Dr Fiona Simpson has won a prestigious Independent Research Fellowship from the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC). She will divide her time as a Fellow between the Grantham Institute – Climate Change and the Environment and the Department of Physics at Imperial.

She has been awarded £1,032,422 for a five-year project called ‘Electromagnetic Array Research over a Tectonic Hotspot (EARTH)’.

The EARTH project will use a technique called magnetotellurics (MT) to produce new models of magma flows beneath Scotland, Iceland and Greenland.

As well as solving longstanding questions about the origins of Iceland’s volcanism, the data will also be used to assess the risks of solar storms on an energy cable proposed between Iceland the UK.

Dr Simpson’s findings will be used to supplement existing seismological data, helping governments and communities to plan for and mitigate events such as the eruption of Eyjafjallajökull volcano in 2010, which grounded flights across Europe.

She said: “Hundreds of millions of people‘s lives globally are impacted by volcanic activity. If we can understand what drives eruptions, by mapping magma below Earth‘s surface, we can be better prepared to deal with the consequences.”