SGEES student won ‘Best overall movie’ at the Victoria Summer Gold Competition
Geophysics Masters student Ben Higgs is working on a joint VUW-NIWA-GNS project focussed on sonar imaging of gas flares on the Hikurangi margin. Ben attained a summer scholar-ship last summer and has also been awarded this year’s Rachel Westergaard Scholarship. At the conclusion of the summer Ben won the ‘Best overall movie’ category in the Victoria Summer Gold Competition.
Geophysics Masters student Ben Higgs is working on a joint VUW-NIWA-GNS project focussed on sonar imaging of gas flares on the Hikurangi margin. Ben attained a summer scholar-ship last summer and has also been awarded this year’s Rachel Westergaard Scholarship. At the conclusion of the summer Ben won the ‘Best overall movie’ category in the Victoria Summer Gold Competition.
Ben provided the following synopsis of his movie:
Quantitative analysis of EM302 water-column acoustic backscatter data
My movie summarizes the work that I completed for the Victoria Summer Schol-arship project: “Quantitative analysis of EM302 water-column acoustic backscat-ter data”, which took place between November 2014 and March 2015. This focuses on an area of abundant submarine hydrocarbon gas flares discovered by NIWA in April 2014 on the Hikurangi Margin, New Zealand. The seep sites exist at abnormally shallow (<300m below sea level) depths, increasing the likelihood that the gas can reach the atmosphere. Such gas flares are predominantly methane, a powerful greenhouse gas and the chance that the gas is reaching the atmospheric circulation system is motivation for better computer modelling techniques for locating and measuring the intensity of gas flares. I addressed this using the multi-beam data that was collected during the April voyage. The scholarship was overseen by VUW MSc supervisor John Townend, as a stand-alone project that would develop a strong foundation to research these flares for my thesis year over 2015. Most of the project was spent using the modelling software at NIWA with the help of my MSc supervisor Joshu Mountjoy. The final parts of the modelling workflow were developed at GNS with the help of my MSc supervisor Gareth Crutchley. I then created the movie using Fledermaus with some of the 3D flare models that I’d created over the course of the project.