Hey there, I’m Jamie. I am an M.Phil student, hoping to become a Ph.D candidate, wondering what all of this Ph.D malarkey is about. It seems to me that I get to continue studying a topic I have been very interested in for the past few years. All thanks to a trip to Spain might I add! That topic is turbidity currents.
Usually when I say to people that I study turbidity currents, I am met with a blank expression. Simply put, you create a turbidity current when ever you pour a cup of tea, pouring the milk last. That cloud of milk that erupts from the bottom of the tea is a small scale turbidity current! Neat huh?! Science in a cup! Well these exist in the ocean but instead of being made of milk, they are made of sand and water. Not quite as tasty, but still important!
I first became interested in turbidity currents while on a field trip in Sorbas, SE Spain while I was doing my undergraduate degree. I took on the project of turbidity currents because I hadn’t heard about them before and didn’t really know what they were. When I did a bit of reading around before the trip they seemed pretty cool! But anyway, when we were in Spain we visited this gigantic deposit of, what was, a submarine landslide, now visible on the land due to plate tectonics lifting the crust above sea level. This is known as the ‘El Gordo Megabed’, and it’s called a ‘megabed’ for a reason! You can see below the curved lines in the rock – those are the compression lines (shunt fault) formed when a section of the Sierra Alhamilla collapsed (for unknown reasons) when it was under water and crashed into the sea floor. The deposit is up to 40m high in places, that’s as high as five two-storey houses!
The size of the event amazed me to the point that I carried on studying turbidity currents to the end of my undergraduate degree, and now I’m studying them for my Ph.D too!
Additionally, turbidity currents happen to be very important to the way modern humans function. Turbidity currents carry bits of trees, plants and other organisms into the deep ocean where they get buried under sand. Over time these bits of material are buried by more sand, eventually put under a lot of pressure, and eventually made pretty hot, which transforms them into ‘hydrocarbons’. These hydrocarbons are taken from the ground in the form of oil or gas, and can be used to make things like petrol for cars and planes, burned in power stations to make energy for our homes, as well as road surfacing materials.
Did you ever notice how sticky the roads are when they are freshly done? That’s bitumen or asphalt, which can either be found in this form in the ground or at the surface, or be refined from a different form of oil.
We all know how important roads, electricity and car fuel are right? Without turbidity currents, we wouldn’t have oil and gas, and without oil and gas life would be very different.
Jimsblog 