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Geological award at Kensington Palace

A geological project has been awarded the Duke of Cambridge SCUBA Prize for the best science-based diving project, receiving a grant from the British Sub Aqua Club Jubilee Trust

23 November 2021

HRH the Duke of Cambridge in lively discussion on the finer points of limestone petrography with Dan Bosence and three divers from IPSAC (Image courtesy BSAC and BSAC Jubilee Trust)

Professor Dan Bosence and colleagues from Royal Holloway, University of London and Imperial College London teamed up with the Isle of Purbeck Sub Aqua Club (IPSAC) to obtain geological samples from the enigmatic circular structures exposed on the seafloor of Weymouth Bay, Dorset as part of the Bumps in the Bay project. These recently discovered ‘bumps’ are truncated dome-shaped structured, 50 to 200 m across, developed in Jurassic strata offshore from the Unesco World Heritage Site of the Jurassic Coast. An earlier assessment of these large circular structures in the Purbeck Limestone Group was published in the Journal of the Geological Society (Bosence et al. 2018, J Geol Soc London 175, 742-756; https://doi.org/10.1144/jgs2017-155).

The award ceremony was held in November 2021 at Kensington Palace and hosted by HRH the Duke of Cambridge, as President of the British SubAqua Club (BSAC). Following a short presentation by Nick Reid (IPSAC Chairman) and Dan Bosence (Emeritus Professor, Royal Holloway University of London), there was time for questions and discussion with the Duke, who rapidly assessed the problems tackled by the research and how this geological investigation would lead to answers about the origin of these unique and previously unknown features of our Jurassic Coast.

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