Oxford Earth Sciences Student Wins International Geoscience Prize

Congratulations to Oxford Earth Sciences student Edward Clennett, who has been awarded the second prize in the Halliburton Landmark Earth Model Award, an International Geoscience Competition Rewarding Excellence in Master’s Level Research. In addition to this, Edward has also been awarded the Geologists’ Association UKOGL (UK Onshore Geophysical Library) Prize, a UK MSci competition.

Edward’s Research Project was titled: ‘A Quantitative Tomotectonic Plate Reconstruction of Western North America and the Eastern Pacific Basin.’ For the project, Edward built a plate reconstruction model of an archipelago in the eastern Pacific, which gradually collides with North America, using constraints from seismic tomography, geological evidence and palaeomagnetism. He was supervised by Prof. Karin Sigloch, with international collaborations at the University of Sydney and the British Columbia Geological Survey. As part of his project, Edward was able to spend two months in Sydney during Michaelmas term and the Christmas vacation of his 4th year. The research was published in AGU Journal Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems (G-Cubed) last week. You can read the full paper here.

The Earth Model Award (EMA) was established as the Neftex Earth Model Award in 2012, in affiliation with the Geological Society of London, to foster the link between industry and academia by rewarding excellence in Master’s level research. For the 2019 award, applicants were encouraged to submit theses focussed on ‘big picture’ research in a wide range of geoscience subjects, particularly those with a relevance to natural resource exploration.

Edward will shortly be leaving Oxford to start a PhD at the University of Texas at Austin where he will keep modelling plate tectonics. We wish him the very best of luck for his future studies and look forward to seeing the results of his research.