Wildfires are in the news lately, but if you were in the Hailar Basin, Inner Mongolia during the Early Cretaceous (~100 million years ago) you’d find yourself in a lot of smoke! Even though it was tough times for vegetation, the palaeomires were able to accumulate incredible thicknesses of peat – enough to make 70 […]
On the 7th of June, 9pm Brisbane, Australia time I’ll be giving an invited lecture on some of the palaeoclimate, palaeovegetation and palaeotectonic studies we’ve been doing in the Hailar Basin, Inner Mongolia, China. This is for The Society for Organic Petrology. Read the abstract for the talk below. It’s ONLINE and Open to All! […]
The 39th Annual Meeting of The Society for Organic Petrology will be held in Bogotá, Colombia in September 2022. Colombia is known for many things of course – its divine coffee, the incredible hospitality of its people, the range of climates and the beautiful Andes. But what most people don’t know is that under that lovely exterior […]
Thirty seconds seems like an incredibly short amount of time. But a lot of things can happen in thirty seconds. I had removed one of my gloves to turn the page in my field notebook to jot down some measurements on the coal we were sampling. It was a bad idea. In that short amount […]
My son asked me what scores of other children ask their parents at some point: “Dad, have you ever been on TV”? I was in the middle of painting a wall inside the house and was poised to say no… no, sorry son, I have not, when I realized I actually have. So instead I […]
If your idea of heaven is noodles, then when you die, you will come to Taiyuan. In case you didn’t know, the Shanxi Province in China is the noodle capital of the world and the capital of Shanxi is the city of Taiyuan (at least in terms of noodles). I had come to Taiyuan to […]
Sadly, I lost a trusted and long-time friend on the Geology 483 field trip: my hammer! I must have taken it out somewhere, either at 12-mile beach, or on top of the Denniston Plateau (perhaps at Burnetts Face) while leading the students around and … well, somewhere out there, she lies. I would have had […]
It was the renowned West Coast rain which put us to sleep that first night. The next day, puddles of the wet stuff lay everywhere and in some places spanned the entire road width. Low tide was at 11:52am so about an hour beforehand we set off to 12-mile beach to look at the lower […]