Category: Research

April 17, 2022

Digging into Yarcomb Sand’oil

I realised Acomb must be vaguely scientifically interesting when I found it mentioned in Martin Lister‘s 1683 Royal Society paper “An ingenious proposal for a new sort of Maps of Countrys, together with Tables of Sands and Clays, such chiefly as are found in the North parts of England…” Lister’s idea was that rocks and sediments should be mapped, for...

Categories Outreach/Research

March 19, 2022

Jurassic geology of Yons Nab, North Yorkshire

I was going through some papers in the loft and I came across a sedimentary log of Yons Nab, North Yorkshire, which I drew up in 2009 after visiting the site with Prof. Duncan McIlroy. As I’m never going to do anything with it, I thought I’d simply publish it here. If you’d like to explore the Middle and Upper...

Categories Outreach/Research/Teaching

March 15, 2022

Ancient crustaceans as ecosystem engineers

In the last few months, I’ve given two public online talks with this title. They attempt to explain that the fossil record shows that marine crustaceans have been engineering new habitats for millions of years. Should you wish to watch the version I gave to the Geologists’ Association meeting in honour of Joe Collins, you can view it here:

Categories Outreach/Research/Teaching

January 7, 2022

The education of Miss Phillips

A few years ago, with Dr Tori Herridge, I wrote a Trowelblazers article about the marvellous Anne Phillips. As Anne’s Wikipedia page makes clear, geologist and science historian Dr Nina Morgan has been crucial in uncovering many details of Miss Phillips’ life and work, including important contributions to geological science. I very much enjoyed Nina’s recent article explaining how rail...

Categories Research

May 23, 2020

Trapped Wind

The Fascinatingly Fortuitous Fossilization of Farts There are people out there who don’t think palaeontology is astonishing, and they are quite wrong. To prove this, here is a 20 million-year-old cockroach fart, fossilized in amber: The late lamented Dr WHO once told me “serendipity is looking for a needle in a haystack and finding the famer’s daughter.” I think my...

Categories Media/Outreach/Research/Teaching

March 2, 2020

How to map volcanoes!

This Thursday, March 5th, Professor Kathy Cashman FRS of the University of Bristol will give the 4th annual John & Anne Phillips Lecture at the University of Hull. Professor Cashman’s talk will focus on “Mapping lava flows from the ground, air and space” and introduce the audience to her ground-breaking research into how volcanoes work. Maps of lava flow age,...

Categories Media/Outreach/Research/Teaching

December 12, 2015

An Introduction to Shales and Fracking

The slides from my York Lifelong Learning presentation on Dec. 12th can be downloaded here as a PowerPoint file: 2015_Intro_ShalesFracking_SML. Useful links UK & Europe ReFINE: Researching Fracking. ReFINE is the leading international fracking research consortium, led jointly by Newcastle University and Durham University. The website includes all the group’s scientific papers, research briefs, and newsletters. Shale Gas – British...

Categories Media/Outreach/Research/Teaching

August 2, 2015

Theogeology

Theogeology is an exciting new academic discipline, focussed on trying to understand what building stones old churches were made from, particularly in the Ryedale and Wolds regions of North and East Yorkshire. It began a few months ago, when buildings archaeologist Dav Smith, a dilettante geologist (myself), and a couple of our friends, went out onto The Street in the...

Categories Research

May 30, 2014

An Introduction to Geology: 2014

Week 9. Fossils. How to tell bone from stone: Smithsonian magazine article by Brian Switek. The Fossil Record of Cricket (an article I wrote for ESPN Cricinfo). I later wrote another on the evolution of fast throwing.   Weeks 6. & 7. TECTONICS The day the Earth moved – very interesting article in Cosmos magazine describing the revolutionary times of...

Categories Research/Teaching

March 22, 2014

Powered By Rock – Week 8

REVIEWING THE OPTIONS Lecture notes – 2014_PoweredbyRock_lect8_summary_SML (PowerPoint) An Excel spreadsheet showing the full list of UK power stations (location, type, capacity) from the DUKES website. Energy predictability Every year, the International Energy Agency gives an overview of the World Energy Outlook. The 2013 edition can be found here. However, according to Energy Post, the IEA World Energy Outlook consistently...

Categories Research/Teaching