Bryan Lovell
| Bryan Lovell | |
|---|---|
| Born | February 10, 1942 |
| 🏳️ Nationality | British |
| 🏫 Education | The University of Oxford, Harvard University |
| 💼 Occupation | Geologist, author |
Julian Patrick Bryan Lovell (born February 10, 1942) is a British geologist, lecturer, and author.
Early life and education
Lovell was born on February 10, 1942, in the UK. His father, Bernard Lovell, was a scientist who, in 1945, founded the Jodrell Bank Observatory in Cheshire, establishing the new science of radio astronomy at the University of Manchester. His mother, Joyce, was a teacher and writer. Lovell was the second of five children who grew up in the village of Swettenham, Cheshire.
Lovell attended The King’s School Macclesfield from 1951 to 1960. He went on to the University of Oxford, where in 1964, he earned an MSc in geology for research on the Carboniferous Bude Sandstones in Cornwall, supervised by Harold Reading. He then moved to Harvard University, where he worked for his Ph.D. on the Eocene Tyee Formation of the Oregon Coast Range, supervised by Raymond Siever. His interest in looking at rocks in the field persists to this day.[1]
Career
Sandstones, universities, and industry
On his return to the UK in 1968, Lovell was appointed Lecturer in Geology at the University of Edinburgh. At Edinburgh in the 1970s, Lovell worked on distinguishing between two major types of sandstone. On the one hand, the deepwater sandstones, like those he had studied in Cornwall and Oregon, were turbidites deposited by the downslope flow. On the other hand, were contourites deposited by currents flowing along the slope, which he observed in the Silurian in Wales.
Lovell and Dorrik Stow were among the first to propose criteria for distinguishing between these rock types. These studies interested the oil industry, for which Lovell consulted during the 1970s before he was invited to join BP Exploration full-time in 1981 as that company’s first Chief Sedimentologist. Lovell subsequently served as Exploration Manager, first in Ireland and then in the Middle East. He became Head of Recruitment for BP, retiring from full-time work with the company in 1996. The award of an OBE to Lovell in 1989 was made in the Diplomatic Service and Overseas List, for "Services to British Commercial interests in Ireland and to Anglo-Irish relations".[2]
Pulsing mantle plumes
In 1996 Lovell was invited to join the Earth Sciences Department at the University of Cambridge as a Senior Research Fellow, working at the Bullard Laboratories under the leadership of first Dan McKenzie and then James Jackson. Lovell was already engaged in research at the department, working with Nicky White. White and Lovell suggested that the sedimentary record could be used to measure the pulse of a mantle plume. They proposed that the well-documented discrete episodes of sand deposition in the Paleogene of the North Sea basin reflect pulses in the early Iceland plume.
Innovation in university teaching and industry training
Lovell introduced multi-disciplinary programs in both university and industry settings. In the 1970s, he created the Earth Science 1 course with Edinburgh colleagues in other departments for students outside the science faculty. In 1977, George Allen & Unwin published a book related to the course. The British Isles through Geological Time: A Northward Drift is a set of paleogeographical maps reflecting recent work on plate tectonics and using North Sea data released in volume by the oil industry collectively in the mid-1970s.
In the 1990s, working with BP colleagues across the company, Lovell created the international and cross-business Challenge program of recruitment and early development. He remained involved in developing and extending the program across BP for twenty years. Lovell taught the program at global locations ranging from Alaska and Azerbaijan to Trinidad and Vietnam until he retired as a BP consultant in 2009.
During the course of his involvement with the BP Challenge program, Lovell progressively introduced material on human-induced climate change and the responsibility of fossil-fuel companies to help control carbon emissions. He worked with the Geological Society of London to promote debate. In 2010, Cambridge University Press published Lovell’s Challenged by Carbon: The Oil Industry and Climate Change.
Presidency of Geological Society of London
During Lovell’s term as President of the Geological Society from 2010 to 2012, the Society became the first such organisation to promulgate the geological case for concern about human-induced climate change. Lovell promoted joint carbon capture and storage meetings with the American Association of Petroleum Geologists, home of many climate skeptics. He was President at the time of the first international conference on the Anthropocene, the proposed new geological epoch. This meeting was held at Burlington House, Piccadilly, home of the Geological Society. Lovell promoted interdisciplinary activity and meetings on geology and archaeology and on geology and poetry. His contribution to the Society was recognized by a new series of flagship conferences titled “Bryan Lovell Meetings.”.[3]
Recent and present activity
From 2013 to 2020, Lovell was a consultant on climate change and carbon capture and storage to CEO Andrew Mackenzie and his colleagues at BHP Melbourne. Shortly before the Paris climate summit in 2015, BHP became the first major resource corporation to seek to align its investment portfolio publicly with global targets for the reduction of carbon emissions.
Lovell is now an Emeritus Senior Researcher at the University of Cambridge. He continues to work on the impact of pulsing mantle plumes on the geological record and climate change. Helped by his longstanding field companion and wife Carol, his current focus is on continuing studies of exposures of the puddingstone-bearing Paleogene rocks near their home in Hertford.[4]
Publications by Lovell
- Andrew Rankin New York Times interview with Lovell 2011
- Science Museum video of Lovell on Hertfordshire Puddingstone location of the specimen of puddingstone exhibited in new Science Museum Atmosphere Gallery from 2011 onwards
References
- ↑ "Sign In to The Times & The Sunday Times". account.thetimes.co.uk. Retrieved 2023-11-09.
- ↑ bloomsbury.com. "Who's Who 2023". Bloomsbury. Archived from the original on 2023-07-19. Retrieved 2023-11-09.
- ↑ "The Geological Society of London - Bryan Lovell Meeting 2019". www.geolsoc.org.uk. Retrieved 2023-11-09.
- ↑ Nield, Ted (2014-05-01). Underlands: A Journey Through Britain's Lost Landscape. Granta Books. ISBN 978-1-84708-673-0. Search this book on
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