Geology Jenga

EGU DIARIES: Day One (Monday 28th April)

Laura Roberts-Artal April 28, 2014

It is only the first day and my diary is already jam packed! There is so much on offer at the conference that I’ve found it difficult to choose how to organise my day. However, I followed some of the tips on Will Morgan’s blog: Conference Top Tips for EGU2014: 1)Chat to people – check; 2) keep up to date with goings on in social media – check; 3) spread my wings- check. I must admit, I’ve failed at keeping a note pad handy and it has proven to be a real problem!

Today my mission was to fully embraced number three and spread my wings by attending sessions not related to my research. It is easy to stick to your discipline and focus on only research you think might be relevant to your own. However, the range of topics on offer at the conference means it would be foolish to pass up the opportunity to investigate and learn about new topics!

Credit: Wikimedia Commons,
Author: Fabienkhan

The lab at Liverpool has strong links with archaeologist and so the session on artefacts and historical sites ( GI3.4) caught my eye. What struck me the most about what I learnt there is how applicable many of the techniques I thought were classically geological can be applied to archaeology. It shouldn’t be such a big surprise to me that you can use XRF (X-Ray Fluorescence) and SEM (Scanning Electron Microscopy) to characterise tiles on buildings and how the findings can help understand the effects of air pollutants can have on ceramics used on buildings. I was even more surprised to learn that electromagnetic waves (THz frequency in particular) are used on artworks to characterise classics such as Goya’s Sacrifice to Vesta. The methodology can identify defects on the canvas, how many layers the painting is made of and where the painter has applied more strokes.

The second highlight of my day was the Splinter Meeting on Natural Hazard Education, Communication and Science Policy-Practice-Interface ( SPM1.47). I found the discussion to make some very interesting points about how communities affected by natural hazards might respond and perceive scientist efforts at science communication, engagement and outreach:

What is the impact of public communication on research?
How much time should research projects (and scientists) dedicate to dissemination?
Should funding bodies give more support and guidance into how to disseminate research findings and who the target audience should be? I think this point is valid, not just for the natural hazard community, but the research community in general, especially as outreach/public engagement is now a requirement for most successful grant applications.
It is critical to make your science relevant to the audience you want to engage.
We discussed in some detail what the role of web/social media vs. hardcopy vs.human interaction in public engagement is and someone raised the very valid point that it shouldn’t be one versus the other, but a far more combined approach.
Finally, who should fund scientist efforts to engage in public education and communication?
Cordon Caulle eruption 1960.
Credit: Wikimedia Commons,
Author: U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric AdministrationI

I also attended a medal lecture by Rumi Nakamura on Plasma Jets in the near-Earth’s magnetotail. I’m not going to lie, the most amazing fact I learnt at the talk was that Dr. Nakamura has published over 200 peer-reviewed articles which have been cited in excess of 4000 times! That is seriously impressive!

My day ended with the short course on Adding Value to Your Research Experience, but I’ll summarise the details of all the short courses I attend at the assembly into a single post after the conference, so keep tuned for that.

A diverse and very interesting first conference day.

Looking forward to EGU 2014

Laura Roberts-Artal April 24, 2014

This time next week EGU 2014 I’ll be looking at a sea of posters and enjoying workshops, splinter sessions and talks galore and I literally can’t wait!

You may have noticed (and we apologise), Dan and I haven’t been so good at updating Geology Jenga with regular posts. We have both made the transition into the deepest and darkest depths of thesis writing and it really is an all-consuming thing. They do say a change is as good as a break and that is why I’m so looking forward to the meeting next week.

It’ll be great to catch up with all the people I’ve met through the PhD journey and I’m thrilled that a lot of them are going to be at the meeting this year. The proposed tweetup, will be great for putting faces to twitter handles! If you want to come along, sign up here. And of course, there will be the lovely sights of Vienna to enjoy.

However, it’s not all about the socialising and sightseeing. This year, not only am I attending as a scientists, I will also be blogging for EGU. You can expect me to cover some of the courses and workshops, as well as key note lectures and a range of talks. On Thursday I’ll be mainly covering the developments in my field, palaeomagnetism.

Above all, what I’d really like to do is talk to people about their research and their conference experience. Expect to see me at as many poster sessions as I can physically attend and by all means, talk to me about your work! I’m very keen to interview a range of scientists as part of our 10 minute interview series and will be featuring the interviews throughout next week and also over the coming months. If you’d like me to come and see your work, get in touch! I’d love to hear from you. (@LauRob85 or leave a message in the comments below).

Dan & I will also be tweeting as much as we can, so stay tuned!

A foreseeable, yet surprising earthquake?

Laura Roberts-Artal April 3, 2014

On Wednesday morning I woke up to a flurry of activity on my twitter feed: there had been a large earthquake in northern Chile. I followed up some of the tweets and realised that there had also been some tsunami warnings as a result of the earthquake. After ascertaining that the scale of the disaster wasn’t as large as I’d anticipated, given the size of the quake (I don’t want you to think for one moment that I am belittling the plight of the people affected by the earthquake. I was more relieved that the damage was not on a larger and wider scale, for instance similar to that caused by the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami), I envisaged that there would be frenzied activity at the seismology and geodynamics group at my university.

Turns out I wasn’t wrong about the frenzied activity in the seismology office! Photo courtesy of Steve Hicks.

A large amount of the research done by the Liverpool seismology group revolves around understanding the structure and properties of the central Chile subduction zone. So, I got in touch with my fellow PhD student, Steve Hicks (who has guest blogged for us before on the hazards associated with earthquakes) and asked him to write a blog post that might shed some light on the events in Chile.

Steve describes the lead-up to Wednesday’s magnitude 8.2 earthquake, examines what we have learnt so far, and what it may mean for future earthquake hazard in northern Chile.

Earthquakes tend to take us seismologists by complete surprise, but this did not seem to be one of those. We were not alone. The people living in northern Chile were also waiting in anticipation. Over the past few weeks, they had become accustomed to the ground beneath their feet shaking. Within just one week in March, four magnitude 6 earthquakes struck northern Chile and were accompanied by over 300 smaller events.

Aerial view of the rupture area showing the location of the mainshock, and aftershocks with magnitude greater than 5. The colour image shows the preliminary USGS slip model for the mainshock.

An earthquake was long expected in northern Chile, too. For several decades now, it has been recognised as a seismic gap. We believed that this region was capable of producing large earthquakes, yet a large rupture had not been recorded since 1877. We could not be sure when it was going to rupture again, but the recent earthquake sequence was certainly keeping the seismological community on edge.

Chile is home to some of the world’s largest earthquakes. The country is situated where the eastern part of the Pacific seafloor (the Nazca plate) is sinking beneath the South American Continent. In shallow parts of this subduction zone, the two plates can become stuck and locked against each other, leading to big accumulations of tectonic stress that may be sporadically released every several hundred years.

By taking a closer look at the earthquake, we find that aspects of earthquake were in fact somewhat surprising. The earthquake was located at the edge of a region of the megathrust fault that was according to one model, highly locked. However, according to a preliminary model from the USGS, most slip was located to the southeast of the earthquake epicentre, in a region of low locking. Low locking implies that the fault is constantly sliding and less capable of producing large earthquakes. Data from on-land GPS stations are used to calculate locking, but the accuracy of these calculations tends to be poorer offshore, where much of the fault is located. The primitive nature of the rupture model means that it may also open to errors. To obtain a more robust slip model, scientists will now begin to analyse a wide range of datasets including GPS, seismic, satellite and tsunami observations – a process that will take many months.

Seismicity in northern Chile before and after the earthquake. Earthquake locations taken from the Servicio Sismológico Nacional, Chile.

The strong magnitude 7.6 aftershock that hit on Thursday morning reminds Chileans that earthquake hazard still remains high.

Some scientists believe that based on the earthquake’s size and location, it is possible that the northern Chile seismic gap has not yet fully closed. Attention may now be drawn further north and toward the Peruvian border where the potential for a large earthquake could remain. What is for sure though is that earthquake scientists will be working hard and listening to the fault’s crackles to understand better what it may have in store for the future.

If you want to know more about the Chile earthquake, a short list of resources:

http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eventpage/usc000nzvd#summary

http://rt.com/news/chile-earthquake-aftershock-evacuated-025/

https://news.liv.ac.uk/2014/04/01/fluid-pressure-responsible-for-earthquake-magnitude/

http://www.iris.edu/spud/backprojection/6690518

Some personal perspectives from a PhD student on the peer-review system

Daniel Schillereff March 19, 2014

This is a follow-up to a previous post from September 2013 entitled ‘Soliciting peer reviews from PhD students’. In that piece, I summarised the responses I’d received from a number of editors of peer-reviewed journals in the field of Quaternary Science having asked them their feelings on soliciting peer reviews from PhD students. Some recent events, most significant being the acceptance of my first paper and being invited to review a manuscript a manuscript for the first time, have encouraged me to outline my personal experiences.

Reviewing my first paper

Late last year an email out of the blue from an Editor of a peer-reviewed EGU Open Access journal arrived in my inbox inviting me to review a manuscript. I initially presumed the Editor in question had read my recently-published blog post and was following up my expression of interest, but the timing didn’t work; I received the email before the post went live. I’ll elaborate on my experience of the reviewing processes in a moment, but after I had returned my review, the Editor kindly gave me some feedback on my review and told me how I’d come to their attention: it turned out a colleague had seen a talk I gave at a recent conference, the Editor examined my online profile and judged my knowledge base to be appropriate. This certainly confirms that aiming to give oral presentations from an early stage in your PhD can lead to unexpected rewards!

The Open Access profile of EGU journals means the full manuscript is available as a Discussion version; I spent considerable time scanning the manuscript while deliberating about whether to accept. I have no qualms in admitting I was nervous! By accepting the invitation to act as a reviewer, I was, in essence, responsible for deciding whether the rigour and relevance of the work was sufficient for it to permanently enter the realm of published research. This quote from Dr Stephen Keevil (KCL) in the ‘Peer Review: The nuts and bolts’ report on the role of a reviewer was definitely on my mind:

“…to act as a gatekeeper for quality in an area of science that I know and care about”

In the end, I decided to undertake the review because I felt comfortable that my background knowledge was sufficient to assess where the work fit in the current state of science and whether the investigation carried out met the stated aims and also that sufficient more specialist expertise I’d gained during my PhD would enable me to comment on the rigour and methodology of the research.

I was most anxious about my lack of detailed knowledge pertaining to the environment from which the samples were collected. I have a general idea of the local topography and landscape but I know very little about the geology, climate and landscape history of the area in question. These characteristics can have enormous effects on the sedimentary record and I felt this was not fully addressed in the paper; thus, several questions I posed in my review sought clarification on this aspect. However, this was not the principle aim and other researchers with experience working in the same region would not require such detail to be included in a paper and I remain unsure whether it was appropriate to focus on these aspects so much.

It was interesting to read the response from the authors explaining how they had addressed the comments from both reviewers. Looking at the final published version, my view is that the majority of my suggestions to the authors were explicitly addressed but a couple of my more substantial queries (related to geomorphic setting) were deemed not sufficiently important as to alter their findings. The Editor clearly felt their revisions were sufficient and what I believe to be an interesting and high-quality manuscript is now published.

Submitting my first paper

The acceptance of my first peer-reviewed manuscript a couple of weeks ago was wonderful, although I imagine the feeling of seeing it published online with paginated formatting and a DOI number will be even more gratifying! The process has been a tremendous experience and I cannot emphasise enough to other PhD students the value of going through the peer-review system at an early stage (obviously substantive results are necessary!). Obviously it looks impressive on your CV but the reviewers raised questions that I had never before considered (and neither had my Supervisors!); I have no doubt my overall PhD, not just this paper, will be substantially improved by this experience.

Diagram from the ‘Peer Review: The Nuts and Bolts’ 2009 report from the Voice of Young Science network.

The three reviews were largely positive and some of the comments were quite pleasing. The reviews were very different in terms of their length, detail and principal concerns but all three raised very good points that I needed to address. One section ultimately was removed from the original manuscript; While deleting hundreds of words was disappointing, it also made me realise I had been rather narrow-minded and too focused on one particular area of my own research and had missed some of the wider implications. I think this is easy to do when undertaking a PhD but is definitely a useful lesson. One reviewer examined the manuscript in extraordinary detail and offered numerous constructive comments and I am extremely grateful for their efforts. While I recognise the time commitment required, I do hope my future submissions receive a similar degree of attention from reviewers and it has certainly inspired me to ensure if and when I am invited to review again, I invest equivalent time and effort.

Most importantly, the revised manuscript is without doubt much better than my original submission. The Nuts and Bolts report indicated 91% of researchers felt their last paper was improved after peer-review and I certainly include myself in that section. Please do get in touch on Twitter or the Comments section if anyone has any questions about my experiences.