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 […]
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 […]
The fruits – as they say – had finally ripened and what fell off the tree? A paper of course*. A nice fat, juicy paper about those lovely Eocene-age volcanics that lie within the Senakin Peninsula. After a couple of decades wondering when someone would publish on the basalts and volcaniclastic sediments in Kalimantan Selatan […]
The speedboat skipped from wave to wave effortlessly; Tanjung Dewa was on our left and then it was gone. A head of us I could see the Senakin Peninsula, its dark forests tangled with cloud. The chill morning air made me smile. My three colleagues, Mr Mike Friederich, Prof Hendra Amijaya and Dr Ferian Anggara, […]
The Russian Far East has magical connotations. Perhaps no other place on Earth is so well known; yet so little visited. Most Westerners will be (or should be) enthralled by the word Siberia. The furthest part of Siberia is the Far East. Though remote, it nevertheless has had a tremendous amount of geological studies applied […]
I have an old fish on the wall, and I get to ponder it’s life every time I walk into my loo at home. I’ve been pondering this fish for the last 24 years. Considering its age, it is not a stinky, yucky fish. In fact it is over 48 million years old, so any […]
It was an early morning start and the topical air of South Kalimantan (Borneo) already hung heavy and thick. We boarded the wooden powerboat that was more than just a little tippy. It held a party of six, which consisted of colleagues Joan Esterle, Sonny Pangestu, Hermes Panggabean plus Pak Juwady, our pilot, and a […]
For those of you following this blog, you might remember that last year, on my annual field trip for the Geology 483 class (University of Canterbury), I lost my hammer. As is usual, this year as last, we visited the Denniston Plateau, which has an excellent geological section extending from the basement (Greenland Group meta-sediments; […]
It’s back to work after a long break over the holiday season! Having spent December and most of January in New Zealand, then the USA and then New Zealand again, we are back in Jakarta. Before leaving in late November, I attended the UGAS (Unconventional GAS) conference (26-27 November 2012) in Bali as a speaker. […]