astronomy

Patience Cowie

Patience Cowie is a astronomy topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Patience Cowie rather than just read about it. In short: Patience Anne Cowie (27 January 1964 – 7 April 2020) was a Professor of Earth System Dynamics at the University of Bergen. Her research has considered fault propagation and rift basins.

Key takeaways

Patience Cowie belongs to astronomy; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Patience Cowie to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Patience Cowie from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

Patience Anne Cowie (27 January 1964 – 7 April 2020) was a Professor of Earth System Dynamics at the University of Bergen. Her research has considered fault propagation and rift basins. She was awarded the 2016 Geological Society of London Coke medal.

Early life and education Cowie was born in the United Kingdom. She studied geology at Durham University and graduated in 1985. During her undergraduate degree she took part in field trips and became more interested in geological research. Cowie moved to the Lamont–Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University for her graduate studies and earned master's degree in 1989. She remained there for her doctoral degree and completed her PhD under the supervision of Christopher Scholz in 1992. She moved to the University of Nice Sophia Antipolis as a postdoctoral research fellow in 1992, where she spent one year before joining the University of Edinburgh.

Research and career Cowie moved to the University of Edinburgh in 1993, initially supported by a Natural Environment Research Council research fellowship. She was awarded a Royal Society University Research Fellowship in 1994. Her research considers the surface process responses to active faulting. These include studying the physical laws responsible for river erosion, how sediment is dispersed in rift basins and developing field testing models using source-to-sink approaches. She uses a range of research approaches, including data collected during field visits, theoretical and mathematical models. This includes the use of Lidar and ground-penetrating radar to monitor seismic slip. In 2003, Cowie was made an adjunct researcher at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. She was promoted to Professor of Geodynamics at the University of Edinburgh in 2008. In 2011, Cowie joined the University of Bergen as a Professor of Geodynamics. Here she is co-leader of the Statoil-Norwegian Multi-Rift Project. Cowie has intensively investigated geological faults. She has studied the way that faults propagate, the variations in space and time due to the interactions of faults, the rates at which they slip and how damage zones develop in high porosity sandstones. Her recent work has considered the geomorphology of the Apennine Mountains in Italy and mainland Greece. Alongside work on geological faults, she has studied subsidence in rift basins, rates of erosion and how sediment is routed across rift basins. She has studied the evaluation of Late Jurassic rifting in the North Sea. She co-leads MultiRift, a Research Council of Norway program that uses surface process modelling. Cowie has investigated the origins of earthquakes, and was the first to identify that fault zones deform the same way predicted by experiments in laboratories. The Geological Society of London recognised the contributions that Cowie has made to geology in 2016 and awarded her the Coke medal. The citation read, "Patience Cowie's research career has been outstanding from its outset: her seminal PhD work, carried out with Chris Scholz at the Lamont–Doherty Earth Observatory, produced novel insights into the way faults grow and interact, and explained the physical mechanisms behind fault linkage and the reason why fault displacement-length scaling occurs in natural systems... Patience's research is characterised by deep clarity of thought, and represents a judicious combination of numerical modelling, seismic analysis and field observation... Patience Cowie, you are an inspirational and far-sighted geoscientist, who has revolutionized our understanding of the growth and interaction of faults".

Selected publications Her publications include:

Cowie, Patience; Berkowitz, Brian (2001). "Scaling of fracture systems in geological media" (PDF). Reviews of Geophysics. 39 (3): 347–383. Bibcode:2001RvGeo..39..347B. doi:10.1029/1999RG000074. hdl:20.500.11820/f2c6994d-c857-466d-ae08-6f7b85782295. S2CID 53495936. Cowie, Patience; Scholz, Christopher H. (1 November 1992). "Physical explanation for the displacement-length relationship of faults using a post-yield fracture mechanics model". Journal of Structural Geology. 14 (10): 1133–1148. Bibcode:1992JSG....14.1133C. doi:10.1016/0191-8141(92)90065-5. Cowie, Patience; Scholz, Christopher H. (1 November 1992). "Displacement-length scaling relationship for faults: data synthesis and discussion". Journal of Structural Geology. 14 (10): 1149–1156. Bibcode:1992JSG....14.1149C. doi:10.1016/0191-8141(92)90066-6. She has served as the editor of the Geological Society of America journal Geology.

Personal life Cowie was married with two daughters, Esther and Saskia. Her husband, Leo Zijerveld took a career break during their childhood, completing a degree at the Open University. She was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2008.

References

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Patience Cowie

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Patience Cowie claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In astronomy, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Patience Cowie before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Patience Cowie ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Patience Cowie

In research: Patience Cowie appears in astronomy research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Patience Cowie in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Patience Cowie is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics 1964 births, 2020 deaths, 21st-century British earth scientists, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Patience Cowie outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Patience Cowie in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Patience Cowie means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Patience Cowie out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Patience Cowie in simple terms?

Patience Anne Cowie (27 January 1964 – 7 April 2020) was a Professor of Earth System Dynamics at the University of Bergen. Her research has considered fault propagation and rift basins.

Why does Patience Cowie matter?

Because it connects several astronomy ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Patience Cowie?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Patience Cowie.