Bulletin “ Dear Colleagues,

It is a great pleasure to welcome Kanchana Ruwanpura and Chris Dibben and his research team to our School, and to congratulate Chris on his £7M ESRC research award to Direct a new Administrative Data Research Centre. Special congratulations too to Gabi Hegerl for her recently announced and highly prestigious Wolfson Royal Society Research Merit Award, and to Rob Bingham on his receipt of the UK Polar Medal in the New Year’s Honours. I would also like to highlight the tremendous showing of GeoSciences staff in nominations for EUSA Teaching Awards, and to thank Gus Harris and his GradSchool team for organising such an excellent Conference. Please read on for more details of these, and further inspiring successes of our staff and students.

Best wishes, Sandy”

Nov-Jan 2014

UK's first ever over snow traverse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet

New GeoSciences colleagues Dr. Robert Bingham (Chancellor's Fellow) and Mr. Damon

Davies (NERC PhD Student) have just returned from taking part in the UK's first ever over

snow traverse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. The traverse was part of the

£7.4m NERC Ice Sheet Stability and Response (iSTAR) programme, which

aims to combine glaciological and oceanographic measurements to

understand the influence of the ocean on ice loss from West Antarctica.

Between November and January, in a party of 12 including scientists from

the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) and the Universities of Bristol, Leeds and

Reading, Bingham and Davies travelled ~1500 km across Pine Island

Glacier, the world’s largest glacier and one that is showing demonstrable

retreat and thinning contributing to ~10% of currently observed global sea-

level rise. In particular, and together with colleagues from BAS and Bristol,

Bingham and Davies acquired ~2500 km of radar data sounding the bed of

Pine Island Glacier, vitally important for calibrating ice-sheet models which

aim to predict its future rate of ice losses.

More details can be found on NERC's iSTAR website

http://www.istar.ac.uk/

Improving estimates of ice mass elevation change

Pete Nienow and Noel Gourmelen have been funded as part of a European Space Agency (ESA) project

which addresses the errors associated with ESA's CryoSat-2 satellite mission. CryoSat-2 is a satellite designed

specifically for investigating ice mass elevation change, especially of the ice sheets and larger ice caps. The

satellite, which has been in orbit since April 2010, uses radar altimetry to make repeat measurements of ice

sheet/cap surface elevation. This ESA funded project started in January 2014 and will run for the next 18

months.

“Notable Awards”

Professor Gabi Hegerl has received a prestigious Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award

Professor Gabi Hegerl will receive a Research Merit Award from the Royal

Society. Her work will focus on Learning about the climate system from the

observed record.

The Royal Society, the UK’s national academy of science, has announced

the appointment of 21 new Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award

holders. Jointly funded by the Wolfson Foundation and the Department for

Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS), the scheme aims to provide

universities with additional support to enable them to attract science

talent from overseas and retain respected UK scientists of outstanding

achievement and potential.

Dr. Robert Bingham receives UK Polar Medal

Edinburgh GeoSciences’ Dr. Robert Bingham has recently been named as a recipient

of the UK Polar Medal from HM the Queen for his work in “contributing to the

knowledge of the Arctic and Antarctic Polar Regions for the United Kingdom.”

Dr. Bingham, a graduate of Edinburgh Geography from 1998, joined the School of

GeoSciences in October 2013, and has spent the intervening 15 years participating

in and leading polar research predominantly in glaciology and geophysics. Over that

time he has spent, cumulatively, over 2 years camping on the ice in the High Arctic

and central West Antarctica undertaking a variety of exploratory and scientific cam-

paigns. He has recently returned from his latest expedition, part of the £7.4m NERC

Ice Sheet Stability and Response (iSTAR) programme (see associated story).

Instituted in 1857 as the Arctic Medal, and renamed the Polar Medal in 1904, the

award is conferred to selected citizens of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland who have

personally made conspicuous contributions to the knowledge of Polar regions, or who have rendered prolonged

service of outstanding quality in support of the acquisition of such knowledge and who, in either case, have un-

dergone the hazards and rigours imposed by the Polar environment. Previous recipients include the polar explor-

ers Scott (1904) and Shackleton (1907), Ranulph Fiennes (1984), and Edinburgh’s own Professor David Sugden

(2003) and Professor Simon Harley (2002).

Dr. Bingham says “I am deeply humbled and honoured to receive this award. I consider it a testament to the great

teachers, including those in Edinburgh GeoSciences, who inspired me to follow a path in polar research; and to

the many colleagues who have supported me in my Arctic and Antarctic research career since. The polar regions

have become a passion for me, one that is inspired not only by their beauty, but by the clear importance to con-

temporary society of improving our understanding of how the remarkable changes to Earth’s ice cover are begin-

ning to manifest themselves in, for example, rising sea levels around the world.”

Dr. Bingham will receive the medal at an investiture ceremony held at Buckingham Palace in spring 2014.

Funding Success Administrative Data Research Centre for Scotland

The Institute of Geography and the Lived Environment have

just been awarded £7 million by the ESRC to run an

Administrative Data Research Centre for Scotland (ADRC-S).

The centre will both support researchers wanting to use

administrative data for their own research but will also

have its own programme of re-

search into substantive social and

health research areas (eg informal care and an ageing population) and into

technologies that will enhance these datasets (eg Natural Language Pro-

cessing).

The Centre will be directed by Chris Dibben and also includes Jamie Pearce

from the Institute along with colleagues in Law, Informatics, Population

Health, Psychology, EDINA, Sociology and Social Work across the University

with collaborators from the major Universities across Scotland. We will work in close partnership with

the NHS and Scottish Government in this endeavour. The ADRC-S will be based in the Edinburgh

Bioquarter, with facilities to accommodate up to 50 researchers (both permanent staff and visiting

researchers). Together with similar centres in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, it will deliver an

Administrative Data Research Network to the UK research community. Paul Boyle Chief Executive of

the ESRC has commented that: "There will be benefits [from the network] for researchers, govern-

ment, local communities and the public – indeed there is the potential for a revolution in our ability to

answer a host of questions that were previously intractable."

Transforming Energy Demand through Digital Innovation NETwork

In 6 years from now, 80% of UK households will be smart metered. What will be the

consequences of this intervention in our domestic sphere? Who will benefit from this,

and how? 'Transforming Energy Demand through Digital Innovation NET-

work' (TEDDINET) is new project led by the School of Geosciences; Dan van der

Horst (PI), Heather Lovell (Co-I) and Sam Staddon (network coordinator) with co-

investigators in Sociology, Informatics and Electric Engineering (all at Edinburgh)

and Civil & Building Engineering (at Loughborough University). Funded by EPSRC

(£699k) for a period of 4 years, TEDDINET represents what is currently the world's

largest interdisciplinary (science-social science) research programme on smart me-

ters & citizens. The kick-off workshop in Edinburgh in November was attended by

44 researchers from across the UK, and the forthcoming annual meeting at the Roy-

al Society will facilitate debate and knowledge exchange between academia, busi-

nesses and policy makers. For more details, see: www.teddinet.org"

Dr. Stuart Gilfillan recently obtained funding from the NERC oil and gas catalyst round to investigate the use of natural tracers in monitoring for methane pollution from unconventional gas production. The award was for £80k from NERC, £60k from the Scottish Government and £20k from the University of Edinburgh.

The project will develop ways to fingerprint methane gas by identifying the isotopes of carbon and hydrogen present along with the noble gases . These fingerprints vary depending on the origin and depth of the methane, and will enable pinpointing of the source of any increase in methane levels during exploration and production activities.

From a University news article Stuart is quoted as saying "Creating a fin-gerprint test will enable gas exploration and extraction to be carried out responsibly and should help address public concerns over this technology. It is important that action is taken to sample relevant sites before commercial extraction begins"

Funding Success

A new European Commission FP7 project awarded to

Prof Mark Rounsevell will investigate the impacts, ad-

aptation and vulnerability of European land-based

sectors to high-end scenari-

os of climate change.

The IMPRESSIONS project

(Impacts and Risks from

High-End Scenarios: Strategies for Innovative Solutions) has been awarded €11

million over 5 years of which €820,000 comes to the University of Edinburgh. The

project involves 27 partners from across Europe and the world, who met earlier

this month at a kick-off meeting at the University of Oxford (see attached photo).

IMPRESSIONS will: develop a novel stakeholder-driven methodology for the crea-

tion of an integrated set of high-end climate and socio-economic scenarios; apply

these scenarios to a wide range of existing and new spatially-explicit models of

impacts and adaptation in five case studies covering global, European and regional/local (Scotland, Iberia and

Hungary) scales; embed the impacts modelling work within an integrated assessment approach which ad-

vances the analysis of multi-scale and cross-sectoral synergies and trade-offs; evaluate the time- and path-

dependency of adaptation and mitigation options taking account of the non-linearity, complexity and tipping

points described in the scenarios and impact model results; work with public and private decision-makers to

better understand their knowledge needs and maximise their active participation in the research.

Further information is available through the coordinators website: www.eci.ox.ac.uk/research/biodiversity/

impressions.php

The School of GeoSciences has recently been awarded two successful projects from the

Research call, Technology Strategy Board - Solving business problems with environmental data

Both of these are led by Industry and each have a strong University of Edinburgh component.

Dr. Ed Mitchard.will be the PI of a project called SAREDD - An operational service to provide

A reliable Forest degradation information using satellite radar data. The company lead will be

Astrium Geoservices. Our researchers have developed analysis techniques that can detect

deforestation and forest degradation using cloud-penetrating long-wavelength radar satellite

data. This feasibility project, with industry, will initiate the development of marketable products

and services to the emerging REDD+ (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degra-

dation), the United Nations initiatve to reduce deforestation in developing countries.

Dr. Caroline Lehmann will be the PI of a research project Global Monitoring of

Soil Carbon from Space Company lead, Global Surface Intelligence. Our re-

searchers will use GSi-Carbon's biomass data to provide a novel data service

on soil carbon with full global coverage that can be made available to clients

via geographic information systems (GIS). The initial scope of the project will

be to conduct a feasibility study to asses the potential to generate soil carbon

datasets from Earth Observation data.

Launch of Scottish Forum on Natural Capital

Edinburgh University is a founding partner in the Scottish Forum on Natural Capital, together

with The Scottish Wildlife Trust, Scotland’s 2020 Climate Group, ICAS and the Institute of

Directors Scotland. The Forum aims to bring together public, private and voluntary sector

organisations that seek to protect and rebuild Scotland’s natural capital. Although still in its early

stages, the Forum will provide an excellent opportunity to promote a range of activities from

across the University.

The Forum was announced by Alex Salmond at the World Forum on Natural

Capital, held 21-22 November in Edinburgh. Marc Metzger currently represents

the University on the Forum, which links to a range of his research activities

within the EU funded OPERAs project. His involvement will ensure that OPERAs

research, e.g. in mapping natural capital and ecosystem services and in Natural

Capital accounting methods will be able to contribute to the Forum.

Scottish Forum on

Natural Capital

Ian Murray, with Dr Stuart Gilfilan and Rachel Kilgallon

From Backbench to Lab Bench at the University of Edinburgh

Ian Murray MP swapped legislation for a lab coat, when he visited Dr Stuart Gilfillan at the King’s Buildings campus, University of Edinburgh on the 24th January as part of a unique ‘pairing’ scheme run by the Royal Society – the UK national academy of science.

During his visit Ian viewed the internationally leading All-Waters Combined Current and Wave Test Facility with the team at Flowave TT. This 30m diameter and 5m deep circular tank is a unique facility which can be used to test any wave or tidal renewable energy generation system in any combi-nation of current and wave environments.

Ian also toured the state of the art CO2 laboratory at the Grant Institute of the School of GeoSciences, were he spoke to Ms Rachel Kilgallon, a PhD candidate with Dr. Gilfillan, who is investigating how carbon dioxide injected underground can be tracked to ensure it is safely stored.

Ian Murray MP said: “It was a privilege visiting the world lead-ing University of Edinburgh King’s Buildings Campus in my constituency. The work being done there is fascinating and I enjoyed Stuart’s guide through the different facilities; from developing leading wave technology to testing the safe stor-age of carbon dioxide”.

Dr Stuart Gilfillan has already spent a week in the Houses of Parliament as part of the pairing scheme’s ‘Week in Westminster’. This provided Stuart with a ‘behind the scenes’ insight into how science policy is formed as well as an understanding of the working life of an MP. Stuart said: “I thoroughly enjoyed giving Ian a brief insight into the ground-breaking research and education which is being undertaken within his constituency at King’s Buildings. It was a pleasure to return the hospitality he showed whilst I was shadow-ing him at Westminster and we both learned a great deal from the pairing scheme. I’m extremely grateful to the Royal Society for providing this unique opportunity.”

Talking about Dinosaurs

Our own Paleontolgist Steve Brusatte has been one of the experts consulted for the new film ‘Walking with Dinosaurs’ Steve helped the story tellers to incorporate new science to portray a more accurate representation of dinosaurs based on his current research. This contribution has not gone un-noticed as Steve has been busy giving television and radio interviews to a number of stations.

This included live spots on BBC Scotland and BBC Wales, and various other BBC stations. Along with BBC Breakfast, Steve did a piece for BBC Newsround. The US press picked up on this too when Steve was asked to give a 45-minute interview for Science Fantastic with Michio Kaku, the largest syndicated science radio program in the US.

Steve Brusatte BBC Breakfast December 17, 2013

Public Engagement

Ian Murray, with Dr Stuart Gilfilan at the Houses of Parliament

Highlights

In December ECCI received confirmation the building had made history by becoming the first listed building to achieve the UK¹s highest green building award at design stage.

ECCI has announced its latest strategic project - 'Smart Accelerator'. This 18 month, £1.2million project aims to accelerate the development of major smart city and sustainable island projects in Scotland, based on inter-national good practice. This ERDF-funded project is geared towards integrating SMEs and academic expertise to maxise sustainable local economic development and is supported by the Scottish Government, Scottish En-terprise, Highlands & Islands Enterprise, SCDI and the University of Edinburgh.

ECCI is partnering with Edinburgh City Council and Edinburgh's Colleges on the Edinburgh Interspace project. The new ERDF funded initiative will develop and enhance synergies between Edinburgh's existing incubators and accelerators to create effective knowledge exchange, enhance existing services and provide a central portal to announce internationally that 'Edinburgh is open for business and ready to incubate ideas and business'.

School of GeoSciences and BGS host VMSG2014

The Volcanic and Magmatic Studies Group (VMSG) held their 50th Anniversary Conference in Edinburgh in January

2014. VMSG is a special interest group of The Mineralogical Society of Great Britain and Ireland and The Geological

Society, and the 2014 conference was hosted as a partnership between the University of Edinburgh and the British

Geological Survey. The conference organising committee was chaired by Dr John Stevenson in the School of

GeoSciences.

VMSG2014 is of particular significance as it marks the 50th anniversary of the conference. To celebrate this, the

invited keynote speakers will focussed on the advances in volcanology and igneous petrology over the past 50

years. The event also included a guest keynote lecture from Professor Iain Stewart MBE. The event attracted 225

delegates from the UK, Chile, Japan, USA, Canada, Switzerland, Iceland, Sweden, Denmark and France.

The 23rd Annual School of GeoScience postgraduate conference

The 23rd Annual School of GeoScience postgraduate conference once again provided an

excellent opportunity for students, staff, and industry delegates to learn about the

diverse research currently conducted within the School of GeoSciences at the

University of Edinburgh.

This year the event was held in the stunning setting of Macdonald Marine Hotel in

North Berwick looking out over the Firth of Forth and Bass Rock. We were once again

extremely lucky to have excellent attendance from students and staff from all areas of

the GeoScience School, as well as Industry. The aim of GradSchool has long been to

share the breadth and diversity of research conducted in the School and with 47 talks

and 23 poster presentations certainly achieved this end.

Topics encompassed the whole spectrum of geosciences and ranged from cartography

of The Enlightenment period, through Ice sheet dynamics and melting, to seismic inter-

ferometry and unconventional gas production. Such a broad range of topics is uncom-

mon at a single conference and provides an excellent opportunity to learn and expand

our understanding within the postgraduate community.

This year GradSchool was delighted to secure the support of 16 sponsors, which

enabled the conference to be well attended by a record number of delegates. Talks and

poster presentations from our sponsors showcased research conducted by industry and

allowed our students to see first-hand research opportunities outside academia.

This year two fieldtrips were run; Community Windpower kindly gave a technical talk at

Aikengall Windfarm near Dunbar and Dr. John Stevenson took a group to investigate

the volcanic deposits along the North Berwick shoreline. Unfortunately the weather

was not too kind with extremely strong winds and snow on the hills, and wind and

waves on the shore, but as true geoscientists, the participants didn’t let the weather

dampen their spirits! Our thanks go to Paul Prescott-Clements from Community

Windpower and to John Stevenson for volunteering their time.

The 2013/2014 GradSchool committee would like to thank everyone that has been

involved in the event because the success of the conference relies heavily on your

support, attendance and participation. Please do tell your colleagues about us and

encourage them to be involved next year! Gra

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Student Postagraduate Wards

Congratulations to Nicholle Bell (Uhrin/Graham) and Xiaoyun Hui (Graham/

Vinogradoff who were awarded the top prizes at the RSC Sixth Scottish Postgraduate

Symposium on Environmental Analytical Chemistry in Glasgow on 11th December and

to Peerapa Kosolsaksakul (Graham/Farmer/Oliver) who received a

“Highly Commended: Environment” award at the Anglo-Thai Society Awards for 2013.

2013 MSc in GIS Award

Winner of the MSc in GIS award was presented to Amanda Carlson at the

University of Edinburgh Graduation ceremony and this year’s shared winners of the

dissertation prize, Amanda Carlson and David Cooper . Informed Solutions sponsor

this High Achiever award aimed at encouraging and inspiring a new generation of GIS

professionals.

Alumni News

Maria Paz De La Cruz Sepulveda, Director of the Chilean Renewable Energy Centre and

MSc Carbon Management alumnus, has secured $20m of funding from the UK and

Germany to develop renewable energy projects in Chile and displace around 2 million

tonnes of carbon dioxide.

AGU Student Awards

Our student Erica Galetti was one of the American Geophysical Union – AGU winners

(Seismology) of Outstanding Student Presentation Awards from the Autumn 2013

meeting.

Student News

One of our Students Harry Holmes was selected to be a

member of the British Climbing team. He flew out to Korea

in January for the first round of the Ice World Cup. Harry has

been competing in the Scottish Tooling Series where he came

second in first round in Aberdeen on the 9th November and

won the second round in Glasgow on the 23rd November.

Recently Harry has been a host on the BMC international

meet, foreign climbers come to Scotland and are shown

around by lots of British climbers .

Innovation Initiative Grant

PhD student Abraham Adediran was recently awarded an Innovation Initiative Grant

from The University of Edinburgh Development Trust , the value of the grant to be

awarded is £1,903. The grant will help fund part of his PhD research cantered on

answering the question- How do bacteria help plants to survive metal toxicity?

New Senior Lecturer Senior Lecturer in Development Geography

Dr. Kanchana N. Ruwanpura joined us recently as Senior Lecturer in Development Geography and acts as Deputy Director for the MSc in Environment and Development. Her scholarship explores a) the diversity of lived and structured spaces focusing on the connections between ethno-nationalism, post-disaster and materiality, b) the convergence and divergence of global governance regimes as everyday experiences for labour, and c) connections between civil society initiatives and uneven development processes. These research topics reflects her training in heterodox economics and development studies, which made her interested to interrogate Œdevelopment as a global process, in the sense of it being grounded in multiple sources of knowledge, sites of concern and meanings of social justice. Dr. Ruwanpura is committed to a scholarship grounded and multidimensional understanding of South Asia, as it seeks global ascendency. She does so by aspiring to ensure that the political voices and actions from marginalized communities in the region, in relation to development and global process, find their place in her research and scholarship; testifying to the messiness of development and the lived realities of the Global South.

Dr. Kanchana N. Ruwanpura

New book focused on the advances of Automated Mapping

A culmination of two years of collaborative effort has resulted in the

publication of a book focused on advances in automated mapping.

The three editors of this new text (Dirk Burghardt, Cecile Duchene and

William Mackaness), are current and past chairs of the Commission

on Generalisation and Multiple Representation, a research group

working under the umbrella of the International Cartographic Associa-

tion. Not a collection of workshop papers but a book that details the

essential theories, methodological advances, and algorithms of auto-

mated mapping. It includes chapters on database design, the ontologi-

cal modelling that underpins data integration, and ideas of thematic,

highly customised mapping (for example delivering maps over mobile

devices). This 2014 publication with its many case studies illustrates a

maturing of this research field, reflected in its increasing incorpora-

tion within the commercial systems of National Mapping Agencies.

The book also illustrates the relevance of this research in the context

of ‘big data’ and the increasing importance of user generated geo-

graphical content.

Publications

Sarah McAllister, Peter Nienow,

Mark Naylor, Faten Adam, Natasha Milne,

Fiona Hartree

If you have any suggestion for the year

ahead please email

geos.social@ed.ac.uk

Committee Members for 2014

SOCIAL COMMITTEE

Cockburn Geological Museum

Collect.Ed a Cabinet of Curiosities at the University of Edinburgh Main

Library brings together 150 objects from across the University’s collection.

Shells collected by Charles Darwin, Prehistoric shark’s teeth and Meteorite

fragments, along with a selection of rocks and minerals are on loan from

the Cockburn Geological Museum, which is housed in the Grant Institute,

School of GeoSciences. Collect.ed opens on 5th December 2013 and runs

until 1st March 2014

Monday to Friday 10.00am – 5.00pm, Saturday 10.00am – 1.00pm