“Fresh geology is every geologist’s dream!”
Dr Jacqueline Skipper is a Senior Consultant at Geotechnical Consulting Group and the Geological Society's 2024 William Smith Medallist
Dr Jacqueline Skipper, Senior Consultant at Geotechnical Consulting Group and the Geological Society’s 2024 William Smith Medallist
Tell us about your work
The jobs I’ve been involved with for the past 20 years require me to quickly gather information about the ground conditions for a particular engineering project. I use resources like Google Earth and the British Geological Survey website, which has a lot of free information about ground conditions, geological maps, and borehole records, to find out about a site. From the moment I get a call about a project, I ask myself: What’s the topography? Where’s the water? Has this area been dewatered? Interpreting landscapes is an enormous part of my job as a lot of my work is connected to landslips and major infrastructure.
I did my PhD on the Lambeth Group, which lies between the London Clay and the Chalk Group in southeast England, so even though my basal expertise is on something that’s only 18 metres thick, I can apply that understanding to a wide variety of projects. During my PhD, I was lucky enough to have access to five or six large excavation sites, which later became Jubilee Line Underground stations and the Channel Tunnel Rail Link (now HS1). Accessing hundreds of metres-wide exposures of fresh geology, going down 40 or 50 metres, is every geologist’s dream!
What are you currently working on?
I’m working on, among other projects, the geological aspects of a nuclear power station, ensuring that modern standards are met and the basic functions will work with the geology. Power stations are very heavy, so they require deep foundations, as well as tunnels that allow water to feed in. I’ve worked on many tunnels, and I find the idea that you are driving through the ground in three dimensions fascinating. Tunnels are very sensitive projects because if you get the process wrong and more material is excavated than planned, it can start a collapse at the surface. The tunnel can be centimetres or metres in diameter, but they are always sensitive to changes in geology. You must have a really sharp game for tunnelling projects, which makes it an exciting job. The tunnelling process is quite sophisticated nowadays, there are a lot of in-built mitigation features so there shouldn’t be much that’s unexpected, but you never know. For example, for the Thames Tideway Tunnel, the tunnel-boring machine found an unstable Quaternary feature called a drift-filled hollow.
What is your favourite thing about your job?
Being able to take what we are presented with, whether it’s an excavation or a borehole, and link it to my knowledge of sedimentology. When I was a child, I remember going to the beaches in Cornwall and watching how sand moved around. Seeing that in real life and understanding how streams and rivers work and then understanding that what we see in ground investigations is just like that – that connection is magical!
What is a typical day?
Quite often my day is split. One of the main things I’m famous for is a principle called project-specific geological training. When I first worked on the Dublin Port Tunnel back in 2002-2003, it was clear that, for a lot of projects, people didn’t fully understand the ground. I’d been a trainer in the health service before I became a geologist, so I started doing a training course on basal glacial deposits in Dublin for onsite staff, including people in management and design. The training dramatically improved geological understanding and health and safety on site, filled a gap in communication, and ultimately led to my full-time career in geotechnical engineering.
Listen to the full conversation in this episode of 5 Minutes With Jackie Skipper
