School of Earth and Environment

 

 

The Stratigraphy Group

 

News

December

Welcome to Junia Casagrande, who has moved at the worst possible time of year from Rio de Janeiro to Leeds. Junia, a Petrobras geologist, will be working on the evolution of channel-levee systems from the Campos Basin, offshore Brazil using a huge database of 3D seismic reflection data and wells.

Getting ready for the annual BSRG conference, which this year is in Edinburgh. Just the 15 abstracts submitted and accepted – it’s going to be big!

2018 was a good year for publications – just the 19. With 20 in review and revision, 2020 is looking good… Happy New Year!

 

November

This was a good month for first publications. Congratulations to Niall Gandy on his first paper on modelling the Minch Ice Stream, published in the open access The Cryosphere. Strat Group associate, Harya Nugraha, published his first paper in Basin Research on the evidence for palaeo-ocenographic changes offshore Australia through the Cenozoic from seismic reflection data. Also, Hannah Brooks’ Geosphere and GSA Bulletin papers came out.

Grace and Dave Lee had a quick-fire visit to the Ainsa area to complete Grace’s work on the Sobrarbe delta, hacking through impregnable vegetation to collect logs to calibrate to the UAV models. Dedicated!

Dave gave a keynote presentation at PETEX titled ‘Building research partnerships that deliver: Experiences from the SLOPE and LOBE Joint Industry Programmes’. There were also presentations from StratGroup associate Mike Steventon.

 

October

Watch out! SLOPE5 proposal coming your way – proposal can be downloaded here. Also, a big month for our Dan (Bell) with his first two papers published in MPG and JSR.

Main event in October was the first Lobe3 Neuquén Basin field season with Ander and Damjan focussing on the details on onlaps documented so amazingly by @Naughty_Onlaps (Aurelia). Dave and Chris J made guest appearances at the IAS Postgraduate Summer School, led by colleagues Gonzalo Veiga and Ernesto Schwarz, in Zapala.

Tim Cullen spent more time in Greece than the UK, and generally timed (or triggered) his visits with the most appalling weather. But the syn-rift deep-water stratigraphy story is developing nicely.

 

September

Lobe3 sponsors trip! It was intense but was expertly led by Zoë Cumberpatch – super impressive skills from a first year PhD student. The group of 15 sponsors were very engaged, with great questions and discussions. The rocks were staggeringly interesting – but the highlight was the tour and meal in the iconic Guggenheim Museum. Great to see Strat Group alumni (or survivors), Sarah Cobain and George Jones, among the sponsors

 

 

Prior to the Lobe3 sponsors trip, Dave was in Trondheim to discuss the ongoing research from the Upper Slope project with Equinor. This has been a really successful project so far that is a truly co-designed and co-produced research programme, which is having a little pause while Larissa Hansen becomes….a mother! Massive congratulations to Larissa and Matt on the arrival of baby Felix.

September was also notable for the first paper published in the Frontiers in Earth Science: Sedimentology, Stratigraphy, and Diagenesis section. Dave, as Editor-in-Chief, led a group effort with the Associate Editors on a Grand Challenges (and Great Opportunities) paper

 

August

A strong turnout at the International Sedimentologists Congress in Quebec City with talks from Aurelia, Grace, Dave, Luz, Hannah, Jeff and Miquel. The highlight was a quick fieldtrip to the Ordovician Cloridorme Formation on the Gaspe Peninsula, with Leeds alumni Prof Jim Best, and UCL PhD student Pauline Cornard. Really stunning outcrops with beautiful, and sometimes baffling, sole structures that had Jeff in a lather (and many photos that have made it into his Tools and Flutes epic).

 

 

July

BIG GRANT KLAXON!!! Huge congratulations to associate Dr Natasha Barlow on her successful RISeR proposal funded by the European Research Council, which aims to investigate the stratigraphic record of the last interglacial in the North Sea in order to help improve predictions of future coastal response and ice-sheet mass-balance changes.

Fieldwork in the Bakio area with Zoë showing Dave, Ian, and Ander around the salty outcrops. Lots of UAV work, including a model that accidently ‘captured’ a nudist.

 

 

June

Rachel and Larissa are visiting the equinor core store in Stavanger to log core from the Karoo and North Sea as part of the Stratigraphic Traps project. Also, Dave is off to Baja, Mexico, for fieldwork (and fajitas) with Ian Kane, Adam McArthur, Steve Flint, and Steve Hubbard, which should be quiet.

 

May

Congratulations to Bonita Barrett on her successful application to the IAS to support fieldwork in the Gulf of Corinth (€793). Larissa Hansen was busy at AAPG in Salt Lake, convening, presenting, and organising the successful panel discussion at the SEPM evening session. Strat@leeds affiliates, Zoe Cumberpatch and Dan Bell, won poster prizes. Grace Cosgrove has had her first paper accepted, in the Journal of Sedimentary Research, based on detailed analysis of grain character changes through clinothems.

Dave, with affiliates from Imperial (Harya, Na, Mike) attended the Mass Movements conference on Vancouver Island. Finally, Strat Group alumni Luz Gomis starts her new job in the equinor research centre in Bergen – good luck Luz and thanks for all the amazing field assistance for Rachel and Charley over the last few weeks – enjoy the office!?!

 

April

Welcome back Fran Palm! Fran is returning to her PhD studies after maternity leave – a great role model for all, and good to see little Adam making regular appearances in the office. We have appointed three candidates to the Lobe3 JIP, Damjan Ostrelič (Leeds), Ander Martinez-Doñate Gomez (Manchester), and Tim Wigan (Imperial College), who will start in October.

Busy fieldwork time, with Charley Allen in the San Juan area of Argentina studying spectacular outcrops of high latitude turbidite systems, and Bonita in the Gulf of Corinth looking at inter-fan delta successions. Finally, loads of abstracts accepted for ISC in Quebec City, plus a couple of sessions, convened by Dave and Aurelia Privat.

 

 

March

The month started with a field workshop with Statoil/equinor in the Karoo Basin as part of the Stratigraphic Traps programme, with 16 participants from across the company. Rachel stayed on, with former member Luz Gomis, to continue fieldwork on Unit 5 in the Tanqua depocentre.

What a month for Andy Emery! Andy has been successful with three out of three grant applications: the British Sedimentology research Group (the Steve Farrell Memorial Award), the British Society for Geomorphology, and the QRA, to support attendance at EGU, and the session he has convened. Bonita was the inaugural winner of the Trevor Elliot Fieldwork Fund for Fieldwork in the Gulf of Corinth, Greece, to investigate the stratigraphic architecture of shallow marine systems in syn- to post-rift settings (£494).

More congratulations to Bonita and Tim, who have both been awarded internships at the University of Bergen as part of Prof Rob Gawthorpe’s VISTA Chair. More good news, for strat@leeds alumni, Dr Sarah Cobain, who has joined BP this month as a deep-water sedimentology expert. Finally, we ‘welcome’ Dr David Lee, who will be Research Assistant on the Lobe3 project.

** Check out Andy’s great blog on Steve Farrell, and the award in his name, here **

 

February

Congratulations to Tim Cullen who was recipient of the Arthur A. Meyerhoff Memorial Grant for the 2018 American Association of Petroleum Geologists Foundation Grants-in-Aid Program ($2500). Group affiliates, Zoe Cumberpatch and Kevin Boulesteix (both Manchester) were also successful in their applications to the AAPG Grants-in-Aid program. First papers accepted and/or published by PhD students Albertina Nakashole, Luz Gomis, Bonita Barrett, and 3 (three) for Hannah Brooks!

January

Press release klaxon - strat@leeds have a paper in Scientific Reports published this month that uses injectites in the Laingsburg area of the Karoo Basin to show that macrofauna can burrow 4 times deeper than previously thought. Download the open access paper here, and the press release is here .

 

December

What a Day! Albertina Nakaoshole passes here viva (thanks to external Liz Whitfield) on the same day her first paper is accepted in Sedimentary Geology. Luz Gomis Cartesio has also passed her viva and secured a job in Statoil Exploration in Bergen. That means all our PhD graduates this year have jobs in the geoscience – very proud. Strat@Leeds had a typically large presence at the BSRG AGM in Newcastle – both in terms of presentations, and on the dancefloor.

 

November

Stephen Eaton passed his PhD transfer, and we held very useful workshops with the BGS Marine Geology team, and for the tsunami modelling project. Bonita and Luz have also had papers accepted in Marine and Petroleum Geology and Sedimentology respectively.

 

October

PhDs are like buses…Cathey Burns and Catherine Russell passed their vivas – thanks to their external examiners, Gary Nichols and Gino Ghinassi respectively. More good news for Cathey and Hannah who have been awarded prestigious Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) fellowships. Hannah will be going to Chiba University to work with Prof Makoto Ito, where Dave held his JSPS Fellowship, and Cathey will join Strat Group alumni Marcello Gugliotta in Shimane University working with Prof. Yoshiki Saito.

A big team are in the Tanqua Karoo for a long field campaign, led by Larissa and Rachel and supported by Dave Lee and Hannah Brooks. The end of October, Grace Cosgrove had a short field season collecting data from clinothem surface in the Sobrarbe delta in Ainsa supported by Miguel Poyatos-More, and some mini-Hodgsons.

 

 

September

‘Away Days’ with the Manchester Stratigraphy Group to Hathersage in the Peak District. The weather wasn’t friendly, but the team building task was mutually beneficial – team cooking different courses for the evening meal. The rules - £50 and 10 minutes shopping time, and everything had to be cooked from scratch. The losers were also the winners – Team Breakfast and their fresh bread, and (needed) full English breakfast.

 

 

PhD transfers continue – well done to Rachel Healy and Charlotte Allen. Dave ran a deep-water sedimentology and stratigraphy workshop for Ecopetrol in Bogota, Colombia, and staying with Strat Leeds alumni, Andrea Ortiz-Karpf. Unfortunately his trip to the Ecopetrol research centre in Bucaramanga was scuppered by a pilots strike – so instead had to sample Colombia’s newest brewery – and visited a cathedral in a salt diapir in Zuipaquira. The main event of the month, however, was Hannah Brooks smashing her viva (thanks to external examiner Mike Mayall). Very minor corrections in the same month as her first paper was published in Sedimentology.

 

August

Leeds Quaternary visit to BGS core store in Keyworth led to finding an unsplit core collected in the 1990’s from the Dogger Bank. So, it was split and photographed, and showed a huge amount of variation in sedimentary facies. Andy is still scratching his head.

 

July

Year 1 PhD transfer season has started – well done to Andy Emery, Niall Gandy and Tim Cullen who all cruised through the process. Dave has been filmed discussing the SMAKS database, part of the PDS Ava Clastics software. See the results here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xRbQr21F-ao

 

 

June

Grace Cosgrove, Daan Beelen, and Dave Hodgson all presented at the SEPM Field Conference ‘Propagation of Environmental Signals within Source-to-Sink Stratigraphy’, held in L’Ainsa, Spain. The conference was an excellent show case, and rare opportunity for geomorphologists and stratigraphers to interact, mixed with field visits to local outcrops, and a new geological map presented by Cai Puigdefàbregas. The convenors, Sébastien Castelltort, Julian Clark, Andrea Fildani, and Cai, did a spectacular job.

 

May

Exciting! Fieldwork in one of the most active extensional bits of the Earth’s crust – the Gulf of Corinth – for Tim Cullen and Bonita Barrett. Tim is investigating process transitions, and stratigraphic architecture, in the foreset to bottomset deposits in the spectacular Evrostini fan-delta succession – see the rocks here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VvCSou9ZeJo

 

 

Bonita’s focus of research is the Selanous fan delta – a largely untouched fan delta to the west of the phase 2 border fault – in order to investigate lateral variations in fan delta stratigraphy from fault centre to tip – see more here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmWRfmNzKt8

 

 

April

Big presence at AAPG, with awesome posters from Yvonne, Hannah, Bonita, Grace, and Catherine, Rufus, Miquel, and Luz and talks by Dave, Steve, and Andrea. Apparently the group road trip around west Texas was awesome (not jealous).

Visit our YouTube channel for highly amateur drone films from outcrops around the world. Have is an example, from the rubbish dump outside Laingsburg, South Africa https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYhFocqYL1E

 

March

Grant success! Funding from the Royal Academy of Engineering, via the Newton Fund, entitled Submarine slope instability in the Colombian Margin and managing risk to submarine infrastructure: development of a methodology for the seafloor geotechnical characterization in the Colombian Caribbean. The project is led by Dr Bill Murphy and will be run in close collaboration with the Universiddad EAFIT, Medellin, Colombia and Ecopetrol

New papers klaxon, and the only similarity is that they are both published in Sedimentary Geology. Burns, Mountney and Hodgson (351, 21-35) is on dimensions and facies architecture of crevasse slay deposits, and Dowey, Worden, Utley and Hodgson (355, 46-63) is on the formation of grain coats in a modern estuary.

We had a strong presence at the Subsurface sand remobilization and injection conference held at the Geological Society, London, with four talks on the afternoon of the first day. Jeff felt that having two talks was a bit 'silly'.

 

February

Fieldwork time is upon us again, thankfully, with Aurelia and Andy heading to the Neuquen Basin (don’t touch those ammonites), and Rachel, Larissa, and Charly joining a big group from the Manchester Strat Group in the Karoo. The office will be quiet….

Congratulations to strat@leeds alumni, Dr Janet Richardson, who is returning to Leeds as one of the iCASP Impact Translation Fellows.

Thematic set on the Quaternary Geology of the North Sea, co-edited by David Hodgson, published in the Journal of Quaternary Science

 

January

Congratulation to Michelle Shiers, who passed her viva voce. The second paper from her thesis, titled ‘Controls on the deposition, accumulation and preservation of mixed fluvial and marginal-marine successions in coastal-plain settings’, will be published in JSR in February.

We had a strong turnout at the Deep-water Deposition Systems: Advances and Applications conference at the Geological Society of London (Jan 25th-27th), with presentations from Hannah, Aurelia, and Dave.

Welcome to Dr Larissa Hansen and Stephen Eaton. Larissa is starting a 2-year postdoctoral position, funded by Statoil, working on stratigraphic traps in base-of-slope and basin-floor settings, using exhumed analogues in the Karoo Basin, and subsurface data from offshore Norway. Stephen is starting a PhD, part funded by Vattenfall, investigating the origin and evolution of sediment waves, offshore East Anglia, using an integrated dataset of bathymetry, shallow reflection seismic, grab samples and boreholes.

 

December

Congratulations to Andy Emery, who won the ‘People’s Choice’ best poster at BSRG, Cambridge.

As part of the Lobe2 project a short film was commissioned based on the October 2015 sponsors' field trip. The film highlights the research undertaken by the group and its potential value to industrial partners.

 

 

October

The group is currently advertising for a Research Fellow to join the group. Collaborating with Statoil, the project focuses on the architecture and modelling of deep-water stratigraphic traps. Further details can be found here.

With the start of Autumn comes the latest influx of keen PhD students into the group. A big welcome to Charley, Tim, Andy, Rachel, and Simon.

Congratulations to Andrea on the successful defence of her PhD: Bathymetric and substrate controls on submarine mass-transport emplacement processes and channel-levve complex evolution. Excellent work Dr. Ortiz-Karpf.

 

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Recent Publications