Changing the World: How Tom Berry Accepted the Challenge

"Challenge accepted" is a call to action. It's a commitment to growth, innovation and excellence. It's about pushing boundaries, embracing new ideas and not shying away from obstacles.

Our people accept the challenge every single day – and we're showcasing a few of their stories. Today, we connected with Tom Berry, our chief geologist for Europe in Leeds, United Kingdom, to discuss how he's advancing ground engineering research to build more resilient underground structures.

The challenge: Mudstones are very common – forming over 50% of the Earth’s sedimentary rocks. Understanding the makeup and behavior of this common rock is crucial for many of our projects and can ultimately help us build more resilient and efficient water reservoirs and underground structures, saving our clients time and money. 

Tell us more about this challenge

Many of our clients are involved in projects responding to climate change or decarbonization – including projects such as ensuring water resilience and radioactive waste disposal. To do this successfully, deep domain knowledge is required to understand exactly how the geosphere responds to the construction and operation of shafts, tunnels and caverns, as well as water conveyance and storage structures for our growing urban populations. 

Mudstones can self-seal, meaning they can naturally close cracks that form within it, thereby reducing the ability for water or other fluids to flow through them. Our team is working with the University of Leeds to characterize the speed and magnitude of self-sealing through a program of laboratory testing. This research will help us better understand this behavior to build more efficient and effective reservoirs and underground structures, saving our clients time and money.

What’s the hardest part of this?

There are several challenges we face, but that’s what makes it exciting and where we can add value to our clients. Finding suitable samples for laboratory testing is difficult, but a large challenge lies in the preparation of specimens, to test, as these weak rocks are very sensitive to environmental conditions and can dry out and break in a matter of minutes. Additionally, some experiments can take a long time, up to six months of measurement, attention and nurturing. Finally, the research is being carried out part-time, so balancing work, research and family is a big challenge - thankfully I have wonderful, patient and understanding colleagues and family. 

Can you share an example of how you’re approaching this?
We've developed an unusual but effective specimen preparation method that's likely to be adopted by the wider industry for preparing the weakest of our rock specimens. These weak rocks are too hard for soil preparation techniques but too weak and sensitive for standard rock preparation techniques, such as drilling. As such, we hand carve the samples slightly larger than the required size for the tests and then shave them down to ensure we meet the standard sample dimension tolerances. 

How do you define success? 

Success has several criteria that will demonstrate the return on investment for Jacobs. This includes our continuous engagement with our clients and improved visibility and credibility in industry. All these results lead to winning interesting long-term work.