2022 definitely feels like a very full year. I've lost count on the number of beds I've slept in and I feel I've travelled at lot. My family has been very patient with me and I am glad that the year comes to a quiet end in Edinburgh now. I do look forward to spending a fair bit of time with my kids and wife and friends over the next three weeks.
Between February and December 2022, there were 4 synchrotron visits (2 to SLS, 1 to DLS and 1 to APS), a fortnight in southern Spain with students to establish a new advanced field camp, a good amount of time spent in Austria to run a workshop for an EU project and a science retreat with our team, as well as work on a new structural geology course, and a conference in Grenoble where we presented our latest 4DµCT research. I've been in Lausanne working with a friend and colleague at EPFL and completed two consulting projects for companies that develop pumped storage hydropower in the Scottish Highlands. The consultancy field work really reconnected me with field mapping, and I've updated my skills and gone fully digital now to meet the required turn-around times and data formats.
Writing this, I am also recovering from a hip-replacement surgery that unfortunately became necessary as the condition of the joint started to affect my ability to do field work. Luckily all went well and, fingers crossed, I should be back in the field to do more consultancy work and field teaching in March.
Science and publication-wise, we have several super-cool papers pretty close to submission, and I have to say, it's been a great, great pleasure to work with Damien Freitas, James Gilgannon and Roberto Rizzo as the three postdocs on our Midgard project. The gents have been supermotivated, creative, hard-working and productive, I honestly couldn't ask for more. The results we produced with the fantastic support of Christian Schlepütz and Federica Marone at SLS really exceeded our expectations. We have also up'd our image analysis skills, found a way to segment 4D datasets really accurately and calculate transport properties from them.
In terms of collaborations, the ICTMS meeting in Grenoble really was a golden opportunity for establishing new collaborations, but also to consolidate existing ones. As part of our impact efforts, we've negotiated with the Spanish synchrotron ALBA to make some of our rigs available to a wider geoscience user community, but ultimately decided to work with Andy King at SOLEIL's PSICHÈ beamline until SLS' TOMCAT is back from a longish dark period as they upgrade to a 4th generation storage ring. Hopefully, later in 2023, users will be able to do 4DµCT experiments using our Mjölnir and Heitt Mjölnir rigs at PSICHÈ with the necessary user support provided by our team. I was also really glad to meet up with Ryan Hurley and work on a project where we aim to combine time-resolved imaging with x-ray diffraction to characterise both cause and effect of pressure solution creep in halite and calcite aggregates.
Along the lines of "sharing is caring", we've also just been at APS in the US, where two of our rigs have been copied and are being successfully used at two different imaging beamlines: Sleipnir at 2BM, and Mjölnir at 13BM. The rigs very nicely integrate with the exciting imaging setups there, and it was great to see that these groups have taken our robust design templates and adopted them to their needs.
On the teaching side of things, I've spent time working on two courses: One for the new Earth Sciences degree that will launch in Edinburgh in September 2023 (Earth Science for Society) and one that may become an MSc-level structural geology course and/or an open-source teaching resource (Case Studies in Structural Geology). Both are exciting projects and I will write more about them as they mature.
