March 2015 Bulletin

REF2014: School of GeoSciences Top of the class, again

The School of GeoSciences has been identified by the Research Excellence Framework (REF) 2014 assessment as having the greatest concentration of ‘world leading’ and ‘internationally excellent’ researchers in the UK. The School’s submission to Unit of Assessment B7 - spanning the range of geography, earth systems and en-vironmental sciences - reflects the exceptional breadth and strength of the School. Key measures of success include: We are ranked top in the UK for ‘research power’ by the THES for the second time in a row (last time

being RAE2008), with the equivalent of 82 full-time researchers at the ‘globally leading’ and ‘internationally excellent’ standard.

78% of our activity is recognised as ‘world leading’ or ‘internationally excellent’, with 100% of our research environment in these categories.

32% of our research Impact (where research can be demonstrated to have led to a significant impact beyond academia, for example in policy, wealth creation, quality of life) is graded as ‘globally leading’ with a further 50% ‘internationally excellent’.

95% of academic staff in the School were submitted, with 22% of these being early career researchers.

These results reflect tremendous hard work from ALL staff in the School, support and academic. It is only through everybody playing their part across the full spectrum of the School's activities that the research excellence has been achievable.

School of GeoSciences

Stephen Brusatte

Discovery of the first uniquely

Scottish sea-living reptile

Sarah MacAllister

2nd year PhD in Biosphere research

group has NERC grant success

Neil Stuart

'...environmental services in Belize'

Research Impact recognition

57 Fieldwork Bursaries

awarded

Thanks to our Alumni from across

the School of Geosciences, we have

just awarded 57 fieldwork bursaries

of up to £340 to students across the

School's degree programmes.

‘Every eligible student (i.e. those

already identified by the University

as eligible for additional bursary

support) received a contribution to their fieldwork costs’. This is a tremendous achievement - and a great credit

to the generosity of our alumni. Helping our students with the cost of their undergraduate fieldwork is a key

priority for the School, and it is immensely satisfying to know that so many graduates recognise the importance

of keeping excellent fieldwork affordable for all.

Contact us

Submit content

If you would like to submit a story please contact fiona.hartree@ed.ac.uk

It is with thanks to our colleagues that these pages are full of success stories and achievements from across the School.

The aim of this bulletin is to disseminate a wide selection of news which is typically circulated every 3 months.

The next edition will be published in June 2015

Hello

Sandy Tudhope

Achievements Recognition

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Our Successes

Professor Iain Main has been appointed Director

of Research, taking over from Professor Paul

Palmer, we wish him well in this position.

“Dear Colleagues,

As usual, this bulletin brings you some wonderful

examples of individual and group achieve-

ments. However, I want to use my introduction to pay

tribute to two of our students. Annika Lewis, an

American student on our GIS Masters programme, and

Tim Dixon, a 3rd year Geology and Physical Geography

student spending a year abroad at the University of

British Columbia, tragically died in completely unrelated

circumstances over this past month. Both were creative,

outward-going, generous and talented students, and

they will be sorely missed. Our deepest sympathy and

respect go to their family, friends and teachers.

Best wishes,

Sandy"

Recognition

Professor Mathew Williams awarded a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award

The scheme provides universities with additional support to enable them to recruit or retain

respected scientists of outstanding achievement and potential to the UK. The scheme is

jointly funded by the Wolfson Foundation and the Royal Society. This award will support his

research into "Tracing sources and sinks in the terrestrial carbon cycle under global change”

over the next five years.

Professor Gabi Hegerl appears in ‘The World's Most Influential Scientific Minds 2014’ report

‘Thomson Reuters has launched Highly Cited Researchers, a compilation of influential names in science. Deriving from InCites Essential Science Indicators, a subset of the Web of Science, Highly Cited Researchers presents more than 3,000 authors in 21 main fields of science and the social sciences. These researchers earned the distinction by writing the greatest numbers of reports officially designated by Essential Science Indicators as Highly Cited Papers—ranking among the top 1% most cited for their subject field and year of publication—between 2002 and 2012’ Only 6 people from the University of Edinburgh are listed within this report with Professor Gabi Hegerl appearing under GeoSciences (page 52).

http://thomsonreuters.com/articles/2014/worlds-most-influential-scientific-minds-2014 http://sciencewatch.com/grr/presenting-highly-cited-researchers

Geoffrey Boulton elected President of the International Council for Science (ICSU) Committee on Data for Science and Technology Geoffrey Boulton (Regius Professor of Geology Emeritus) has been elected President of the International Council for Science (ICSU) Committee on Data for Science and Technology (CODATA). CODATA is responsible for agreeing fundamental scientific constants, and is currently leading the charge internationally for open data and the policies and practices required to underpin it. Geoffrey chaired the Royal Society report on “Science as an Open Enterprise: Open Data for Open Science”.

Dr. Kanchana N. Ruwanpura appointed as Editor to Geoforum Dr. Kanchana N. Ruwanpura has been appointed as Editor to Geoforum for a three year period from January 2015; she will join four other colleagues in the existing editorial collective. Geoforum is a leading international and inter-disciplinary journal, which has consistently made the top 11 ranking of Geography journals since 2008.

Dr. Stuart Gilfillan, Dr. Gareth Johnson and Dr. Sascha Serno from the Carbon

Capture and Storage (CCS) group at the School of GeoSciences have travelled to

Victoria, Australia, in December 2014 to participate in and co-lead the Otway 2B

extension project at the CO2CRC Otway CO2 test injection site.

The Otway 2B extension project aims to find out how much CO2 is securely locked

away in the subsurface using geochemical and geophysical monitoring. The two

most common CO2 storage mechanisms are ‘residual ‘and ‘solubility’ trapping.

Residual trapping occurs when CO2 is locked away in individual and dead end spaces

between rock grains, similar to how air is trapped in a sponge, while solubility

trapping refers to CO2 dissolved into fluids that fill the pores between rock grains, in

the same manner as CO2 is dissolved into water to make it fizzy. Few research

studies so far have found out exactly how much CO2 is stored by residual and solubil-

ity trapping across an entire storage site. Hence, there is a need to develop a reliable

means to do this for future industrial-scale storage. In direct collaboration with

CO2CRC, one of the world-leading CCS research organisations, the role of the team

from the School of GeoSciences in the project is to use noble gas tracer injection and

recovery to determine residual trapping levels, and to apply independent stable

oxygen isotope measurements to quantify the amount of CO2 retained in the reser-

voir by solubility trapping.

The experiment was conducted as planned, and the field noble gas measurements

were very successful recovering a significant portion of the injected tracers. In the

upcoming months, the team will focus on the geochemical interpretation and

numerical simulation of the noble gas and oxygen isotope data, in close collabora-

tion with their colleagues from CO2CRC and other Australian research institutions.

Their results will provide the CCS community with a robust technology to estimate

levels of residual and solubility trapping of CO2 storage sites.

The team also used their time in Australia to collect gas and water samples from

different gas fields and mineral springs in the Otway Basin. Results from these

samples present the first part of a longer-term, EPSRC-funded, PhD project to

provide a detailed geochemical understanding of the controls on CO₂ and

methane storage and leakage in the Otway Basin.

Stuart Gilfillan

Gareth Johnson

Sascha Serno

Scottish Carbon Capture & Storage

Our researchers engage in the Otway 2B extension project

The Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) Continuing Pro-fessional Development (CPD) scheme, funded by Scottish Power, which was developed and delivered by the Scottish Earth Science Education Forum (SESEF), and which was successfully delivered to Scottish schools by SESEF, was licenced to the Scottish Council for Development and Industry (SCDI) in 2013. After initial training and support, by SESEF staff, SCDI have been delivering CCS CPD sessions across Scotland through their Young Engineers Clubs. Jane Martin, Programme Director – Young Engineers and Science Clubs Scotland, SCDI, who has been overseeing the CCS

Scottish Carbon Capture & Storage

Professor Stuart Haszeldine, Director of SCCS,

presented a report in January on one possi-

ble future use of the North Sea subsurface,

namely, to enable deep decarbonisation of

European energy emissions. This report pre-

sents conclusions and recommendations

from the international conference organised

by SCCS in Edinburgh on 29th of October

2014, attended by more than 120 individually

invited delegates from around the world.

Carbon capture and storage is an emerging

technology group, which enables greenhouse

gas emissions from large point sources of

power plants and industries to be captured,

transported, and injected for secure disposal

into microscopic rock pores, 1 km or deeper

beneath the surface. Research by SCCS pub-

lished in 2009 was the first to identify the im-

mense extent of storage capacity beneath the

UK North Sea which is more than enough to

hold European CO2 emissions arising during the

next 100 years. Additionally, the North Sea

benefits from a large technical database

derived from oil and gas exploitation and has

no public opposition to CO2 storage, unlike

onshore areas of Germany for example. The

report states that there is a clear opportunity

for UK and EU policymakers to rapidly develop

CO2 storage for large tonnages, helping high-

carbon Member States specifically around the

North Sea to meet their 2030 decarbonisation

targets at much less cost. The report also

points to the utilisation of CO2 to improve

recovery from existing fields, extend the eco-

nomic lifetime of the North Sea, and simulta-

neously store more carbon than is produced

without any public subsidy.

The SCCS report <http://tinyurl.com/peboqb7>

will also be highlighted at Westminster in June.

delivery, reports that the programme has been so successful that interest has been shown by their counterparts in England and Wales.

Colin Graham was asked to give a presentation on CCS to the Executive Committee of SCDI in November 2014. He invited Jen McKenna to present with him. Jen McKenna graduated in 2011 and had been a student on the GeoSciences Outreach Course and is now a science teacher at Inveralmond Community High School in Livingston, West Lothian.

The Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) Continuing Professional Development scheme

Highlights The ECCI was selected to host a special Scotland-focused meeting of the Committee on Climate Change. It is the first time the Committee (independent body that advises the UK and devolved Governments on tackling and preparing for climate change) has met outside of London.

http://edinburghcentre.org/news/ECCI-hosts-CCC

ECCI resident David Townsend has won eSpark’s Entrepreneur of the Year award

This award was given in recognition of the development of his company Town Rock Energy over the last year. http://www.townrockenergy.com/

David is one of the founding members of ECCI's Low Carbon Ideas Lab , Scotland's first low carbon focused business incubator. The prestigious title also came with a £5000 cash prize. Nicola Sturgeon and Sir Tom Hunter were among guests at the awards ceremony.

http://lowcarbonideaslab.org/

ECCI welcomes new residents GeoGeo - specialist in GIS for International Development

Welcome to our new innovation suite residents GeoGeo - specialists in GIS (Geographic Information Systems) for International Development.GeoGeo—Paul Georgie, Founder & CEO and Steven Kay, Geospa-tial Technologist - aims to promote the very latest mapping technologies across the world, helping communities, organisations and governments alike, to benefit from them.

<http://edinburghcentre.org/news/Welcome-GeoGeo>

Scotsman Opinion Piece - 2015 is a big carbon

‘Scotland is leading the way when it comes to reducing emissions, which is why even China is tapping into our expertise’ says Andy Kerr

The year 2015 is going to be a momentous year. It is the culmination of a quarter of a century of tortuous twists and turns in global debates about what, if anything, should be done about society’s unintentioned emissions of greenhouse gases. The outcome of intergovernmental negotiations in Paris at the end of this year will determine the political will to deliver change (or not) at a global level for a generation.

<http://edinburghcentre.org/news/Scotsman-Opinion-2015-Feb>

Discovery of the first uniquely Scottish sea-living reptile

Steve Brusatte led a large team of Scottish palaeontologists who announced the discovery of the

first uniquely Scottish sea-living reptile from the Age of Dinosaurs. Named Dearcmhara shaw-

crossi, the new reptile was a motor-boat-sized, dolphin-like fish-eater that was at the top of the

food chain 170 million years ago. Its fossils were found on Skye by an amateur collector, who

donated them to a museum for Steve and his colleagues to study. Their paper was published in the Scottish

Journal of Geology. There was considerable press attention focused on the discovery, with many British tab-

loids predictably claiming that the team had found the "ancestor of the Loch Ness Monster". Steve

appeared on a few television programs to discuss the find (BBC Scotland, STV, and BBC Newsround), and

was interviewed for radio by NPR in the USA (the programs Morning Edition and All Things Considered) and

Good Morning Scotland and MacAulay and Co. on BBC Scotland.

Three short extreme floods carve

large canyon in Iceland

A recent published paper in Proceedings of the National Academy

of Sciences by Edwin Baynes (published with his PhD supervisors:

Mikael Attal, Linda Kirstein, Andrew Dugmore and Mark Naylor)

looked at the impact of extreme flood events on the formation of

a large canyon in Iceland. The paper has shown that the 28 km

long, 100 m deep canyon has been formed during flood events

(which last a matter of days) approximately two, five and nine

thousand years ago. Between these periods, the evolution of the

canyon has been relatively stable. It is interesting because it

shows that natural environments can be shaped very suddenly, as

well as gradually through time, and these catastrophic events can

have a long lasting impact on the landscape morphology.

The research generated interest in the media, notably on the BBC

website

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-

31356229)

Upstream towards Hafragilsfoss

Down stream from Dettifoss

Europe's most powerful waterfall called Dettifoss

Press Coverage

Take a look: The College of Science and Engineering has chosen two of the School's impact case studies presented to REF to feature on the University's new webpages promoting the relevance of our research in the wider world.

http://www.ed.ac.uk/research/impact

Dr Neil Stuart

'Development of environmental services in Belize'

Professor Ian Main

‘Shaping policy on earthquake risk estimation and

forecasting’

Local children taking part in the ‘Savanna Trail’

An earthquake devastated L’Aquila in Italy in 2009

Our School provides Research Impact Exemplars

Global Academies initiative

The School of GeoSciences plays a key role in the Global Academies initiative and, via GESA, helped secure the Leverhulme doctoral funding The main Geosciences staff involved with the Global Academies are Dave Reay, Marc Metzger, Meriwether Wilson, Rachel Chisholm, Dan van der Horst and Mark Rounsevell (Global Environment & Society Academy), and Julie Cupples (Global Development Academy). The £1m Leverhulme Trust doctoral scholarship grant entitled “Perfect Storm - Interdisciplinary Doctoral Training” will train four cohorts of doctoral researchers, 20 in total, to examine major problems around the world.

http://www.ed.ac.uk/news/2014/global-181214

Grant Success Successful Horizon 2020 Project: ‘FracRisk’ from the work program ‘Secure, clean and efficient energy’.

This Horizon 2020 project is valued at 3 million Euros and involves 13 partners from Europe, Israel and the US. It will be coordinated by Chris McDermott. The objective of this project, entitled "Furthering the Knowledge Base for Reducing the Environmental Footprint of Shale Gas Develop-ment (FracRisk)", is to develop a knowledge base for understanding, preventing and mitigating the potential impact of the exploration and exploitation through hydraulic fracturing of shale gas reserves found throughout Europe, to develop a decision support tool for risk quantification of the environmental impacts of the technology, and to provide impartial scientific advice at a policy and legislative level within the EU.

Dry forest biomes in Brazil: biodiversity and ecosys-tem services Dr. Kyle Dexter and Professors Patrick Meir and John Grace are co-investigators on a £80,760 grant, recently awarded by the RCUK-CONFAP Research Partnership. This project, led by Prof. Toby Pennington of the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, aims to expand plot-based monitoring in South America to seasonally dry tropical forests and to investigate the relationship between phylogenetic diversity, species diversity, and the ability of dry forests to store carbon and provide other ecosystem services.

ERC Consolidator Grant Tetsuya Komabayashi was awarded a five-year ERC Consolidator Grant (1.9 million euro) which will start in June 2015. The goal of this project is to identify the thermodynamic state of the Earth's central core, which will provide us with critical information about the origin and evolution of the solid Earth. Tetsuya will set up an ultrahigh-pressure diamond anvil cell laboratory to recreate the Earth's core conditions at pressures and temperatures of more than 135 GigaPascals and 5000 Kelvin respectively. By combining the experimental data with thermodynamic calculations, he will try to solve a sixty-year-old question, "what elements are in the core in addition to iron?".

A Terra-correlator update from Mike Mineter

A year ago ECDF (who run the university's Eddie

computer) were installing the Terra-correlator

(TC). New nodes were added to the university's

Eddie computer for research in the GeoSciences.

The heart of the TC is two nodes with a 2TB of

memory. We also installed two other nodes that

have some go-faster hardware we are poised to

exploit (These are Intel Phi cards, that are like a

small cluster within one computer.)

The TC is available for use by anyone with an appropriate program or data management

challenge in the School. Current users are in land use modelling, climate science, and

seismic science.

So far the main use has been to allow programs that need extra memory to be run easily,

and to allow many of them to run concurrently. For example, in the latter stages of her

PhD research Emma Turner quickly ran a large number of analyses that integrated cli-

mate and satellite data, each needing 20+ GB of memory. Carlos Alberto da Costa Filho

describes his use: "The objective of imaging in seismic processing is to map subsurface

structures using seismic energy. New methods, generally referred to as Marchenko imag-

ing, are being explored and developed, allowing for more accurate and artifact-free

images. The data are too large for running imaging even one subsurface point on other

Eddie nodes. The Terra-correlator, on the other hand accommodates not only one, but

several copies of the data, allowing for several imaging of points to be calculated in paral-

lel".

Two research areas are using the nodes for parallel computing, with up to 32 processes

sharing the 2TB of memory.

Sascha Holzhauer reports,

“The TC has transformed our ability to do agent-based simulation of the dynamics of land

-use change in Europe - we can do better research, faster"

Good progress is being made in collaboration with Informatics and EPCC (Rosa Filgueira

and Amy Krause respectively). Working with Andy Bell, Lizzie Entwhistle and Giovanni

Meles, they have already demonstrated a much improved capacity to pre-process and

correlate large numbers of seismic station signals in real-time. This is the major step to-

wards enabling new techniques for such cross-correlation based analyses, and the iden-

tification of repeating events in large seismic datasets. Their techniques are also applica-

ble to experiments and analyses needing "data streaming".

For further information see the Terra-correlator wiki,

https://www.wiki.ed.ac.uk/display/Terra/Terra-correlator+wiki

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Edinburgh MSc Project featured in GIS Professional magazine

The February 2015 issue of GIS Professional features a three-page arti-

cle on mapping books written by Alex Mackie and Bruce Gittings, enti-

tled Once upon a somewhere: The challenges of putting books on the

map, the article is based on Alex’s GIS Masters dissertation. It explains

that books are spatial objects – written, published, printed and con-

sumed at particular geographical locations. Importantly, books also fea-

ture places as their subjects or within their storyline. Thus, it is perhaps

surprising that there have been relatively few attempts to exploit their

spatial location, whether as a means of promotion or a way of con-

necting people to place. The article goes explains how Alex implemented a glob-

al book map, which constantly grows by automatically harvesting pub-

lication data from the internet

GIS Students find Careers

Mid February saw our GIS Masters students involved in a Careers Work-

shop organised by Programme Director Bruce Gittings. Many of the

speakers were graduates of our GIS programme; speakers included Susan

Bird from the University of Edinburgh Careers Service, Liz Richardson from the School of Geo-

Sciences, Alma Jones and Alan Bragg from the Scottish Government, Scott Krueger from Ed-

inburgh travel success-story Skyscanner, Charles Kennelly from major GIS company ESRI-UK,

David Lawton from Cheshire-based consultants Informed Solutions, and Tom Stork from the

humanitarian REACH Initiative.

Bruce Gittings speaks locally at the Liberton Association

Bruce Gittings, Director of GIS programmes ,was warmly received by 60 attendees to his talk entitled "Describing Scotland from the 19th Centu-ry to the 21st: the Gazetteer for Scotland”

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Daniel Jones awarded Innovation Initiative Grant

GeoSciences PhD student Daniel Jones has just been awarded an Innovation Initiative Grant by the University of Edinburgh Develop-ment Trust. The award, worth £2,200, will be used to fund his project: ‘Catalysing a research network in Mozambique: Linking Mozambican universities and the University of Edinburgh to gener-ate exciting collaborative research opportunities’.

The Innovation Initiative Grants programme accepts applications twice a year, and is funded through the generous donations of alum-ni and friends of the University.

More information can be found on the Development & Alumni website:

http://www.ed.ac.uk/schools-departments/development-alumni/students/iig.

Daniel Jones

Rebecca Astbury (5th yr MEarthSci GPG student), won the student prize for her presentation at the annual Volcanic and Magmatic Studies Group Meeting held in Norwich 5-7th January 2015.

Investigating the metabolics of drought mortality in Scots pine

Sarah MacAllister, a 2nd year Ph.D. student in the Biosphere research group, has been awarded £20,200 by NERC to study the metabolism of drought mortality in Pinus sylvestris (Scots pine). Oxidative stress is a prominent side-effect of physiological responses to severe, mortality-inducing drought. The main goal of this work is to investigate whether metabolic markers can be identified that are suggestive of heightened oxidative stress and whether populations in different climatic and edaphic environ-ments show variation in metabolic activity under drought. Sarah’s Ph.D. thesis is su-pervised by Drs Kyle Dexter and Yann Salmon and Professors Maurizio Mencuccini and Andrew Hudson.

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Emily Creamer successfully passed her viva in January. ‘Community: the ends and means of sustainability? Exploring the position and influ-ence of community-led initiatives in encouraging more sustainable life-styles in remote rural Scotland. ‘ Her research funded by ESRC/DEFRA as part of the 'Sustainable Lifestyles Research Group' (http://www.sustainablelifestyles.ac.uk/) and was jointly supervised by Simon Allen and Claire Haggett (School of Social and Political Science).

Tannaz Pak successfully defended her PhD thesis ‘Saturation tracking and identification of residual oil saturation’. Her PhD was carried out jointly between Edinburgh and Heriot Watt as part of the collaborative International Centre for Carbonate Reservoirs (ICCR). This month Tannaz also published some of her findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science of the United States of America. In the article Tannaz details the use of x-ray computed tomography to analyse

a previously unidentified pore-scale process during multiphase fluid flow in porous media. Pak T., Butler I.B., Geiger S., van Dijk M.I.J. and Sorbie K.S. (2015) Droplet fragmenta-tion: 3D imaging of a previously unidentified pore-scale process during multiphase flow in porous media. Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci., doi: 10.1073/pnas.1420202112

Recent Viva Success

Public Engagement

Student Gihan Soliman has been invited to partici-pate as a guest member in the 1st WEF YGL Circular Economy Taskforce Speaker Series. The meetings are hosted by the World Economic Forum - Young Global Leaders. This came in recognition of "the leadership role that she is playing in the Circular Economy" through her activism since 2008. In spite of the political upheaval in Egypt, the models she instituted as an educator and environmental activist are alive and progressing. Gihan believes it is im-portant in the 21st century to emphasise a strong link between academia and entrepreneurs in order for new business models to assimilate life equilibri-um cycles as found in nature.

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Italian High School Liceo A. Rosmini visit our School

Early this February the School of GeoSciences hosted the visit of Liceo A. Rosmini. The High

School is based in Trento in Northern Italy ,and their visit to GeoSciences was part of a

week long exchange visit to Edinburgh. The visit was by a group of 48 senior pupils accom-

panied by 3 teachers. Luciano di Maio, a senior teacher who organised the visit, was keen

to enhance his students’ understanding of Scotland’s approach to environmental issues and

renewable energy, as environmental issues are an important part of their science syllabus.

The students were given a presentation by Brian Cameron about the environmental issues

facing Scotland and the Scottish Government’s policy to address them, as well as the

targets that have been set to reduce Scotland’s dependence on fossil fuels and its move to

renewable energy.

Massimo Vieno of CEH and the School of GeoSciences also gave a presentation about his

work and the research which has highlighted the need for change.

The staff and pupils were very impressed by what Scotland was doing to address the envi-

ronmental issues and with the goals that had been set.

Luciano di Maio is keen to continue the links we have made and would be happy to host

anyone who is visiting the Trento area, to give talks to the pupils, and is also keen that

other schools could have the opportunity to visit Edinburgh University. “If you are interest-

ed in teaching experiences or research in Italy, the city where I live (in the Dolomites) is quite

well known for its science faculty. I'll be happy to return your favour.” (Luciano di Maio)

Overall the staff and pupils of Liceo A Rosmini enjoyed their visit to Edinburgh; their visit to

the School of GeoSciences gave them a better understanding of environmental issues and

the progress Scotland is making to tackle them.

Last word to Luciano…

“I just wanted to thank you once again for the wonderful op-

portunity you have given me, my colleagues and my students to

be for a few hours part of that fabulous university.

Thanks for the nice welcome and for the talks.”