• About us
• People
• Recent Research
• Slope 5
• Publications
• Training
• Collaboration

• Introduction
  • Slope 5 Overview
  • 1st Field Season Report
  • Future Planning
  • Project Sponsors
  • Slope 5 Proposal
• People
  • Team Overview
  • Steve Flint
  • Dave Hodgson
  • Ian Kane
  • Adam McArthur
  • Miquel Poyatos-More
  • Euan Soutter
  • Max Bouwmeester
  • William Taylor

Future Planning

The University campuses have started to open back up in the last weeks and PhD students are starting to get lab access again. We are planning some advanced drone training in the Peak District this month. Re-opening should be complete by early September and fieldwork is possible from then onwards, subject to UK and overseas government regulations.

We are planning for a Rosario field season in October/November if at all possible. Flights from the UK to Mexico resume in September and we are closely monitoring the situation on a weekly basis, which we discuss at our Thursday project meetings. We are also working on alternatives if the Rosario is unreachable until early 2021. We are fortunate that the SLOPE 5 team has considerable experience in the Tabernas basin of southern Spain (Hodgson PhD thesis) and the French Alpine basins (Soutter PhD thesis and Kane’s research activities for 10 years).

Our previous work in the Alpine foreland basins includes a long-running industrial project in Equinor (led by Kane) on reservoir quality and its distribution in deep-marine systems, and a long history of applied and academic research trips. Leveraging on this, we have identified the Barrême basin as a relevant and accessible area to focus attention. Preliminary work by Kane and Soutter has found excellent 3D exposure of channel bodies and margins interbedded with heterolithic overbank sediments, offering good potential for architectural and sedimentological investigations of common slope facies transition and reservoir terminations. These outcrops offer an exciting and surprisingly understudied complementary analogue to the Rosario Fm.

Our planning schedule means that we will decide in early September to propose to sponsors for their agreement a late September field season in Spain or France, targeted at specific pinch-out styles, or whether to deploy to Mexico in October. We propose to discuss these options with sponsors via a Zoom meeting in early September.