Anisotropic 3D full-waveform inversion. Geophysics, 78, R59-R80. ISSN:0016-8033.

Research Grants

Jennifer Le Blond was a co-investigator on a grant awarded by the Colt Foundation (ca £210,000) to look at occupational kidney disease in Pacific coast Central America. The grant PIs are Neil Pearce (LSHTM) and Ben Caplin (UCL), and the project is due to begin in September 2014 lasting for 3.5 years. Other co-investigators include members of the Karolinska Institutet, Sweden, Universidad Nacional Autónoma De Nicaragua, Nicaragua, and the University of Oxford. The grant is run in partnership with La Isla Foundation (NGO).

Jennifer Le Blond was co-applicant on a grant awarded by NERC (ca £24,000) as part of their Advanced Training scheme call. The PI was Emma Humphreys-Williams (NHM), and the project includes other researchers at the NHM, Cranfield, University of York and UNESP, Brazil. Their award will fund a short course entitled, ‘Soils and regolith: from parent rock to critical resource’, which will be open to early-stage researchers and will run in late February 2015.

J-P Latham was awarded a grant through Pathways to Impact Funding 2014 (EPSRC Internal Scheme) entitled, ‘Virtual Breakwater Wave Proxy Tool – VBWPT’. The funding will enable his group to maximise the impact of an existing EPSRC grant on modelling coast protection and breakwater structures, which is nearing completion in 2014. The group have found the ideal PDRA for the project, who will join ESE from the Institute of Hydraulics, Cantabria, where he is currently completing his PhD.

Research Activity

Julie Prytulak is currently sailing on the International Ocean Discovery Program’s (IODP) Expedition 352 to the Bonin Forearc. This two month expedition (31 July to 29 September) aims to investigate subduction initiation and links to on-land ophiolite sequences. There are many ways to follow along with what already is a very successful expedition.  For the lighter side of things, Julie has a blog on the Imperial website called, ‘Crustal Death and Rebirth in the Ring of Fire’, which is also accessible through the IODP JOIDES Resolution website.  Official updates are also found on that site, including public reports. Weekly photographs and some science updates can also be found on the JOIDES Resolution Facebook page.

Rafi Blumenfeld has been appointed a Distinguished Visiting Professor at the National University of Defence Technology (NUDT), Changsha, China. NUDT is the developer of the fastest supercomputer in the world, the Tianhe-2. The appointment, which is part of the Chinese 1000-talent programme, comes with an initial budget of 2.5 Million CNY (ca £250,000) for building a research group on granular materials, generating collaborations between them and international partners (in particular Imperial College London) and for submitting a proposal for a new centre for science of granular matter, which will be based in both ESE and the College of Science, NUDT. 

Trevor Almeida is currently spending 6 months at the Ernst Ruska Centre for Microscopy and Spectroscopy with Electrons in Jülich, Germany, where he will be using their aberration-corrected transmission electron microscope, dedicated to off-axis electron holography, to visualise directly the thermal demagnetisation of nano-scale magnetic minerals. 

Impact and Media

Zita Martins’ invited talk at the UCL Symposium on the Origins of Life was featured as a Science Weekly podcast, by The Guardian.

Phil Mannion was featured in an Imperial College news headline story, ‘Timing of asteroid final straw that wiped out weakened dinos’. He was also interviewed live on BBC Radio Cambridgeshire, and the article featured in Nature News and the BBC News.

Outreach Activities

In July Peter Fitch led a field trip to the Isle of White for 14-16 year old students as part of the BG Group Earth and Marine Science Summer School, organised by the Imperial College Reach Out lab and Exscitec.

On 25 July ESE hosted 40 international sixth-form-equivalent students from 17 different countries, for a morning of workshops as part of the London International Youth Science Forum (LIYSF), a two-week summer school. The participants undertook activities designed to show some of the research applications of the Earth Sciences. Workshops on, ‘Our Dynamic Earth’, and ‘Violent Volcanoes’ were run by Paul Grant and Emma Passmore. The event was assisted by undergraduate student Ben Warnick.

On 26 July Ian Bastow gave a pre-dinner lecture for the Geoscience Education Academy (GEA), at the Geological Society, Burlington House. The meeting was organised by Pete Loader and colleagues, including PhD student Matt Loader. The GEA is a BP-sponsored event that offers UK teachers a great opportunity to understand how to teach geoscience if it is not their principal subject, or to inspire new material  for existing Earth science teachers.

In July Matt Genge gave a lecture for the Outreach Office, ‘The Science of Cosmic Disaster’.

Fieldwork

New PhD student Radchagrit (Aike) Supakulopas and Adrian Muxworthy, were joined by Arne Døssing (DTU), Conall Mac Niocaill (University of Oxford) and Morten Riishuus (University of Iceland) for a two-week fieldtrip in northern Iceland. They were collecting palaeomagnetic cores as part of Aike's PhD project, collecting nearly 800 in total.  It was Aike's first experience of camping; he did well considering the sub-zero temperatures. Luckily, Bárðarbunga did not erupt during fieldwork.

New Staff

From 1 September, Elizabeth Day joins us as a Teaching Fellow in Geophysics, as part of the undergraduate teaching team. She will temporarily be in office 1.37/1.32a. We wish Lizzie a very warm welcome to the department.