Tuesday 6 July 2021

Success for Keble Geographers

Congratulations to Keble Geography Finalist Ben Skailes, who has been awarded the H O Beckit Prize for the best physical geography dissertation, and the C D D Gibbs Book Prize in FHS Geography 2021.

Ben’s dissertation looked at the mechanisms controlling the arrival of the summer rains in South Africa — a date of socioeconomic significance due to the reliance on rain-fed agriculture in the region. He found that a low level jet formed by the topography of the Zambezi River Valley was a source of dry air, and, in years when rainfall was late to arrive, it was particularly strong. The wider implications are that this jet could be a control of the Congo Air Boundary, which is thought to be responsible for the future drying trend seen in climate models.

Ben, along with two other Geographers, has also been nominated for external national dissertation prizes as follows:

Ben Skailes: Dissertation nominated for the Alfred Steers Dissertation prize, an award for the best undergraduate dissertation in a UK geography department.

Tim Goodman: Dissertation nominated for the external Economic Geography Research Group (EGRG) undergraduate dissertation prize.

Jamie Curtis: Dissertation nominated for the external Climate Change Research Group (CCRG) undergraduate dissertation prize.