Professor Becky Briant's Inaugural Lecture - Reconstructing past landscapes and building new ones: why mud and gravel are more important than you might think
When:
—
Venue:
Birkbeck Clore Management Centre
The low-carbon transition needs people who understand the subsurface sediments on which infrastructure will be built. For example, nuclear power and renewables are currently being rolled out at scale across the UK and globally and need to be deployed faster if we are to meet the Paris goal of constraining global temperature rise to 1.5oC above pre-industrial levels. Many of these projects are built on Quaternary sediments, deposits from the last two million years which have yet to turn into rock but can be many metres thick and considerably more complex than bedrock, for example the c. 80 m thick glacial and coastal sediment sequences in West Cumbria near the Sellafield nuclear site.
Over the past 25 years of reconstructing past landscapes in southern England and the Middle East, I have developed the skills needed to help ground engineers decipher these sediments and am currently collaborating with ground engineers in Jacobs through a Royal Society Industry fellowship. I have provided training to Jacobs colleagues who are unfamiliar with the Quaternary and advice on specific projects, derisking them by improving the ground models used. I have also initiated project-specific collaborations and trialling of innovative technologies to answer geotechnical questions. In this lecture, I will detail my journey in developing these skills, outline how risk management in large infrastructure projects depends on understanding the complexities of landscapes and share some initial findings from our collaboration.
Biography
Becky Briant is a Professor in Quaternary Science. She joined Birkbeck in 2009, following a PhD at the University of Cambridge and posts at King’s College London and Queen Mary University of London. Her research focusses on reconstructing Quaternary palaeoenvironments (spanning the last 2 million years), with a particular focus on rivers and coasts. She collaborates with:
- Specialists to generate robust estimates of the age of different sediment bodies using geological dating methods such as radiocarbon, optically-stimulated luminescence and amino-acid racemisation dating, to understand the relative timing of events and rates of landscape change.
- Palaeolithic archaeologists to apply these findings to understanding patterns of human dispersal
- Landscape evolution modellers to better understand how short-term processes scale to produce millennia-long sediment records
- Structural geologists to better estimate long-term uplift rates.
- Ground engineers, co-founding the Quaternary Research Association (QRA) Engineering Research Group in 2021 and securing a Royal Society Industry Fellowship in 2024.
Becky is also on the steering group of the UK Geoscience Strategic Alliance, chairing the numbers working group, a member of the Research and Higher Education Committee of the Royal Geographical Society and Secretary of the QRA. Within Birkbeck, she is Co-Director of the Birkbeck Research Centre for Environment and Sustainability and teaches environmental topics on undergraduate and postgraduate programmes, currently serving as Programme Director for the BSc Environment and Sustainability.
This inaugural lecture will be followed by a drinks reception in the Clore foyer.
Contact name: Chris Fray
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