NEPTUNE Canada

Nigel Edwards Honoured

Jul 21, 2010

Nigel Edwards and associates at the award ceremony. (Click to enlarge.)

The Canadian Geophysical Union has announced that its J. Tuzo Wilson Medal for 2010 has been awarded to Professor Nigel Edwards of the University of Toronto. The medal recognizes scientists who have made an outstanding contribution to the field of geophysics in Canada through scientific or technical research, instrument development, industrial applications and/or teaching.

Edwards graduated from the Imperial College, London where he studied physics and mathematics. He completed his PhD at Cambridge University supervised by Sir Edward Bullard, one of the most distinguished geophysicists of his time. Bullard was an excellent theorist and experimentalist and recognized the importance of the development of new instruments to further geophysics.

At the suggestion of Bullard, Edwards began work with Lawrie Law, a Canadian on leave from the Earth Physics Branch, to measure the geomagnetic temporal variations over the British Isles using three component magnetometers. The Royal Society published the results in 1971. They demonstrated the importance of electric currents in the ocean and shallow seas in explaining the patterns of magnetic fields observed.

Near the end of his stay in Cambridge, Tuzo Wilson appeared. Tuzo and Teddy Bullard were close friends. Tuzo encouraged Edwards to move to Toronto initially as a PDF with George Garland and then as a faculty member. Edwards, coincidentally, now holds the J. Tuzo Wilson Professorship in Geophysics there.

Discouraged after 10 years of publishing many papers on the exploration methods MMR and MIP, which never really caught on, Edwards seriously considered giving up his academic career. Fortunately, Edwards and Lawrie Law got together once again, this time to fulfill Sir Edward Bullard’s dream of building an electromagnetic instrument to look at the conductivity of the ocean floor. With the encouragement of Roy Hyndman, an equipment grant from NSERC and support from the Geological Survey the method named MOSES was developed. It worked and is still in use today worldwide. Edwards had become a marine geophysicist!

Nigel Edwards directs cable untangling for the Controlled-Source Electro-Magnetic (CSEM) experiment on the lawn at NEPTUNE Canada's Marine Technology Centre, 12 Aug 2009. (Click to enlarge.)

During a sabbatical with colleagues at Scripps, Edwards set about understanding marine frequency and time domain Controlled-Source Electromagnetic (CSEM) methods which differ fundamentally from their land based counterparts. The joint publications that resulted were the start of a major effort by universities in studying the electrical character of the seafloor. The work also led directly to a multi hundred million dollar industry. Major service companies like EMGS and OHM were set up to carry out surveys to search for gas and petroleum using many of the ideas.

Edwards current work is building towed EM systems to search for hydrocarbons, particularly gas hydrates - methane and water clathrates that reside beneath the seafloor under conditions of low temperature and 500+ meters pressure of seawater.

Edwards is one of the Principal Investigators for the NEPTUNE Canada research project - “Geophysical Imaging of Gas Hydrate at the ODP889 Node-Bullseye Vent Site.” A permanent CSEM apparatus developed by his group at Toronto is currently operating there.

From all of us at NEPTUNE Canada, congratulations, Nigel, on your award!

CSEM prep crew: Shuqing Li, Nigel Edwards, Reza Mir and Pat Edwards, 12 Aug 2009. (Click to enlarge.)

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