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Top awards for earth science students
Author: Media & Communication, Faculty of Science
Published: 12/07/2016

Two postgraduate students from the Department of Earth Sciences at Stellenbosch University (SU) scooped two of the top awards from the Geological Society of South Africa this week.

Jean Loock won the award for the best fourth year thesis, while Matthew Mayne received the John Handley award for the best MSc thesis in earth sciences in South Africa in 2015.

Loock, a former Grey High School learner, had to participate in a three month return voyage to Antarctica on board the polar research vessel the SA Agulhas II in order to collect data for his research on climate change: "My project tackled climate change by studying bio-active trace metal concentrations in the Southern Ocean and defining the growth stress induced by low concentrations on marine phytoplankton.

"It was a massively fulfilling project to be a part of. The research we are doing here at SU can only be done by a handful of labs in the world, yet it is massively important to our understanding and modelling of future changes in our ocean and climate," he says.

Loock is continuing with research on this topic for an MSc under the supervision of Prof. Roy Roychoudhury. He will present the results from his honours thesis at a symposium of the South African National Antarctic Program (SANAP) at the end of July and again at the International Ocean Science Conference of the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR) which will take place in Malaysia in August.

As part of his MSc thesis, Mayne created a software tool called Rcrust which enables a new concept in modelling known as 'path dependence': "This path dependence concept allows us to investigate multi-step processes which are crucial to our understanding of how metamorphic rocks are formed," he explains.

A metamorphic rock is a type of rock which has been changed by extreme heat and pressure.

According to his study leader, Prof. Gary Stevens, this new tool will greatly assist geologists in studies of bulk compositional change, for example, when investigating the effects of melt loss on the water content of a rock

Mayne, who matriculated from Edenvale High School in Johannesburg, says the user-friendly interface of Rcrust makes it accessible to geologists and students alike, and will hopefully expand the applicability of thermodynamic modelling in this field.

He recently published an article in the Journal of Metamorphic Geology entitled "Rcrust: a tool for calculating path-dependent open system processes and application to melt loss" which presents Rcrust to the community. In July he will present work from his paper at the Workshop on the Origin and Evolution of Plate Tectonics in Locarno, Switzerland, and in August at the International Geological Congress in Cape Town.

Rcrust is available for download from the Department of Earth Science's website at http://www.sun.ac.za/english/faculty/science/earthsciences/Pages/Rcrust-1.aspx

Mayne is now pursuing a PhD in earth sciences under the supervision of Prof. Gary Stevens, who holds the SARChI research chair in Experimental Petrology at SU.