Jaafar Jotheri, Crevasse splay is the earliest type of irrigation system in the world

BSG Postgrad Newsletter Spring 2015

Postgraduate News

Spring 2015


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Cover photo: Morgan Gibson

Contents:

Registration for the 2015 BSG AGM is still open! See

overleaf for the flyer and visit the website to register.

Grant deadlines for PG conference and travel grants

are 30th September and 31st January every year – visit

the website for guidelines and see the summer 2014

newsletter for a FAQs article on the grants with Prof

Steve Darby.

Nominate a fellow postgraduate for the Dick Chorley

award – see the last page of the newsletter for details.

A fully funded award is available for a British-based

young geomorphologist to attend the 5th AIGeo

conference – see page 12 for the flyer and contact the

conveners for details.

Don’t forget!

Postgrad news from the BSG Spring 2015

Welcome to your new BSG newsletter. We’ve had

an influx of new recruits join the forum over the past few months – head over to page 3 to meet them! Unfortunately, alongside introducing new blood to the fold, it is time to say cheerio and a huge thanks and best wishes to John Groves, Mattie Biddulph and Adam Trueman for their hard work and contributions to the forum over the past few years - good luck with the final year and writing up! The latest news from the BSG can be found at www.geomorphology.org.uk – it has undergone a major redesign recently. We think it is looking rather swish, but please do get in touch with your comments and suggestions! As always, our contact details can be found on the last page – we put a lot of PhD/postdoc job ads on Twitter, as well as funding and conference opportunities so it’s worth following us to keep informed. Enjoy the newsletter, The BSG Team

Forum members

Adam Trueman (chair) Durham @AT_ecogeoman [email protected]

Morgan Gibson (deputy) Aberystwyth @Morgan_Gibson [email protected]

Mark Allan Northumbria @_markallan_ [email protected]

Rupert Bainbridge Northumbria @GeoRu [email protected],

Mattie Biddulph Northampton @MattieBiddy [email protected]

John Groves Queen Mary, University of London @Johnwegroves [email protected]

Kate Reid Northumbria [email protected]

Jamie Wood Gloucester [email protected]

Francesca Falcini York @FranFalcini [email protected]

Owen King Leeds @Owen__King [email protected]

Lauren Knight Portsmouth @Lauren__Knight [email protected]

Danielle Alderson Manchester [email protected]

BSG Postgrad Newsletter

Spring 2015

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Hi, I’m Fran, a first year PhD student at the University of York. My project is focused on calculating surface roughness of palaeo ice stream beds. This will involve looking at lots of Digital Elevation Models (DEMs) of the UK to start with, and could potentially include fieldwork. Surface roughness is the change in elevation over a given horizontal distance, basically the wavelength of elevation along a transect. My work will increase our knowledge and understanding of surface roughness at the bed of ice streams, particularly its relationship with glacial landforms, and hopefully help to explain some of the behaviour seen in current ice streams on Antarctica and Greenland. For more icy insights find me on Twitter @FranFalcini.

Hi, I’m Jamie and I am a second year PhD student at the University of

Gloucestershire. My research project focuses on the use of luminescence

dating to evaluate sedimentation rates within blocked-valley lakes in eastern

South Africa. With the use of single-grain OSL, the ultimate aim of my project is

to identify tropical storm deposits and chronicle storm events which have

impacted this region over the past ~4000 years. Alongside my own research I

assist with the commercial running of the geochronology lab here at the

University of Gloucestershire, both collecting and processing samples for

external clients. If you want to get in touch please drop me an email

([email protected]) or find me on Twitter (@JamieCallumWood).

Francesca Falcini, York University

Jamie Wood, Gloucester University

My PhD involves the investigation of the chemical characteristics of organic matter that has been exported from eroding peatlands during flood events, and subsequently stored in floodplains. Floodplains are commonly regarded as zones of carbon storage but can also be active cyclers of C and thus may provide stratigraphic records of carbon cycling. The carbon processed on floodplains (storage or mineralisation) needs to be taken into account in carbon budgets. I am using techniques such as pyrolysis GC/MS to attempt to distinguish between peatland organic matter from in-situ soil growth between flood events. The floodplain under investigation (South Pennines, UK) is a potential hotspot for carbon processing as the peatlands upstream have experienced substantial degradation, thus representing an ideal study area for the exploration of these processes.

Danielle Alderson, Manchester University

Welcome your new PG Forum reps!


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Welcome to your new PG forum reps!

Are you interested in joining the Postgraduate Forum? We

are currently seeking enthusiastic PGR’s to join the

Forum. Representatives from Northern Ireland are

especially welcome but we’re open to recruiting anyone.

Being a Forum member is a wonderful opportunity to

contribute positively to the Postgraduate experience and

be directly involved with the BSG at a decision-making

level. If you’re interested, get in touch with one of the team

or via [email protected] for more

information.

Interested in joining?

Hi I’m Lauren. I am a first year PhD student at the University of Portsmouth and prior to this I completed my BSc (Physical Geography) and MSc (Glaciology) degrees at Aberystwyth University. My PhD research concentrates on establishing the patterns, dynamics and timings of Late Devensian glaciation in the Wicklow Mountains, Ireland. My research involves both remote sensing and fieldwork to systematically assess the geomorphological, sedimentological and geochronological evidence of former glaciation. My research interests include the palaeoglaciology of the last British-Irish Ice Sheet and the application of remote sensing to both glaciated and glacierised environments. Feel free to get in touch via email ([email protected]) or on Twitter @Lauren__Knight

Lauren Knight, Portsmouth University

I am a first year PhD student at the School of Geography, University of Leeds studying the response of Himalayan glaciers to climatic change. More specifically, I am looking at how glacier stagnation and their evolving geometry will influence the development of glacial lakes at their surface. Glacial lakes pose a threat to mountain communities living down-valley as they are occasionally prone to bursting open and releasing a huge amount of glacial meltwater- a glacial lake outburst flood (GLOF). Most of my research will be conducted using remote sensing techniques, but a couple of trips to work on the glaciers around Everest base camp will help me validate my data, as well as to test some novel techniques in one of the harshest environments on the planet! Feel free to get in touch via email [email protected] or on Twitter @Owen__King

Owen King, Leeds University


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1st prize: Jerome Mayaud

Cash prize of £100; Photo on front cover of ESPL for 2016

BSG Photo Competition 2015

This photograph was taken in 2014 in a beautiful barchan dunefield south of Terrace Bay along Namibia's Skeleton Coast. As a break from our long field days in the remote Huab valley, my PhD supervisor decided to take us on a journey up the coast to track down a dune that he had worked on almost ten years ago. Barchans are famously fast-moving bedforms, constantly moving with the winds, so there was a palpable sense of anticipation in our 4x4 - would we find his old friend after all this time? We trekked across a hot gravel plain, eagerly checking and rechecking our GPS, searching, anticipating. Eventually, we reached the spot where the dune should have been. Gravel. Undeterred, we climbed a massive transverse ridge to get a better view of the surroundings. Too many piles of sand to choose from. Minutes passed as we silently scanned the horizon. Just as I was about to admit defeat, my supervisor pointed into the distance: "That’s the one!” A desert man never forgets his dunes. Excitedly - like school boys - we skipped across to the barchan,

even passing the old metal stakes he had left to track its movement a decade ago. The dune was stunning, with a crisp slipface and the perfect horns I'd so often read about in textbooks. She had moved several hundred metres to the north, but as a ray of sunshine broke through the advancing fog, my supervisor's satisfied grin said it all: she hadn't lost an ounce of her magic.

Jerome is a NERC-funded PhD student at the University of Oxford's School of Geography and the Environment. He is interested in the interactions between vegetation and wind in semi-arid deserts, and how complex vegetation patterns affect the movement of sediment across desert surfaces. By integrating field data from southern Africa into a new transport model, he hopes to improve our understanding of the potential for future land degradation in socio-economically vulnerable regions around the world. Jerome's earlier research focused on the glacial dynamics of western Greenland.


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Runner-up: Edwin Baynes


This photo was taken from the eroded plunge pool behind Smjörgil, a waterfall on the northern

flank of Eyjafjallajökull in South Iceland, that Edwin explored with some undergraduates while

demonstrating on a field trip. The small stream drains into the large braided river system within the

Markarfljót valley that can be seen in the background of the photo.

Edwin is a PhD student at the University of Edinburgh, studying the impact and processes of

bedrock erosion and canyon formation during extreme flood events in Iceland.



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Runner-up: Mikael Attal



Mikael is a Lecturer in landscape dynamics at the University of Edinburgh. His work combines field studies, topographic analysis and modelling to better understand the processes that shape landscapes (in particular river processes) and to enable the extraction of useful information from the morphology of landscapes in terms of tectonics, erosion and climate. His PhD student Edwin Baynes is working on the impact of extreme flood events

on the morphology of bedrock landscapes and this picture was taken while investigating a potential study area near the now famous Eyjafjallajokull volcano, in the south of the island. The gorge on the picture, just west of the Sólheimajökull glacier, may have been carved by a jokulhlaup sourced from under the Mýrdalsjökull ice cap. The channel is clearly too small to keep the oversized gorge "clean" and is overwhelmed by debris cones.


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Highly Commended: Laura Vezzola

Photo on front cover of ESPL for 2016


Laura is a Ph.D. student in Environmental

Sciences at the Department of Earth Sciences,

University of Milan (Italy). The main topic of

Laura’s project is "impacts of climate change in

glacial environments", and in particular Laura

study changes in distribution and characteristics

of tree vegetation in the Italian Alps, due to the

current climate warming.

However, Laura is lucky to have a portuguese

boyfriend, and every now and then they like to

wander around in his hometown, the peninsula

of Peniche - located about 100 km North of

Lisbon (Portugal) on the Atlantic coast. This

picture was taken in an area called Ilha das

pombas. The coastline around Peniche is

composed of sedimentary rock, mainly Jurassic

limestone, forming spectacular cliffs, and the

scientific community identified in Peniche the

world's best record of transition from the

‘Pliensbachian’ age to the ‘Toarcian’ age in the

early Jurassic, about 183 million years ago.

Coastal processes continuously drive the

shaping of the cliffs.


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Jaafar Jotheri, Durham University

We employ geoarchaeological data, remote sensing and ancient texts to suggest that Sumerian irrigation systems in the central Mesopotamian plains (back to at least the third millennium BC ) was herringbone pattern, developed from an earlier phase of crevasse splays and simple spur canals.

The Tigris and Euphrates rivers, when they reach the Mesopotamian Plains, form branching, anastomosing systems which both dominate and structure the southern landscape. Therefore, the landscapes of southern Mesopotamia is hydraulic landscapes and water is the specific structuring agent in what is actually a complex array of rivers, canals, distributaries and marshes which dominate and in part create the landscape.

The Mesopotamian channels are raised on levees and that levee breaks can occur either as a result of natural causes or human actions. As a result, the small distributaries so created would form a minor crevasse splay. The water issuing from crevasse splays could have supplied small irrigated patches of land which would have

Crevasse splay is the earliest type of irrigation system in the world

formed ideal niches for a household or two. However, by exerting further control of the levee break, the discharging flow could have serviced extended lineages, until each branch became a formal distributary, positioned approximately vertically to the main channel.

One generation does things in a certain way, and the next generation, instead of starting from scratch, does them in more or less the same way, except that perhaps it adds a modification or improvement. The succeeding generation then learns the modified version, which then persists across generations until further changes are made Such processes of generational copying can be suggested to have operated in crevasse splays in southern Mesopotamia, specifically where the secondary channel had become managed by local communities and modified incrementally over succeeding generations.

The higher gradients of levee slopes provide greater flexibility for the distribution of water to the fields and were less likely to silt up. Such short spur channels could therefore supply irrigation modules of modest scale, each serviced by a single canal of 2–5 km length. Some evidences from cuneiform texts suggests that most


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canals were of 2-5 km. Each module was then capable of being organized by kin groups or small-scale communities

Traditional practice in Iraq suggests that where levees were lower, around 2 m high, the flow from levee breaks was easier to control, whereas where they were high, maybe 5–7 m elevation, the issuing discharge was more difficult to control. This means that farmers often choose to irrigate areas where the levees and topographic elevations are lower.

One advantage of levee slope irrigation is that by taking advantage of flow down the levee slope, these channels would have made it easier to direct flow in various directions into fields and they would have incurred less sedimentation. Nevertheless, because the levee break would represent a point of weakness in the levee bank

this could result in larger flows breaking through to create major distributary channels and eventually avulsions.

However, if managed with care the distributaries of simple levee breaks would then provide ideal loci for irrigated fields, which could eventually be formalized into a more regular trellis of irrigation canals. Not only is the topology of the natural crevasse splay junction the same as that of the formalized system but also, the fields of the latter can be shown to have been of roughly the same scale as the Sumerian features discharging flow could have serviced extended lineages, until each branch became a formal distributary, positioned approximately vertically to the main channel.

For more details, the original paper is: Wilkinson, T., Rayne, L., and Jotheri, J. 2015: Hydraulic landscapes in Mesopotamia: the role of human niche construction.


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More Abstracts: full articles available on our blog: www.bsgpostgraduates.wordpress.com

Observations and Impacts of the 26th August 2014 Val Veny floods

Rupert Bainbridge

Last year, I was in the European Alps helping out on some fieldwork. Whilst we were there to look at landslides onto glaciers the weather quite often had other plans! On the 26th August 2014 in Val Veny, Italy we had some heavy rainfall which caused extensive damage to infrastructure and rapid channel change. Fuelled on delicious European pastries and with a flooding river, we were unable to resist the urge to document some of what happened that day. I provide a brief overview of some observations and impacts from the flooding.

Reflections on the BSG Windsor Workshop Owen King, Francesca Falcini and Lauren Knight

The Windsor Workshop is an annual, 4 day event organised by the British Society for Geomorphology that is designed to welcome first year PhD students into the world of academia, preparing them for the trials and tribulations they may face over the next 3 years of their project.

And more!

Read about Antarctic adventures, OSL dating, tips for surviving progression and more on our blog at www.bsgpostgraduates.wordpress.com

Reflections on EGU 2015 Danielle Alderson

The EGU (European Geosciences Union) conference is held every year in the beautiful city of Vienna. This was Danielle’s first time at the conference, and first time presenting at a large international conference. Check out Danielle’s blog article for some of her reflections on the conference.


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Geomorphological Techniques is a free online resource, outlining the current methods utilised in the

particular specialist area of interest. The aim is to provide an up-to-date, evolving resource for

geomorphologists to use and contribute towards. All articles are peer reviewed.

Contribute your expertise

Are you an expert on a particular geomorphological technique? Have you just written a methods chapter for

your PhD and would like to share it with the world? Would you like to help others to avoid the pitfalls you

have uncovered, or get a head start at applying a method to further geomorphic research?

The BSG are looking for authors to volunteer articles to contribute to an updated, online version of

Geomorphological Techniques. Each article should be approximately 2000 – 3000 words in length, outlining

the current methods utilised in your specialist area and will be peer reviewed by at least 2 specialists in the

field. Honoraria of £200 are available for BSG members that author articles.

Please contact the Publications Sub-Committee Secretary Dr. Lucy Clarke ([email protected]) if you are

interested in contributing. The current table of contents is listed at

http://www.geomorphology.org.uk/onsite_publications.

Geomorphological techniques – call for contributions


Social Media

Nominations for the Dick Chorley Medal for PG research

Dick Chorley inspired and guided many Postgraduate students in geomorphology during their academic careers. As recognition for this commitment to serving the future of the discipline, BSG has decided to honour his memory by creating the Dick Chorley Medal and Prize (£500) for Postgraduate Research.

The Dick Chorley Medal is awarded for “the most significant original published contribution to geomorphology by a current or recently graduated post-graduate student.” One paper will be considered, published (electronic or paper form) in an English language research journal. Nominated candidates must be within 3 years of obtaining their PhD. Note that anyone is allowed to nominate candidates (e.g. supervisors, external examiners, Heads of School, supervisory team members).

Please visit http://www.geomorphology.org.uk/award/4 to nominate your peers.

Don’t forget to follow us on social media to keep up with all the latest news, PhD & job opportunities, field meetings and more.

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http://www.geomorphology.org.uk/award/4

Jaafar Jotheri, Crevasse splay is the earliest type of irrigation system in the world

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Transcript of Jaafar Jotheri, Crevasse splay is the earliest type of irrigation system in the world