This year’s Near Surface Geophysics Group (NSGG) postgraduate symposium took place on the 13th of May at the headquarters of the British Geological Survey in Keyworth, Nottinghamshire. A wide variety of topics were represented. The talks were categorized into one of four research themes: “Soils, Cryosphere and Archaeology”, “Marine Geophysics”, “Seismics and Geohazards”, and “Geoelectrics”, with speakers coming from all over the country from universities including: Swansea, Reading, Imperial College London, Keele, Nottingham, and ETH Zurich.

The Southampton Geology and Geophysics group had a strong presence this year; four of the eleven student presentations in the conference programme were delivered by G&G students from NOCS (including all three under the “Marine Geophysics” theme). Tim Hughes gave the first “Marine Geophysics” themed talk on “Environmental controls on the thermal performance of high voltage cables under the seafloor”. He was directly followed by Bedanta Goswami and his talk: “A controlled source electromagnetic study of gas hydrates at the Vestnesa Ridge, West Svalbard continental margin”. John Emeana rounded off the session with a talk on “Sediment thermal properties and heat flow implication on the performance of sub-seabed HV cables”. After the conference lunch and a very entertaining keynote lecture, Will Firth delivered his presentation on “Multi-parameter inversion of decimeter resolution 3D seismic reflection data”.

All of the talks were very interesting, and led to numerous thought provoking discussions during the following lunch and coffee breaks. Many people there had very useful suggestions for how we might improve on our current work, and brought to light some aspects of our work that might be worth investigating further.

Once all of the presentations had been heard, a panel of judges got together to select a winner for the “best paper” prize. The decision was made very difficult by the overall high quality of all the presentations, but eventually, they narrowly decided to award the prize to Tim Hughes, with Bedanta Goswami earning an honourable mention to complete a Southampton “one-two”!