The Society for Underwater Technology (SUT) held the 8th Offshore Site Investigation & Geotechnics (OSIG) conference in September at the Royal Geographical Society (RGS) in London.
The OSIG is held every 5 years and is dedicated to offshore geotechnical engineering, site investigations, geohazards and geosciences. It stands alongside the ISFOG (International Symposium on Frontiers in Offshore Geotechnics) as a highlight in the conference calendar. This edition of the conference title was entitled “Smarter Solutions for Future Offshore Developments” with the following challenge in the call for papers: “The challenges currently faced by the offshore oil & gas industry call for innovative approaches to improve efficiency and rigour in practice, while the offshore renewable energy industry has identified and addressed, through major research programmes, key technical issues that must be solved to support its growing strength. High profile international incidents have also occurred across all sectors in recent years that pose significant data acquisition, engineering and operational challenges.” With this in mind it is interesting to note that this is first time that delegates from the renewables sector outnumbered those from oil & gas at the OSIG conference. In addition to the 4th McClelland Lecture being delivered at the conference the following keynote papers were presented:
The published proceedings (comprising 1323 pages) are split into 2 volumes and 12 sections including:
Parallel presentation sessions were introduced in order to fit in a huge number of presentations and presentations times were kept short (5 min in the parallel sessions, which was described as a speed dating equivalent for geotechnical engineers). A knovel approach to Q&A was available in plenary sessions where delegates could use a social media forum to submit questions during the presentations. This has benefits and draw backs (with some delegates choosing to make anonymous questions or using fake names which takes away from the collaborative spirit of the event). However, it probably encouraged more questions which is a positive if not making more work for session chairs. A few of the conference papers (in addition to the keynotes above) which best answer the challenge made in the call for papers, in my opinion are summarised below:
Over the course of the 3 days there were some excellent presentations and there are of course many other fantastic papers. A great event and we look forward to the next one in 5 years time.
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