40th Annual Meeting of The Society for Organic Petrology Decoding the shift: Organics and Critical Minerals in Future Energy Everything is in Place! Abstracts are coming in and registrations are being made. Don’t miss out! This meeting is one of the most ambitious annual conferences to be undertaken by TSOP. If you want a truly […]
In March I had the pleasure of accompanying the PhD candidate Edafe Ominigbo (School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, Queensland University of Technology) to Kalimantan, which is the Indonesian part of the island of Borneo. We were there to collect mafic rocks as part of his study. I know very little about igneous petrography (I […]
Decoding the shift: Organics and Critical Minerals in Future Energy ABSTRACTS DUE: 1 July 2024 It has been four decades since the first official TSOP meeting at Tyson’s Corner, Virginia (USA) in 1984. Although the aspiration was always for TSOP to be an internationally recognized professional organization, I think few of us could have imagined […]
It is no secret that the mere mention of the word coal is divisive. Yet, people on either side of the debate have a far from adequate understanding of what coal actually is. Practically no one who is talking about coal these days has the faintest idea of the conditions under which it is formed, […]
As a New Zealand Citizen, I am always amazed at the grandeur of its landscape. Although I have lived outside New Zealand for the last 10 yrs, I can never forget just what a wonderful place it is. Thus, when there was an opportunity to head back both for work and pleasure, how could I […]
As the world’s population passes the 8 billion mark there is little doubt the strain that puts on the Earth’s resources†. Just think on that for a moment. Clean, potable water is at a premium. Unprocessed food stuffs are not available to a large part of the population. And energy to power washing machines, schools, […]
Like in many other places in the world, the country of Mongolia is endeavoring to move away from coal. And it is trying to be both practical and realistic. There are not many people in Mongolia, just 3.3 million for an area that stretches to 1.56 million square kilometers. People are spread pretty thinly over […]
How the newly published paper “Constraints from lamprophyre petrogenesis on the timing of Eocene lithospheric thinning and associated rifting of Borneo and Sulawesi” (Murphy et al., 2024) came to be has an interesting history. Well, to me anyway. If we take the Way Back Machine* to the mid-1980s, when I was doing my PhD field […]
I returned the other week from an extremely enjoyable trip to Patras, Greece where the 39th Annual Meeting of The Society for Organic Petrology (TSOP) was held. The meeting occurred in tandem with the the 74th Annual Meeting of the International Committed on Coal and Organic Petrology (ICCP). A big shout out to the organisers […]
After three and half years we made the journey back to China and back to the Early Cretaceous of Inner Mongolia. We know that it was hot in the Early Cretaceous, even at high latitudes such as that of Inner Mongolia but our first stop in Beijing had us sweating and swearing in very real […]