Jeff Lang and Alice Sai Louie
Two of Lincoln Agritech’s young scientists have been named as finalists in this year’s Falling Walls Lab Aotearoa New Zealand.
Falling Walls Lab is a global search for world-changing new ideas from students or early-career scientists.
Research Scientist Alice Sai Louie and Postdoctoral Researcher Jeff Lang will be among 22 young scientists making their three-minute pitches at the national event in Wellington on September 11.
The New Zealand winner will compete in the global event in Berlin in November for the title of international Breakthrough Winner of the Year in the emerging talent category.
Alice’s concept is titled “Breaking the Wall of Hidden Waters” and proposes a solution to the difficulty of measuring shallow groundwater across large areas, such as cities, in real time. Shallow groundwater is a major threat to low-lying cities, contributing to flooding, damage to infrastructure, and liquefaction potential.
Her proposal is to use existing infrastructure in a way that provides real-time groundwater monitoring, to give a much more complete picture of what’s happening.
Jeff’s concept is titled “Breaking the Wall of Earthquake Forecasting”.
In young countries such as Aotearoa New Zealand, our knowledge of the long-term frequency of large earthquakes is limited because our written records are short. This affects our ability to assess earthquake risk.
“Stalagmites record changes in groundwater chemistry, sometimes over tens of millennia,” says Jeff. “We hypothesise that when earthquakes fracture cave rocks this briefly raises magnesium in the groundwater above the caves, which the stalagmites record as a magnesium pulse.
“By analysing and dating stalagmites near major historic earthquakes we can test this hypothesis which, if true, could greatly extend our country’s seismic record.”
Lincoln Agritech’s Group Manager, Environmental Research Simon Pollock said he was proud that out of the 22 New Zealand finalists, two were from Lincoln Agritech. “We certainly do have some great up-and-coming young scientists in the company.”
