Fossils, geology and minerals. The highly acclaimed international earth science magazine with over 450 articles and book reviews.
There are many good guides the geology of the Lake District and this is no exception. However, this is first and foremost an illustrated guide to the region’s rocks and an introduction to the common rock types to be found, largely through the use of colour photographs.
This is another excellent guide produced by Dunedin Academic press, to go along with the other two reviewed on this page. This one provides, at an introductory level, a succinct and readable guide to metamorphism.
Rosalind Jones (France) In Part 1 (Mull’s famous fossil tree (Part 1): Chrissie and the tree), I described the events surrounding the unique fossilisation of an Eocene redwood tree in Mull’s famous Staffa suite of volcanic rocks. In this part, I will take you on a walk to the fossil… … Read More
Deborah Painter (USA) During the 1700s, when North American colonies were under British rule, a certain highly intelligent and educated man by the name of Thomas Jefferson heard of a remarkable natural arch in west central Virginia, to the southwest of his home in Charlottesville. He purchased hectares of land… … Read More
Sea level change is something that probably everyone who does their best to keep up to date about climate change, thinks they know about and on which they will have an opinion.
Deborah Painter (USA) The island of Greenland is now an independent nation called Kalaallit Nunaat in the language of the native-born people. Almost totally covered in ice, the world’s largest island can be compared to a bowl of ice having a rim of ice-free hills and mountains. The southern tip… … Read More
“When he returned from his voyage, Darwin was already known to its leaders [of all the scientific societies of the metropolis] as a young geologist of great promise, owing to the geological letters he had sent home from South America” (Rudwick 1982, p. 190) This is the second of two… … Read More
Jon Trevelyan (UK) Professor Robert Diffendal Jr’s little guidebook to the Great Plains of the USA makes for a fascinating read for an Englishman like me, who has never been there (but wants to). As he says in his article Great Plains geology: A personal journey, they rarely correspond to … Read More
Alan R Lord (Germany) Palaeontological Association Field Guide to Fossils: Number 15 As the editor of this new publication by the Palaeontological Association (see Palaeontological Association Field Guide to Fossils Number 15: Fossils from the Lias of the Yorkshire Coast), I think that it may be time to explain why… … Read More
Tony Waltham (UK) This article accompanies a book review of Tony Waltham’s book, The World of Geology. The text is broadly taken from the book itself. The world of geology is the world as we know it, that we see and that we live on. It is all about the… … Read More
This is a lovely example of photographs used to inspire and text to explain. For many years, Dr Tony Waltham has produced a photo plus explanatory text for the back cover of the glossy magazine, Geology Today.
Matt Salusbury and Tim-Holt Wilson (UK) “The Wonder of Our Times: Being the True and Exactly Relation of the Body of a Mighty giant dig’d up at Brockford Bridge neer Ipswich in the county of Suffolk.” That’s the title of a printed pamphlet from 1651, now in the Thomason Collection… … Read More
This is a new edition of the classic little guide on Blue John by Trevor Ford, who has now sadly passed away. The guide provides a comprehensive overview of the geology and mineralogy of Blue John fluorite from Derbyshire and also provides a description of its mining in the past and today, and its use in the production of ornaments and jewellery.
Mervyn Jones (UK) GA field meeting on 6 and 7 April 2019 This field meeting was the second following the publication of Prof Cope’s GA Guide No 73, Geology of the South Devon Coast (reviewed in Issue 51 of Deposits), the companion to GA Guide No 22, Geology of the… … Read More
Chris Duffin (UK) The Hortus Sanitatis (1491) On 23 June 1491, a new volume was printed and bound for distribution in the German University town of Mainz. The publisher was Jacob von Meydenbach, who might also have been responsible for compiling many of the entries in the book. The volume… … Read More
Steven Wade Veatch (USA) This photograph, taken around 1899, shows my ancestors posing at their modest frame home, where they lived one step away from Cripple Creek’s gold rush world of cardplayers, whisky drinkers, and midnight carousers. The scene depicts my great-grandfather (Robert Pickering Plews), my great-grandmother (Janet Plews), and… … Read More
Just a couple of days before the Covid-19 lockdown, I was with friends at Tidmoor Point collecting wonderful pyrite ammonites from the Oxford Clay with this excellent guide to the South Dorset Coast.
This is a very ambitious work. The authors discuss the geology of Britain as a “geological legacy”, that is, they believe it is “an inheritance bequeathed to 11 millennia or so of its post-glacial inhabitants”.
Andy Gale’s update of his guide to the Isle of Wight (this is the sixth edition) is an important change to an already excellent geological guide. The Geologists’ Association has been updating several of its guides – using a modern format, and providing better colour pictures and diagrams – and this is another great example.
As this book explains, ground conditions for building depend on the history of all these aspects in connection with both the actual building site and the surrounding area. In fact, the book goes into some detail, using colour photographs and block geomodels, to bring the subject to life in what is, I suspect, a somewhat fresh way.
I reviewed some excellent previous guides in this series (Classic Geology in Europe 3: Iceland in Issue 39 and Classic Geology in Europe 12: Almeria in Issue 48), but this one is closer to home and covers an area that I have fond memories of from my Munro-bagging days.
I love the Highlands of Scotland and I am proud to say that I have climbed many of the mountains covered in the glossy hardback. But, as I say in the other book review on this page, it is more than a picture book. It contains some excellent and fascinating science explaining their outstanding beauty.
‘Sedimentary Structures’ is definitely written for professional earth scientists (but also students and non-specialists from other subject areas, where an understanding of the origin and forms of structures in sediments and sedimentary rocks would be invaluable).
This new guide in Dunedin’s ‘Introducing …’ range of books, covering the branch of geology that studies rock layers (strata) and layering (stratification), primarily in sedimentary rocks, but also layered igneous rocks.
So, Palass has published another of its excellent field guides, this time to the fossils from the Lias of the Yorkshire coast. Readers of this magazine will know that I have a soft spot for these guides.
Another issue of Deposits and another excellent addition to the “Introducing Earth and Environmental Sciences” series by Dunedin, many of which I have favourably reviewed in this magazine.
Nouvelle-Aquitaine (New Aquitaine) is a vast region of southwest France covering more than 30,000 square miles. Between 1154 and the end of the Hundred Years War in 1453, much of the region was under British control. Links with Britain are still strong today, both through tourism and the large ex-patriate British population, particularly in the Dordogne, known jokingly to locals as ‘Dordogneshire’.
About 61 years ago, a boy wandered among loblolly pines near an agricultural field not far from the Nottoway River in southern Virginia in the USA. His eyes fell upon a tan coloured rock atop a thick layer of old needles at the bases of the pines. It was a curiosity – the coastal plain Southampton County does not feature rocks reposing at the surface. Young Lloyd Bryant turned over the rounded chunk of stone and was jolted to see an etched human face staring back (Fig. 1).
Dr Sebastian Lüning (Germany) I am a geologist by profession. Everyday of my working life, I have worked with rocks, from nine to five, for 19 years, looking for oil and gas in the Sahara. Sometimes this is stressful, sometimes really enjoyable and sometimes simply annoying – just like any… … Read More
The is a second edition of Prof John Cope’s excellent geological guide to the Dorset coast for the Geologists’ Association (GA). It is slightly shorter than the first edition, with some minor corrections and some of the figures revised, together with new photographs.
