Top honours for Waikato geochemistry students

Three University of Waikato geochemistry students received top prizes at a conference held in Christchurch recently.

The awards were given at the New Zealand Geochemical Group Conference, at the University of Canterbury. Eight students and two staff attended from Waikato University’s Faculty of Science & Engineering.

Waikato PhD student Lisa Pearson won the overall student poster prize for her four-year study of the way in which sediments in Taupo and Rotorua lakes interact with the overlying lake water. This is the third time the former John Paul College (Rotorua) student has achieved a top prize in a conference poster competition.

Also winners were former Waiuku College student Anna Carter and former Western Heights High School (Rotorua) student Alex Keyte-Beattie. Both students received highly commended awards for their posters. The two undergraduate students were part of a seven member team which studied Lake Tikitapu (Rotorua’s Blue Lake).

The team asked the question “Why is Tikitapu blue?”. They found that the volcanic flow in which the lake is situated has very little capacity to generate the nutrients that turn the other lakes green, but also that the sediments in this 22m deep lake had been completely disturbed in the past five years, although the cause of this is yet to be determined.

After 44 years of operations, this was the last conference to be held by the New Zealand Geochemical Group, which will now be amalgamated with Geosciences New Zealand.

“A great feature of the Geochemical Group Conferences has been the strong student participation, which we encourage as much as we can at Waikato University,” says Associate Professor Chris Hendy.