Neil H Kenyon

Neil H. Kenyon
Residence	Wormley, Surrey, United Kingdom
Nationality	English
Known for	Side-scan sonar mapping of the sea floor; Expanding Earth
Scientific career
Fields	Marine Geologist

Neil H. Kenyon is an English marine geologist and sedimentologist, based for much of his career at the Institute of Oceanographic Sciences at Wormley, Surrey, United Kingdom, and later an Honorary Research Fellow at the National Oceanography Centre (NOC) in Southampton. He is known as a pioneer of side-scan sonar mapping of the sea floor and for his studies of seabed bedforms, submarine channels, deep-sea sediment transport, and continental margins.

Biography

Kenyon spent the greater part of his career at the Institute of Oceanographic Sciences (IOS) at Wormley, near Godalming in Surrey, one of the principal British centres for marine geological research. Following the reorganisation of the United Kingdom's oceanographic institutions, he continued his association with the field as an Honorary Research Fellow at the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton. Over several decades he published extensively on marine geology and sedimentology, accumulating one of the higher citation records in the discipline.

Scientific contributions

Kenyon was an early user of acoustic imaging methods for mapping the sea floor. His 1970 paper "Sand ribbons of European tidal seas", published in the journal Marine Geology, used the side-scan Asdic (sonar) method to describe elongate ribbons of sand—up to 15 km long and 200 m wide—aligned with the bed-load transport paths of tidal currents around the British Isles, and it remains a frequently cited classic in the study of seabed bedforms.

He subsequently made extensive use of long-range side-scan sonar, particularly the GLORIA system, to map large areas of the deep sea floor. This work covered submarine fans and channel systems such as the Mississippi Fan and Amazon Fan, sediment waves, turbidity-current deposits (turbidites) and channel-lobe transition zones, submarine landslides including the Storegga Slide off Norway, and the morphology and sedimentary processes of continental margins including the North-East Atlantic and the Norwegian–Greenland Sea. His applications of side-scan sonar in the Eastern Mediterranean also led him to discuss the compressional structures of the sea floor and their possible relationship to models of Earth expansion.

Selected works

• Kenyon, N. H. (1970). "Sand ribbons of European tidal seas". Marine Geology, 9(1), 25–39.
• "A giant three-stage submarine slide off Norway" (1987).
• "The Storegga Slide" (1988).
• "Quantitative analysis of the geometry of submarine channels" (1992).
• "The Norwegian–Greenland Sea continental margins: morphology and late Quaternary sedimentary processes and environment" (1998).
• "Continental margin sedimentation, with special reference to the north-east Atlantic margin" (2000).
• "Characterization and recognition of deep-water channel-lobe transition zones" (2002).

In His Own Words

"Side-scan sonar has enabled us to map the compressional structures of the sea floor external to the trenches in the Eastern Mediterranean. Compressional waves appear to be moving radially outwards from centers in the Tyrrhenian Sea and the Aegean Sea; driven perhaps by diapir-like upwelling from the asthenosphere. If this hypothesis is correct, the need for a subduction zone disappears. In which case, Earth expansion could explain accretion at sea floor spreading axes"

External links

• Neil H. Kenyon on Google Scholar
• Neil H. Kenyon academic profile at Research.com