An Exposed Salt Dome
The salt exposed here consists of halites of the Ara Salt, which was deposited around 540 million years ago during the earliest Cambrian. The core of the dome, where the…
Geology
The Best of Brae
In Late Jurassic times, an overall north-south trending graben system transected the North Sea as a response to tensional stresses building up in the wider area. The grabens were connected…
Microfossils and the World of Chalk and Chert
Microfossils are those fossils that require a microscope to carry out fundamental identification. They are the fossils of a biologically diverse group of organisms, including microscopic algae, protists, and invertebrates,…
How Does Wet Gas Form?
A study performed by Olav Walderhaug from Equinor, the main outcomes of which he shared with GEO ExPro, shows that out of 50 reservoirs classified as wet gas accumulations, 47…
Palynology reinvented
An old technique re-imagined and reducing uncertainty in CCS sites. Palynology Reinvented Capturing carbon dioxide (CO2) from industrial and power sources and storing it in subsurface geological formations is an…
“Land Plants Didn’t Evolve Until the Silurian”
If you were to ask my wife when plants first evolved, she would answer without hesitation (in a mock pompous voice) “land plants didn’t evolve until the Silurian”! She is…
The Incredible World of Fossils
I fell in love with fossils like many others, as a child, hunting on the world-famous Jurassic Coast in Dorset in the UK, a UNESCO World Heritage site, and location…
The Artemis Project: Geology’s Gateway to the Stars
NASA had been under pressure to put a scientist on the Moon – and so in 1972, they sent geologist Harrison Schmitt. NASA’s Artemis I patch. © NASA.In December 1972,…
“Gone Fossil Hunting…”
In the first article in this series, I highlighted the staggering breadth of utility that fossils have, from academic research to applied industrial analysis, value in commercial trade and preservation…
Nature Shows Off
Most Surtseyan style eruptions involve a relatively small amount of water encountering magma. But the explosion in January this year at the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Haʻapai volcanic island erupted in a…
Jurassic Deep-Sea Fishing
You could be forgiven for thinking Mary was the first to discover ichthyosaur and plesiosaur fossils, but specimens of ichthyosaur vertebrae and propodial (limb) bones and pliosaur vertebral centra were…
The Artemis Project: Geology’s Gateway to the Stars
NASA’s Artemis I patch. © NASA. In December 1972, the 17th and last Apollo mission put Harrison Schmitt, the only professional geologist ever to have ventured into space, on the…