I started off my PhD with two weeks of fieldwork in the Slave Craton, NW Canada. I was joined by my PhD advisor, Dr Jesse Reimink, alongside two colleagues from the University of Alberta, Prof Graham Pearson and Andrea Pezzera. We had our base at Point Lake and hired a float plane for supporting logistics. We collected samples of >2.83 Ga diamondiferous conglomerates from Tree River, gneisses from the poorly studied Eokuk Uplift and Kangguyak Gneiss Belt, and had time left to visit the oldest rocks on Earth at Acasta.

During my year out I spent five weeks in the Namibian desert mapping sediment stratigraphic packages with Prof Francis Macdonald and Adrian Tasistro-Heart from UC Santa Barbara. Our focus was on mapping with drone support the Cryogenian Snowball Earth deposits at Fransfontein and the previously unmapped mountains above Opuwo. Fortunately, we also had time to visit the dunes at Sossusvlei (picture).

As a group of five undergraduate students, I co-organised a six-week expedition to map the giant dyke complexes on Tuttutooq island, South Greenland. We raised over £15,300 from five funding bodies including the Society for Economic Geology, Mining Institute of Scotland, and Edinburgh Geology Society. We overcame numerous challenges, from shipping supplies to Greenland, the logistics of extra boat journeys to the island, and the headaches of getting 1.5 tonnes of rocks back to the UK. This picture captures the excitement we all shared upon first landing on Tuttutooq island and being left alone for the first three-week stint. 

Upon returning from Greenland, I immediately undertook two weeks of fieldwork in the Barberton Greenstone Belt as part of my Laidlaw Scholarship. I co-organised this with a fellow undergraduate student, Lot Koopmans, and coordinated with Dr Rosalie Tostevin at U Cape Town. We overcame logistical challenges including accessing a core shed and national park sample permits, and developed a whole new project in the field when core shed plans changed unexpectedly. Ultimately we succeeded in securing all desired samples of Camden Iron Formation from the core shed and Middle Marker sediments (picture) in the Barberton Greenstone Belt, which seeded a new collaboration with Caltech looking for evidence of Magnetotactic Bacteria. 

I visited Iceland twice in summer 2018. Firstly, I spent one week assisting my classmate, Lot Koopmans, with his Laidlaw Scholarship fieldwork looking for microbially induced sedimentary structures in basaltic sands. We took pictures of these structures with a camera analogue for the ExoMars Rover to see what the rover is capable of identifying on Mars. 

My second expedition was as a Field Assistant for Vincent Twomey, then a PhD candidate at St Andrews who was using rock magnetics to investigate the emplacement mechanisms of the Sandfell rhyolite laccolith in SE Iceland. We spent three-weeks camping in very wet conditions as we mapped the laccolith and associated deformed host rock basalt piles (banner picture). 

I was asked by Dr Tim Raub to accompany him on a week-long campaign to measure the magnetic susceptibility of leucogranite dykes in the Semail Ophiolite. Whilst there, we developed a project to examine the influence that carbonation of Semail Ophiolite peridotite may have had on the climate, in particular, whether it may have caused the Late Cretaceous cooling event. 

During Summer 2023, I spent six weeks as a Teaching Assistant for the Penn State University Field Camp. This involved teaching fundamental field skills in mapping, data collection, note keeping, and interpretation to 24 undergraduate students. We visited a wide variety of geological terranes across Montana, Wyoming, Idaho, and Utah. This included glaciation in the Grand Tetons National Park, volcanism in the Challis Volcanic Province, and thrust faulting in the Wasatch Mountains. Alongside teaching and marking, I also had responsibilities in helping to organise logistics and manage the student's experience. 

During my coursework at St Andrews, I went on a variety of geological excursions. This included mapping a two km section of deformed sediments with igneous intrusives along the Fife coast, the South East quarter of the isle of Iona, and the Ben Arnable section of Moine Thrust imbricate faulting along Loch Eriboll.  I won prizes for the best maps in each of these exercises. 

The capstone course for my MGeol degree was a two-week trip in August 2019 exploring a transect across the Alpine Orogeny in Italy and Switzerland. This was a mixture of small-scale local mapping and field-stop geology. I won a prize for the highest grade for this trip. 

I was introduced to mapping with a fieldtrip to the Sierre Norte Mountains of central Spain. We mapped a six square km section of metamorphosed Hercynian basement and overlying deformed Alpine sediments.