The Reekie Memorial Prize is awarded annually to an outstanding student in the Department of Earth Sciences, in honour of John Reekie, a beloved teacher whose legacy continues to inspire generations of geologists.
For information on how to apply for the prize, please e-mail alumni@esc.cam.ac.uk.
Past winners
We announce winners in GeoCam magazine.
The Reekie Memorial Prize for 2020 was awarded by the Part II Examiners to Peter Methley (Selwyn).
Peter writes:
My friends and I mapped an area in the Alpine Foreland near the town of Castellane, in South-East France.
The sequence of sedimentary rocks tells a tale of deepening Tethys Ocean waters during the Triassic and Jurassic, followed by uplift in the Cretaceous and Palaeocene. In the Eocene and Oligocene, conglomerates, highly-fossiliferous marls, nummulitic sandstones and limestones were deposited in a foreland basin in front of the young Alps. As this was happening, north to south compression formed a series of tight folds and intricate faults in the sedimentary cover as it moved southwards over a gypsum-lubricated décollement. By the Miocene, a reconfiguration of the subducting slab geometry and the gravitational collapse of the Alpine hinterland changed the compression direction to ENE~WSW, giving the area some excellent examples of refolded folds and reactivated faults.
Other geological highlights that we found include a limestone unit containing hundreds of ammonites, a petrographically-fascinating partially-dedolomitised rock, the shells of giant oysters, and the remarkably well-preserved skeletons of an Eocene ancestor to the dugong! Of course, the views were also spectacular, although they did come with the cost of having to climb 500-metre-high mountains on a regular basis.
We also had plenty of time for non-geological fun, be it skimming stones on the nearby lake, swimming in the rain, riding a pedalo up the Gorges du Verdon or eating our way through the local shop’s entire range of ice-cream! We even had time to go on some touristy road-trips to Cannes and Monaco (which both happen to be built on cool geology as well). Overall, going mapping was a fantastic experience, and I wish I could go back there now!
About John Reekie
In 2004, a group of John Reekie's former Geology students resolved to commemorate his life and inspirational teaching by founding an annual Geology Prize in the Department of of Earth Sciences, a place he always loved.