2003 IRISH SCIENTIST YEAR BOOK

Home Page

Table of contents

Index by Author

Index by topics

Search


Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies
Alan Jones
Lighting up the Lithosphere

Prof Jones deploying MT field equipment on Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic

The School of Cosmic Physics is delighted to announce that, following an exhaustive international search process, Professor Alan Jones has been appointed as successor to the late Brian Jacob and new head of the Geophysics Section. Professor Jones was born in Manchester and studied at the Universities of Nottingham, Birmingham and Edinburgh. He subsequently worked in Germany and Sweden before crossing the Atlantic to Canada, where he is a Senior Research Scientist in the Geological Survey of Canada and also holds adjunct professorships at Syracuse University, New York, Carleton University, Ottawa, and Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario. He is an acknowledged world expert in using electromagnetic fields to probe the Earth's continental crust and upper mantle or, as he likes to put it, to light up the lithosphere. The method he has mainly used is the natural-source magnetotelluric method, which has proven to be a valuable complement to the more traditional geophysical techniques.

The method is simple and elegant in concept, although making it work well under field conditions and solving the inverse problem for complex three-dimensional structures is another matter. The natural magnetic field at the Earth's surface is constantly fluctuating on a wide range of time scales due to ionospheric whistler waves, geomagnetic pulsations, etc. These fluctuating fields induce currents in any conducting materials buried in the crust, which in turn produce secondary electromagnetic fields at the surface. By accurately sampling these time varying surface electric and magnetic fields over a sufficiently long period of time and sufficiently large area, it is possible, using computer inversion techniques, to reconstruct the conductivity structure of the underlying crust. The method is particularly sensitive to salt solutions, graphite layers and sulphide ore bodies; all tracers of potentially important economic resources as well as scientifically interesting indicators of prior tectonism in otherwise inaccessible regions.

Professor Jones brings an ambitious research programme to DIAS which will involve field work in Ireland, in Europe, and on other continents. His first project, partially funded by DeBeers and by the US National Science Foundation, will start in the Autumn in Southern Africa, where he will be studying the region which is home to the world's major diamond mines. He is currently seeking Post Doctoral Fellows and Postgraduate Students with skills in geophysics, physics and mathematics (inverse theory) to work with him on this and future projects.

Contact: Professor Alan Jones;
The School of Cosmic Physics, Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies,
5 Merrion Square, Dublin 2;
E-Mail; [email protected]