Firstly I would like to thank University College for its generosity in not only awarding me £475 from this fund to allow me to conduct my research, but also for doing so on such short notice outside of term time. The trip was a great success. Our first stop was Singapore where we spent the day at the Earth Observatory of Singapore, talking to potential collaborators and giving a talk. We then travelled to Bandung in Indonesia. Here, we firstly met up with scientists at the Centre for Volcanology and Geological Hazard Mitigation (CVGHM) to discuss potential collaboration, before meeting Dr. Mirzam Addurrachman and his student Taufik at The Institut Teknologi Bandung. Taufik agreed to come on the fieldwork with us, where we provided him with training in field skills in exchange for his knowledge of the location of outcrops. Mirzam provided us a letter to help us to transport the samples back to Oxford. There is a lot of hope for collaboration in the future with Mirzam, and he has already asked me to return to give a talk at a conference. There are plans to set up a Memorandum of Understanding between our two institutions to further help with any future work we undertake together. We have also offered to chemically analyse some of their samples on equipment we have here in Oxford.

Next we undertook the most important part of the trip, which was the fieldwork itself. This lasted four days, camping on Krakatau and the surrounding islands, and we managed to collect over 12kg of samples and transport them back to the UK for use in my research. We also took an accurate account of the order in which the rock units appear stratigraphically, so it will be possible to look for any evolution through the course of the eruption. Without this fieldwork, it would be impossible to conduct my research into the processes linked with explosive eruptions. The next steps to investigate this will be to use crystal chemistry as a proxy for changing conditions and processes prior to both the explosive 1883 eruption and for more recent effusive eruptions, and then to conduct experiments to recreate the conditions that these rocks formed under.

Find out more about the range of travel grants and scholarships available to assist Univ students on our Travel Grants page or read further travel reports.

Published: 3 July 2017

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