Podcast: 5 minutes with Jackie Skipper
In this episode of 5 Minutes With, Marissa Lo (Associate Editor) speaks to Dr Jacqueline Skipper, Senior Consultant at Geotechnical Consulting Group and the Geological Society’s 2024 William Smith Medallist.
Jackie Skipper, Senior Consultant at Geotechnical Consulting Group and the Geological Society’s 2024 William Smith Medallist.
Episode Transcript
[00:10] Marissa Lo: Hello and welcome to Five Minutes With, a podcast by Geoscientist magazine. My name is Marissa Lo and today I’m joined by Dr Jacqueline Skipper, who is a Senior Consultant at Geotechnical Consulting Group and the Geological Society’s 2024 William Smith Medallist. Can you tell us a bit about your work in geotechnical consulting?
[00:32] Jackie Skipper: Quite a lot of the jobs I’m involved in and have been for the last 20 years, require basically finding out as much information about the ground of a particular project as fast as you possibly can. So quite often I’ll get a phone call and immediately I will open up Google Earth on my computer. I will look at the BGS website, which is the British Geological Survey website, which gives a lot of free information about ground conditions, geological maps, and they’ve got a whole system of borehole records on there. So, you can actually go to anywhere in the UK, literally online, and find out information about a particular site. From the moment I get a phone call about a job, I’m going, okay, where is it? What’s the topography? Where’s the water? Why are there no rivers here? Is it going into the substrate? Is it because it’s been dewatered in this area? It’s a really interesting job. That’s the answer. Even just looking and interpreting landscapes, which is an enormous part of my job, is important.
So, I did my PhD on basically the stuff between the London Clay and the chalk in southeast England and looking at it in continental Europe as well; that became my area of expertise. I do also do a lot of work on landslips and on major infrastructure in other countries and other parts of the UK. So, it’s a very, very varied job, even though my basal knowledge expertise is within something that’s only 18 metres thick. The great thing about engineering is you get access to fresh geology. And when I was doing my PhD, I had access to five or six really, really big holes in the ground, which were later Underground Stations on the Jubilee Line and, and also what became HS1, which is the Channel Tunnel Rail Link between St Pancras and it goes down to the connection with the Euro Tunnel. So actually having, kind of, given to you massive, you know, hundreds of metres wide exposures going down 40 or 50 metres. To look at fresh geology is like every geologist’s dream.
[02:47] Marissa Lo: What project are you currently working on?
[02:50] Jackie Skipper: I’m working on a nuclear power station, so I can’t really say very much about it, but I’m involved in the practical aspects of how, if that power station gets built, how the basic functions will work with the geology, in other words, it requires foundations, it requires tunnels which will allow water to go back into the power station. Those are the things which all power stations need. So far, they all are very heavy buildings. I’ve ended up working on a lot of tunnels for some strange reason, and I do find them fascinating. I think it’s just the idea that you are kind of driving through the ground in three, four dimensions has always attracted me to tunnelling projects. They are very sensitive projects because if you get a tunnel wrong, and it doesn’t matter what size, it can be 30 cm in diameter, it could be 9 metres. They are always sensitive to ground movement. For example, if you get tunnelling wrong and you start taking out more material than you want to, you get a collapse at the surface. So, the actual planning stage and understanding the ground is incredibly important for tunnelling projects, and that’s why I think I really enjoy them, because you have to have a really sharp game in order to understand the ground and to understand what might go wrong. This is why it is an exciting job to be in. Tunnelling these days is quite sophisticated. There are a lot of mitigation features that are built into the process these days, so that there shouldn’t be that much that’s unexpected, but you never know. I mean, for example, on the Tideway project, the tunnel boring machine found a Quaternary feature, which we called drift-filled hollow, where the ground is very unstable suddenly and unexpectedly. They dealt with it extremely well, but there’s a whole range of things that we had as emergency measures.
[04:47] Marissa Lo: What is a typical day for you or a typical week perhaps?
[04:51] Jackie Skipper: Quite often I’m split. For example, I still get asked to do specialist courses for a particular project. I mean, one of my main things I’m famous for is this principle called project specific geological training, and it’s something that came up when I first worked in Dublin on the Dublin Port Tunnel back in 2002, 2003. It was quite clear that a lot of projects people just don’t understand the ground. And I saw a place for myself in that, because I’d been a trainer in the health service before I retrained as a geologist. And so, I started doing a training course immediately in Dublin on what we’d found out in a very short time about what are basically basal glacial deposits in Dublin. So, what we did on Dublin Port Tunnel, we did a couple of courses, one for staff who are going to be on site, and one for people who are going to be management and design, and it worked tremendously well and it helped improve the communication and health and safety on site dramatically.
[05:55] Marissa Lo: Is this a gap that you found essentially, in the communication between the geologists and engineers?
[06:00] Jackie Skipper: It was pretty much a gap. If I hadn’t had this brilliant idea given to me by somebody else, I don’t know that I would even notice it needed doing. That led on to my full-time career in geotechnical engineering.
[06:15] Marissa Lo: What’s your favourite thing about your job?
[06:19] Jackie Skipper: For me, the most interesting thing is being able to sort of think in three dimensions and actually take what we’re presented with in the ground, in terms of either an excavation or a borehole, taking that information and linking it to my knowledge of sedimentology. So, for example, when I was a child, I lived in Cornwall and I remember going down to the beaches and watching how sand moved around, for example. And so being able to see that in real life and understand how streams and rivers and things work and then understand what we’re seeing in this ground investigation is just like that. So that kind of connection between what I actually know and have experienced in the landscape in the UK and in other countries all over the world is, you know, it’s magical!
[07:09] Marissa Lo: Thanks so much for speaking with me today and congratulations again on being awarded the William Smith Medal.
[07:15] Jackie Skipper: Thank you!
