Isaac Kenyon's Report
Since completing my BSc in Petroleum Geology I am now currently studying an MSc in Petroleum Geoscience under a Royal Holloway scholarship. To really make this year special I decided to pursue an original thesis project which involved an analogue study in addition to my dataset interpretation provided offshore New Zealand. I therefore had the pleasure to visit Mt.Kilimanjaro in Tanzania. My report reflects with analysis how I have benefited from the funding.
Having fundraised in combination with this scholarship through various events organised by myself and other members of the Royal Holloway University Kilimanjaro Team £1500 was raised alongside this award to fund this project. The travel award took me to Tanzania for 10 days to undertake 6 days of field work for a small comparative field study of Mt. Kilimanjaro’s relationship with the East African Rift system to my MSc thesis dataset which is a similar area and setting which extends over the Mt. Taranaki volcanic region of New Zealand to the Taranaki Basin (offshore rift system).
I was lucky enough to collect over 30 incredible hand samples of rocks from a variety of different localities throughout the Machame Route during the Kilimanjaro Trek for analysis in the UK. Further to this I undertook many structural analyses to understand the modern influence of the east African Rift system spreading on the Kilimanjaro region and vice versa. In addition outcrop and larger scale viewpoint sketches were carried out in the field and recorded as data in a notebook.
When not trekking I stayed in the town called Moshi for the duration of the trip where I wasn’t climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro and spoke to a range of amateur geologists of the region to gather additional information and make useful contacts in the region.
The project improved my self confidence as I was the leader of a group of students who completing a gruelling challenge on the scale of summiting Mt.Kilimanjaro. This was a trip of a lifetime and it definitely improved my geological knowledge, from first hand valuable research of the modern volcanic centre analogue Mt.Kilimanjaro as well as the East African Rift System to be applied directly to my thesis project of the summer. It’s also fundamentally changed my views of the implications of volcanic centres and rifts to improve my interpretations of the thesis dataset in certain areas. The trip also provided me with excellent exposure in a recent petroleum exploration frontier area (East African Rift System), thus the travel award provided the option to study directly what other students will only observe on workstations with subsurface data. Whilst on the ground performing field work in the developing world it gave me unparalleled insight into to the human aspects of petroleum exploration which is often ignored. These consisted of transportation through pipelines of hydrocarbons.
This trip has broadened my geological knowledge of Africa specifically the East African Rift System and the Kilimanjaro Region. Talking to the amateur geologists in the area I was able to understand the influences of the geological processes in this region of Africa and apply it to my thesis project for my MSc Petroleum Geoscience degree. The study was imperative in creating a
better understanding of how volcanic arcs evolve with rift systems over a large regional scale. Particularly during the last 30 million years of ongoing divergence between the Nubian and Somalian sectors of the African Plate, similar to rifting within the Australian Plate offshore New Zealand. In addition I was lucky enough to summit the highest freestanding mountain in the world and from conversing with an amateur mining geologist I was incredibly honoured geologist be given Tanzanite an extremely rare mineral rarer than diamond which is native to Tanzania only in exchange for providing him with more general geological knowledge of the rocks present in the Kilimanjaro region from a petroleum industry point of view achieved from my MSc degree to date.
The travel award has allowed results of development of models showing the evolution of the Taranaki Basin volcanic arc during back-arc spreading, to the present day. It may also aid my first scientific publication with the potential to be widely cited, allowing me to enter the petroleum industry as a petroleum geologist who appreciates the physical geology behind the geophysics.