Perhaps unsurprisingly (as a professional dealer in space rocks), I find all meteorites equally fascinating and, in their own way, aesthetically appealing. However, I have to admit, the meteorites known as the Pallasites, with their […]
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Category: geology
Urban geology: the Worsley Park wall game, Manchester
Wall games are a very geological form of light entertainment and education. I certainly have amused myself by identifying rocks and their features in walls since my days as an undergraduate and before. I was […]
Fossil fish from the north of Scotland
The north of Scotland is famous to scientists and amateur collectors for its wealth of localities where fossil fish of Devonian age can be collected. From plate tectonics, we know that in Devonian times Scotland […]
Great Plains geology – a personal journey
I grew up in the 1940s and 50s in the eastern US state of Maryland and went to cinemas on my own from the age of six, mostly to see what were then to me […]
Agate: a mineral that develops with age, water and moganite
Agate is banded or variegated chalcedony and this distinctive appearance allows a ready identification from any source. Many agate thick sections from basic igneous hosts are reminiscent of a series of distorted onion-like rings with […]
A pale white dot
“There’s nothing new under the sun” goes a famous saying and these words are very apt when trying to understand Earth’s climate trends. Thanks to numerous discoveries made about Earth’s ancient past, we now know […]
What’s so special about South Devon?
Take a trip to the South Devon coast around Easter time and you are bound to come across student parties from universities engaged in fieldwork. What is it about this area that makes it so […]
Siri Scientific Press: A UK-based publisher specialising in palaeontology
I have written this article as a summary of how I established myself in the fossil publishing business because it might be of interest to a general readership. First, a little background about myself is […]
The Anthropocene: should we designate a new epoch? A geologist’s perspective
Whatever your views, this is a subject that will not go away, and the concept of the Anthropocene is gaining more impetus and consideration as time goes by. In a nutshell, the Anthropocene has been […]
The Jurassic Coast (or is it?) with the Geologists’ Association
Since 2012, the Geologists’ Association (GA) has put on annual field trips to the Dorset coast led by Prof John CW Cope (of the National Museum Wales), who is author of the definitive Field Guide […]
The Armboth Dyke, Lake District
The Armboth Dyke makes a good half day geology excursion in a scenic but quiet part of the UK Lake District. Parking is on the west shore of Thirlmere, in a pay-and-display car park accessed […]
Seeing into the ‘Stone Age’: the stone tools of early man
In the early part of his evolution, man made great use of rock and stone to assist him in his activities. The term ‘Stone Age’ has been given to the period of time during which […]
Urban geology: a rostroconch in Hoofddorp
Part of my job is to provide service teaching for the University of Leiden. The university lacks a geology department, but my colleagues and I provide tuition in stratigraphy and palaeontology for life science students […]
Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) – using geology to fight climate change
Practically everyone has an opinion on climate change by now, although for the vast majority of scientists, the weight of evidence is overwhelming – emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are causing climate […]
Australia’s Polar Cretaceous mammals
The Cenozoic Era is commonly referred to as the ‘Age of Mammals’. That is certainly the time in the history of life when their fossils are most abundant and diverse. However, two-thirds of mammalian history […]
All change at Selsey, West Sussex, UK
Issue 26 of Deposits magazine in the Spring of 2011 included my article on fossil collecting at Bracklesham Bay in West Sussex, following in the footsteps of my guide book on Fossil hunting at Bracklesham […]
The Erzberg Mine in Austria – An iron ore reserve with a long tradition
The Erzberg Mine is situated in the Austrian county of Styria. From a geological point of view, it belongs to the so-called greywacke zone, which represents a band of Palaeozoic metamorphosed sedimentary rocks intercalated between […]
Hutton’s unconformity and the birth of ‘Deep Time’
I sometimes ask a question to students in an introductory class about geology: “What is the most famous geological site in the world?” For students from the western hemisphere, the Grand Canyon in the USA […]
The Giant’s Causeway (part 2): other volcanic highlights
This is the second and final part of an article on the volcanic highlights of Northern Ireland’s Giant’s Causeway and surrounds. We were in the area for several days and the weather was fairly mixed, […]
Jamaica’s geodiversity (Part 2): highlights from the Neogene
This is the second and concluding part of our introduction to Jamaica’s geodiversity. Here, we are concerned with more Neogene ‘highlights’ dating from the Middle or Late Miocene, about 10mya, when the island became, once […]
The Giant’s Causeway: part 1
This is the first of two articles on the volcanicity of the Giant’s Causeway and the surrounding area. The Causeway itself is an area of basalt columns, about 100m or so across, jutting into the […]
The Other Mass Extinctions
The extinctions at the Cretaceous-Tertiary (K/T) boundary make up what is probably the most famous geological event in popular culture. This is the point when the great reptiles that characterise the Mesozoic went extinct. Alongside […]
The geology and fauna of the South Ferriby foreshore
The large working quarry at South Ferriby, North Lincolnshire (SE991204) is a well known and productive source of Late Jurassic and Cretaceous fossils, exposing beds from the Upper Oxfordian stage, Upper Jurassic (Ampthill clay, Ringsteadia […]
Miocene, mud and more: Miste 2013
‘Miste’… This word has an almost magical meaning for many fossil collectors in The Netherlands and neighbouring countries. That is because the extremely fossiliferous Miste Bed lies close to the surface around the municipality of […]
A warming medieval climate supports a revolution in agriculture
In the light of our current worries about climate change and global warming, this is the first a series of articles for Deposits that will cover significant climate changes that have occurred in the geological […]
The geology of islands
Islands are attractive places to visit, not just for geologists. Nonetheless, for us, they provide three advantages that favour collecting and research in the Earth Sciences. One of the attractions of an island is its […]
Features in the field: ignimbrites of the Yr Arddu syncline (Caradoc, Upper Ordovician)
In July 1979, I was one of more than 20 undergraduate students at the Department of Geology, University of Manchester, to undertake their final year mapping project in the Snowdonia National Park in North Wales. […]
An alternative view on climate change
Before you start shouting at your magazine, don’t worry, you’re not going to read that I think climate change isn’t happening or that human beings aren’t contributing to it. However, I am going to try […]
The geology of East Greenland
Eighty percent of Greenland is covered by ice and, in places, this is up to 3.4km thick. So, Greenland might not immediately spring to mind as a place to go to observe rocks. However, it […]
Salthill Quarry, Clitheroe: a resource being revitalised
A while ago, SKD published a critique of the poor geoconservation practices on one of England’s most productive Sites of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) of Mississippian age – the so-called scraped surface at Salthill Quarry, […]