Colombia is an utterly magical place and the geology is awe-inspiring. If you haven’t visited yet, make a booking. Today. Especially if you are a geologist. We’ve recently published a paper* on the Late Cretaceous (possibly Paleocene) Guaduas Formation in the Eastern Cordillera Basin. The formation is consistently organic–rich and coal beds are common and […]
Excellent paper* just out by Alex Wheeler reconstructing palaeoclimate and palaeoecology in the Early Cretaceous of Inner Mongolia. Amazing what studying organics can tell you!!! I was lucky enough to work on this paper with him and co-authors Prof Jian Shen, Dr Marvin Moroeng,and Dr Jingjing Liu. We did the sampling of this back in […]
Of all the particles in a sedimentary basin, organics are arguably the most insightful. Think about it: they tell you how hot things got, millions and millions of years ago, and that is both within the basin at depth but also at the surface when they were deposited; they tell you what plants were evolving; […]
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 […]