Profile

I live in Salisbury with my husband Rick. We have an allotment together where we (attempt) to grow lots of different kinds of fruit and vegetables. In my free time I love travelling and exploring new places (particularly by the sea!).

I work as a marine geophysicist for a company called Wessex Archaeology, which is based in Salisbury. In my job, I use geophysical data to identify features of archaeological interest both on, and below, the seabed. This can be things such as shipwrecks and plane wrecks, but it can also include entire landscapes that might have once been home to humans many thousands of years ago during periods of lower sea level.

There are four main data sets I look at. Three of these (sidescan sonar, multibeam echosounder and subbottom profiler) use sound to identify features, and the other (marine magnetometer) detects changes in the earths magnetic field that might be caused by ferrous features (such as a steel shipwreck).

Some of the sites we look at are huge, which means we might have thousands of kilometres worth of data to look at!

My working day can really vary depending on what phase of the project I’m working off. The first phase is to process and interpret the different data sets and identify any features of archaeological interest. For big jobs this can take months and months! My favourite data set is subbottom profiler. Subbottom profilers use sound to map out buried landscape features (such as old channel systems) below the seafloor. I can spend days mapping out these different features in the data. From this, I can begin to build up a picture of what the landscape one looked like, and work out which places might have been desirable for humans to live.

Once the interpretation is complete, I spend a week or two compiling the results and writing a report for the client telling them what we’ve found, how important we think the features are and recommend archaeological exclusion zones (areas they have to avoid) to make sure they don’t damage any archaeological features when they’re building on the seabed.

Most of our data are collected by big offshore survey companies, but occasionally we have to go out and collect the data ourselves. This can mean working at sea for weeks at a time. My day working at sea would involve waking up for a 12 hour shift (either at midday or midnight), settling down into the lab and watching as we collect the different lines of data, making sure every line is of good quality (if not, we have to do it again). It’s exciting living and working on a boat, but it can be a bit scary when you get stuck in stormy weather!