The Paper Trail: Recent Episodes
Henk Kombrink
"The Paper Trail" is a series of interviews with researchers who published in the Netherlands Journal of Geosciences. We ask them to tell us a bit about the background to their work, the relevance to science and society and just how it was to write the piece!
Het is niet ongebruikelijk om op het strand restanten van mammoeten aan te treffen die meer dan tienduizend jaar geleden het gebied waar zich nu de Noordzee bevindt onveilig maakten. Dit gebeurt vooral op plekken waar zandsuppletie heeft plaatsgevonden - de botten worden letterlijk van de zeebodem gezogen en opgespoten op het strand. Vorig jaar vond Anders Schinkel echter iets op Maasvlakte 2 wat hij in eerste instantie niet thuis kon brengen. Jelle Reumer herkende het fossiel wel, en het deed hem denken aan iets wat hij bij de ingang van Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam eerder had gezien... Luister en ontdek!
In a recently published paper, Loes Buijze and her co-authors meticulously describe the characteristics of onshore hydrocarbon-bearing and geothermal reservoirs in the Netherlands. Here, Loes talks about the main implications of these findings when it comes to better understanding the risk of induced seismicity for both types of reservoirs, the questions that are still unanswered, and the research that is currently being done.
In this interview, Rick Wentinck talks about a new modelling approach that simulates movement along fault planes in the Groningen gas field. The results are important, because for the first time, it has been shown that fault plane irregularities may have resulted in the arrest of ruptures, preventing them from progressing deeper into the underburden of the Rotliegend reservoir and thereby causing potentially even stronger seismic events.
Master student Jelle Heere tells the story about the discovery of a mandible from a Late Cretaceous sea turtle in the Maastrichtian of Limburg. By doing so, Jelle demonstrates that the Chalk seas were much more diverse than some people may think, with sea grass growing plentifully and a wide variety of fauna roaming the area. Listen to this podcast to find out more!
Climate change is known to affect the sedimentary response of depositional systems. This has particularly been shown for lacustrine and marine environments where there is generally a lack of internal sediment dynamics that can obscure a paleo climate signal. For that reason, fluvial systems are less straightforward to disentangle because avulsions, crevasse splay formation and channel abandonments form an inherent part of the system regardless of climate forcing. However, by looking at the more distal part of fluvial systems, being the floodplain deposits, Tim Baars from Delft University of Technology managed to demonstrate a cyclic trend in Upper Carboniferous fluvial successions in the Netherlands. In this podcast, Tim explains how he did this.
Scour holes are depressions in the riverbed that can pose a significant risk to bank stability. For that reason, a better understanding of the distribution of scour holes in the biggest rivers of the Dutch lowlands is important. In this podcast, we speak to Bas Knaake from Deltares who has dedicated his PhD research project to mapping the geological factors contributing to scour hole formation. He explains why it is especially in the western part of the Rhine-Meuse delta where scour hole formation is linked to the Holocene architecture of the delta.
Did you know that the shells you pick up on the beach in the Netherlands are about 5,000 years old? "It is because shells are continuously reworked by waves and transported from one place to the other", says Frank Wesselingh from Naturalis Biodiversity Center in this podcast. It forms the perfect introduction to an interesting discovery done in a borehole drilled in Friesland; a discovery Frank tells a bit more about in this podcast. The moluscs the researchers found in the so-called Luxwoude borehole are also reworked, but they are much older than 5,000 years. Based on various stratigraphic criteria, the team concluded that the age of these moluscs is likely to be around 400,000 years, so Middle Pleistocene. And interestingly, these fossils indicate a warm climate, warmer than today's conditions. Learn more and listen to this podcast!
In 2018, two doublets producing hot water from Lower Carboniferous limestones in the south of the Netherlands were told to stop operations. Induced seismicity observed in the area was the main driver behind the decision. In this podcast, we talk to Robert Vörös from QCON, the company that carried out seismic risk assessments and also monitored seismicity through an array of seismometers. Robert and his colleague wrote an interesting paper in the journal about this. What is the mechanism to explain why seismicity took place only after operations were stopped? Find out here!
Until recently, little work was done using biogenic silica or phytoliths for palaeoecological reconstructions in the Netherlands. This is because most studies rely on pollen or macrofossil remains. However, phytoliths are potentially quite powerful because they do not suffer from the same level of organic degradation as pollen or macrofossil do. For that reason, Iris de Wolf sampled a variety of vegetation types in the Netherlands in order to see if the phytolith assemblages found are markedly different from each other. That happens to be the case, as Iris explains in this podcast.
The Maastricht area in the Netherlands is famous for its Upper Cretaceous Chalk deposits. In this podcast, Iris Vancoppenolle tells the story about her research project during which she tried to find evidence of an extinction event in the fossil record using samples from two Chalk quarries near Maastricht. However, instead of being able to pinpoint the event, which probably wasn't recorded in the shallow Chalk seas at the time, her dataset allowed her to make some interesting inferences on circulation of nutrients and the associated paleogeographic setting.
Na een jarenlange loopbaan in het onderwijs besloot Jan Verhagen het roer om te gooien en archeologie te gaan bedrijven. Dit mondde al snel uit in een promotieonderzoek bij de VU naar de kanalen die de Romein Drusus volgens historische teksten in Nederland zou hebben gegraven. Er zijn enkele locaties waar deze waterstaatkundige werken zich zouden kunnen bevinden, en in deze podcast vertelt Jan hoe hij uiteindelijk bij de Utrechtse Vecht belandde als de belangrijkste kandidaat. Tevens legt hij uit wat voor technieken hij heeft gebruikt om zijn aannames beter te kunnen onderbouwen. Een zeer interessant verhaal!
Induced seismicity is a much-discussed phenomenon in the Netherlands, especially with regards to gas production from the Groningen field. However, induced seismic events are not restricted to the north of the Netherlands only, and can have a variety of causes. In this episode, we talk to Annemarie Muntendam-Bos about various aspects of induced seismicity in the Netherlands and what we know and don't know about it. Annemarie works for the State Supervision of the Mines (SODM) and also holds a position at Delft Technical University. Through these roles, she is heavily involved in both the regulatory as well as the scientific aspects of induced seismicity.
In this episode we talk to Phil Gibbard about the Pleistocene glacial history of eastern England and how to date the multiple glacial advances that took place over time. Phil has spent a long career working on glaciations across England and further afield and is known for collaborating with researchers on the continent in an attempt to come up with a holistic view on the Pleistocene geological history of the North Sea region. Phil also touches on the history of the Fenland in eastern England, how the current landscape was formed and deformed and the influence of bedrock geology onto glacial advance.
In this episode we talk to Stephan Spiekman about a recent fossil find in the famous Winterswijk quarry in the Netherlands. Stephan is a paleontologist at the Natural History Museum in London and together with Nicole Klein from the University of Bonn in Germany he managed to pin down what type of species part of a jaw they found must belong to. Stephan also explains how the landscape looked like in Triassic times (almost 250 million years ago), when the area now characterised by agricultural land was a shallow subtropical sea.
The Quaternary geological history of the Wadden Sea is fascinating, as landscapes changed from warm shallow seas to glacial environments scoured by ice. Robin Schaumann, master student earth sciences at the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms Universität in Bonn, Germany, wrote a paper in the Netherlands Journal of Geosciences about the Pleistocene and Holocene history of the island of Norderney in the German Wadden Sea. He used shallow seismic and a series of boreholes to reconstruct how environments changed over time and how the shape of the current tidal channels is influenced by what happened during the Saalian ice-age!
Sander Houben and co-author Geert-Jan Vis recently published a paper in which they discuss the age and depositional environment of the oldest sedimentary strata recovered from a couple of wells drilled in the Dutch sector of the North Sea. Learn how the Netherlands looked like more than 400 million years ago and how it is possible to assign an age to rocks that old! For a read through, here is the link to the paper in the Netherlands Journal of Geosciences.
Harm Jan Pierik vertelt over zijn onderzoek naar landschapsveranderingen in Nederland gedurende de eerste duizend jaar van onze huidige jaartelling. In deze periode krijgt de mens steeds meer invloed op het landschap door toenemende ontwatering en ontginning van veengebieden, wat uiteindelijk drastische gevolgen heeft voor de kustontwikkeling in Zeeland en het noorden van het land. Maar ook in het rivierengebied en op de hogere zandgronden is de invloed van het in cultuur brengen van het landschap duidelijk aanwijsbaar.
Loes Buijze and co-authors recently won the Netherlands Journal of Geosciences publication prize 2019-2020 for a review paper they wrote about induced seismicity related to geothermal energy production. In this podcast, Loes explains the background to the research and how their findings translate to the geothermal energy production in the Netherlands.