The American Geophysical Union (AGU) recently held its Annual Meeting 2023, where Shaoting FENG, a Ph.D. student from the Department of Earth and Space Sciences (ESS) at the Southern University of Science and Technology (SUSTech), received an Outstanding Student Presentation Award (OSPA).

In her presentation titled “The Electrical Structures Revealed by Magnetotelluric Data Near the Littoral Fault Zone of South China Sea”, Shaoting FENG’s study unveiled unique low-resistivity anomalies in the crust near the coastal fault zone in the Pearl River Delta region through magnetotelluric (MT) sounding data. Her research has significantly contributed to enhancing geophysicists’ understanding of potential seismogenic structures in terms of the electric resistivity.

Under the supervision of Dikun YANG, Assistant Professor of the Department of ESS, Shaoting FENG has dedicated herself to studying the electrical structure and dynamics of the crust in Guangdong Province through geoelectromagnetic methods.

Substantial progress has been made, including the collection of MT sounding observation data from many coastal areas in Guangdong Province, along with their processing and preliminary interpretation. This effort fills a research gap in understanding crustal resistivity structures in the Pearl River Delta region.

This research work received support from the Southern Marine Science and Engineering Guangdong Laboratory (Zhuhai).

The AGU, renowned as one of the world’s most influential and longstanding academic organizations in earth and space sciences, established the OSPA awards to promote, recognize, and reward outstanding undergraduate, master’s, and Ph.D. students in the field of geophysical sciences.

Expert evaluations are carried out for oral and poster presentations at the annual meeting, with the top 3-5% of presenters in each category receiving an OSPA award.