A change at the top!

I am pleased to welcome Mike Stephenson as Director of Science and Technology in BGS.  He will replace Denis Peach who served as BGS Chief scientist for 6 years; Denis leaves BGS at the end of June this year and I will be preparing a full and revealing blog nearer that time.

Mike will have oversight of a team of Science Directors who will lead BGS science in six broad areas:

Energy, Minerals and Waste.
Directors Bob Gatliff (Energy and Marine Geoscience) and Andrew Bloodworth (Minerals and Waste)

Geohazards.  
Directors David Kerridge (Earth Hazards and Observatories) and Helen Reeves (Engineering Geology)

Environmental change and impacts.  
Directors Mike Ellis (Climate and Landscape Change) and Rob Ward (Groundwater)

Geological and geophysical survey. 
Directors Andy Howard (Geology and Regional Geophysics) and Mike Young (GSNI)

Information and environmental modelling.  
Directors Richard Hughes (Geo-information and Systems), Matt Harrison (Geoscience Products and Services) and Kate Royse (Environmental Modelling) 

Laboratory Facilities.  
Randy Parrish ( Director NERC Isotope Geosciences Laboratory) and Dee Flight ( Head of BGS Laboratories)

Martin Smith will have a role between Business Development and Science Programming as Director of BGS Global Geosciences.

Another change that is being brought in this month is a move from a matrix management model which has been in place for more than 10 years to a system where science directors will have a group of staff assigned to their area and will manage a budget that will allow them to develop their science across BGS.  Interdisciplinary science will be maintained at the team level. This change will be overseen by our Chief Operating Officer Mike Patterson and his team.

I am looking forward to working with Mike and the Science  Directors and their administrative support. The bottom line will be continued delivery of excellent geological sciences for the UK.

Being recognised, a blog from Russia

I was in Russia this week in order to accept my nomination into the Russian Academy of Sciences (you can translate this website to English using the translate tab at the top of the page) . It is very nice to be recognised for my contributions to science and it makes one think about how well we in BGS recognise the contributions of our staff. Simple things like medals and certificates, like the ones I received in Russia mean a lot, even if they may seem unnecessary. 

Me at the entrance to the Presidium of the Russian Academy of Sciences

In BGS we recognise our staff when they leave with their valedictory letters; we also acknowledge 25 years service with a small gift. Of course we have a bonus system, which does not provide enough, but it is a financial remuneration. However, I believe we should be celebrating our success more in recognising staff in winning grants, writing up their results and also those underpinning the science in administration, laboratories and services.

The soon to be launched internal communication portal is a good first step. If you have any feedback and ideas, please feel free to provide feedback to me or to the communications team at BGSCorporateComms@bgs.ac.uk

Visit of The Rt Hon David Willets MP

This afternoon the Rt Hon David Willetts, Minister for Universities and Science, visited the British Geological Survey to open the National Geological Repository (NGR).

The NGR holds over 500Km of drill core (enough to stretch between London and Edinburgh), cuttings from over 23 000 wells and boreholes, over three million specimens of the UK biostratigraphic (fossil) record, paleontological, rock and mineral collections including: Some of Darwin’s early materials, early material form Antarctic and the National Building Stone collection.  In the BGS library (part of the NGR) we hold 500,000 books and reports, 12 000 journal titles, 75 000 photos, 30 000 items in archive some dating back 500 years (see our website for more detail).

The NGR at the British Geological Surveys Headquarters, near Nottingham.

The NGR was created following the extension of the BGS core store and the relocation of the DECC oil and gas cores from Gilmerton, Edinburgh to the BGS headquarters in Keyworth, Nottinghamshire. The objective has been to recognise the importance of these collections now that the majority of BGS holdings are in one place, where they can be fully exploited in a suite of examination facilities and technical laboratories.

To achieve this, we extended the existing core store by about 100% and installed state of the art mobile racking, we moved the fossil collections into refurbished space and we installed mobile racking to extend the paper records storage by 7.5km.

All of the 300km of offshore cores that were moved from Gilmerton, Edinburgh have been photographed in high resolution and the images have been made freely available on line. Our communications team created a video of the whole process that you can watch below and you can find out more information on our 'A Core Story webpages.

The NGR now contains the largest archive of subsurface information in the UK, incorporating onshore and offshore material from BGS, DECC, the Coal authority and other national collections (see summary list on our website). We have also incorporated the British Antarctic Survey’s (NERC) geological collections as part of the NGR.

In all, these collections allow evaluation of onshore and offshore resources in hydrocarbons, mineral resources, the potential for radioactive waste containment, Carbon Capture and Storage and geothermal energy and underground energy storage, in addition to the basic third dimensional geology of the UK and material from areas across the world where BGS has worked.

The NGR is open to industrial and academic users and for the oil and gas records we have 250 unique groups of industrial users since 2007 (mainly repeat users) and also numerous university users for advanced level teaching.

Typical photograph of a section or core. See here to search the database

The Future for the NGR

BGS is in the process of planning scanning of the onshore cores and remaining records and maps that will underpin shale and coal gas and the renewal of mineral and geothermal exploration in the UK. In addition, BGS plans to release all of its international holdings to encourage economic development in mineral exploration world-wide.  We expect the NGR core store to be full within the next 10 years and a new extension is already being considered.

The collections will be opened to accommodation of critical collections from HEI's as some of these become available and Universities change programmes and professors retire. BGS will create a network in rock physics that will include the key universities in the UK and will link with the foremost institutions in research in subsurface infrastructure research across Europe.

More from Afar......... The 24th Colloquim on African Geology CAG in Addis Ababa

This gathering of geologists to exchange scientific ideas on the geology and related resources in Africa takes place every couple of years. It used to be held in Europe and the concept of this meeting was created in Leeds University in association with their East African Research project 40 years ago. It has grown in size and is a meeting largely of geological agencies and academics, with some interest from the minerals and oil and gas industry and increasingly in areas of sustainability in water, soils and renewable energy.

The BGS has a very prominent role in this meeting and this reflects the diversification of our international portfolio and branching out from our traditional geological mapping role, into developing global data bases and also research in sustainability for groundwater in particular. 

We presented results on geological mapping and geochronology in Tanzania, Ethiopia and the UAE and outlined the need for more integrated research and geological correlation in the Neoproterozoic, a period about 1000 to 500 million years ago when the Earth was undergoing significant changes in its atmospheric and oceanic systems and continental plate configurations that link to the evolution of life on Earth, but also to resource generation.

My Plenary talk at CAG24

In terms of data we are pioneering global projects such as Onegeology in which all geological data is shareable and can be displayed in common portals. Similarly we presented data on  open sourced  software that should allow users to share and improve there data management systems, leading towards simpler construction of archives of data that can be shared in global projects.

EVOSS is aimed at providing volcanic risk related services by integrating real time volcanic data globally and is using African  volcanoes, which are poorly monitored on the ground, as test cases; this is part of a Global Volcano Model (GVM). This part of Africa one of the most volcanically active and one in which BGS with other NERC funded scientists have undertaken one of the most comprehensive studies of active rift volcanism.

The meeting will continue with the celebration of the 40th anniversary of the Geological Society of Africa and the next big geological congress in Africa will be the International Geological Congress in 2016.

Ethiopians are very friendly and the country is rapidly developing  and diversifying. They have some excellent geology and some excellent local and internationally trained geologists in the country and it is a pleasure to be in the country again after 12 years.

My view of Addis Ababa (from the hotel)

Looking Afar in Ethiopia

I am in Ethiopia which is organising the Conference on African Geology this year. I enjoy the country and have several students that I have trained who work here in the University of Addis Ababa.  With a group of geologists attending the conference we went on a field trip to the Ethiopian sector of the African rift valley, which terminates in the Afar.

Geological Map of the Afar Rift

Me overlooking the Ethiopian sector of the African Rift Valley

It is at this point that three of Earth's plate boundaries meet in a triple junction and it is the only place on the planet where a triple junction occurs on continental crust and where we can observe the rifting process and the birth of an ocean. This is one of the hottest parts of the planet, both through the climate but also the intense volcanic activity. Nonetheless, there are several million people who live in the area and manage to use irrigation effectively to farm and also are starting to look into sustainable energy systems, geothermal from the volcanic systems and also wind and water.  

It is an extreme place in many ways and one that is most susceptible to climate change, which may on the multi decade scale significantly impact on the inhabitants ability to live in the Ethiopian rift in particular in the triple junction region of Afar.

BGS in the UAE

BGS completed the second phase of a major mapping contract with the UAE at the end of 2012. This has been a very fruitful collaboration that has led to the production of a complete set of high resolution maps of the UAE. These are all accompanied by reports on deep geophysics, building stones, mineral potential and environmental geology and building subsurface conditions in cities such as, the rapidly expanding, Abu Dhabi. The photo below is of the superb Grand Mosque which was completed 3 years ago and one of the aims would be to provide a source for the sorts of building materials used here.

I visited the Ministry on the 2nd January 2013 and met the project leader Abdullah Abdi, with Khalid Ali Alhosani, Saleh Ahmed Almahmoudi (see photo below) the intention being to recognise the significant work that both sides have put into the project and discuss ongoing science activities that might evolve now that we have completed the basic surveys.  At the same time BGS  is investing in a suite of follow- up research projects in the UAE.

We expect to maintain a strong ongoing collaborative relationship with the UAE ministry and it was excellent to see all of the geological information, maps and other products strongly co-branded by the the project leaders, UAE, BGS, Sander Geophysics and Western Geco.

A Festive Blog

I started this blog about a year ago and have managed more or less one per month. I had a bet (a plate of oysters) with Sarah Nice from the BGS Communications Team, that no one would bother to read it. Well,  I lost my bet as I now have several thousand readers, not a hard price to pay and the oysters were a first for Sarah.

BGS continues to do well despite the hard financial times and tight budgets from government. Nonetheless, our science outputs have increased  this year, both in the conventional literature and on the web and in smart apps.

I encourage you to lake a look at our report for the last financial year and the presentations at our recent 2012 stakeholder meeting at the Geological Society of London.

I wish you all a happy Christmas and all the best for 2013 and thanks for reading the blogs; I will keep them coming in 2013!