Winter Programme Abstracts 2024-25

Dinosaur Bones and Badlands
Professor Phil Manning (University of Manchester)

Dinosaurs in some cases were awkwardly large. This led to some incredible adaptations to overcome the challenge of vast size, but makes them particularly difficult to excavate and study!
Some of the largest dinosaurs were the sauropods, growing up to 37 metres in length, if we are to believe some of the skeletons in museums, which are often based on partial/fragmentary remains.
This talk will take you on an excavation to the Morrison Formation of Wyoming (USA) that has produced several moderate sized (20+ metres long) sauropod dinosaurs, that were excavated over a period of five years.

Wednesday October 9th

Gold exploration and development in the United Kingdom
Dr Tim Colman (BGS, rtd)

Gold has only recently been the focus of active exploration since the abandonment of the fixed price of US$35 per ounce. in 1972, and it’s dramatic rise, since then, to a current $2500 per ounce.
The talk describes the various styles of gold mineralisation throughout Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and developments in their exploration and exploitation over the past 50 years.
Gold exploration and mining is not for the faint hearted!

Thursday October 17th. (WGCG)

Dawn of the Modern World: Life, Death and Rain in the late Triassic
Dr Mike Simms (Curator of Geology at National Museums NI.)

In November 1987 two young geologists stumbled upon evidence that the prevailing aridity of the Late Triassic was interrupted, for about a million years, by an interval of greatly increased rainfall that appeared synchronous with mass extinction and diversification events in both marine and terrestrial environments. This key episode in the evolution of taxa from dinosaurs to dinoflagellates, coccoliths to coral reefs, has been described as the Dawn of the Modern World. First published in 1989, the Carnian Pluvial Episode (CPE) was virtually ignored for almost 20 years. Since 2010 there has been a huge upsurge in interest worldwide. Research groups have confirmed much of what was reported, and hypothesised, in that first paper. The CPE is now entering the scientific ‘mainstream’. It featured prominently in episode 1 of the recent BBC documentary Earth, and was the main focus of a recent Japanese documentary.
This talk provides a history of the discovery of the CPE, the evidence for the climatic and biotic changes discovered back in the late-1980s, and more recent developments in the study of the CPE. The speaker is well placed to describe these events - he was one half of that geological partnership of 1987, and still works with his co-author Alastair Ruffell all these years later, and recently published another major paper on the CPE.

Wednesday October 23rd

The past, present and future of Antarctic seafloor ecosystems
Dr Rowan Whittle (BAS)

The seafloor around Antarctica is home to a diverse and unique community of animals and plants that are mostly found nowhere else on Earth. Sea life in the region has evolved over millions of years; from when the continent was much warmer, and was covered in forests, and there were ammonites, mosasaurs and plesiosaurs in the ocean; to when it became separated from other continents, and ice started to form.
We are currently investigating how past changes in climate caused shifts in seafloor ecosystems. Our research looks at how past seafloor communities were structured, and how this has changed over the Cenozoic (66 Ma to the present); through geological events, such as the K-Pg mass extinction (66 Ma) which killed off the dinosaurs; over a time of warmth in the early Eocene (56 Ma), to global cooling, and the onset of glaciation in the Antarctic region (around 34 Ma).
Today, around 94% of the Southern Ocean’s biodiversity is found sitting on, or crawling across, the sediments and rocks at the bottom of the sea. Having existed in near-isolation, and freezing waters for millions of years, these uniquely adapted species are under threat to local and global change.  Our research aims to improve our knowledge of how modern Antarctic ecosystems are structured, and how they function, and under what conditions they evolved. Using biological data from sea-floor science expeditions, fossil specimens from Antarctic field campaigns, and emerging technologies, we aim to use these data to increase our ability to predict ecosystem disturbance in a changing environment.

Wednesday November 13th

Earl Ferrers’ Lead Mine, Dimminsdale: History, Geology and Minerals
Dr Frank Ince

The Dimminsdale SSSI and Nature Reserve spans the Leicestershire-Derbyshire border, and is the location of the Earl Ferrers’ Lead Mine and Limestone Quarry (Staunton Harold), and some of the Harpur-Crewe Limestone quarries (Ticknall). The lead mine was worked from the late 1700s to the middle 1800s. Since the late 1700s, the mine has been a source of interesting mineral specimens that have found their way into many museum collections, both in the UK and elsewhere in the world. Of most interest are the galena and calcite specimens; although, chalcopyrite, bitumen, and sphalerite specimens are also impressive. This illustrated talk summarises the history and geology of the lead mine, and quarries, and describes the mineral species that occur in Dimminsdale SSSI.

Wednesday November 27th

Volcano-ice interactions in Iceland and Chile
Dr Dave McGarvie (Honorary Researcher, Lancaster University; Honorary Fellow, The University of Edinburgh)

Volcano-ice interactions (or glaciovolcanism) is a relatively new field in geology, and part of its attraction is that there are discoveries to be made that involve interesting fieldwork – often to remote and challenging places.
Part of its challenge is its complexity, because whether you have an explosive eruption or a lava eruption into ice, these eruptions will produce a much wider range of volcanic rocks. Another challenge is that as such eruptions occur beneath ice, they can seldom be observed, so there is always a puzzle to be solved, and a reconstruction to be done.
Iceland is a most excellent place to study volcano-ice interactions for two reasons. Firstly, there are lots of volcanoes, and there’s lots of ice, and, secondly, there’s a variety of compositions, ranging from the dominant type (basalt), to the uncommon type (rhyolite); and between, there are a bewildering variety of volcanic rocks. Another reason why Iceland is most excellent is that ice thicknesses vary from over 1.5 km., during recent glaciations, to just a few tens of metres on the margins of modern-day ice caps; and this enables us to better understand interactions between eruptions and ice.
Chile has many ice-capped volcanoes, and yet volcano-ice interactions are seldom studied. Access can be difficult, and one Chilean volcano that I will be talking about, requires riding up to it on horseback.
In this highly-illustrated talk, I’ll deal with some of the following topics:
• How ice thickness influences eruptions.
• How eruptions into ice provide us with valuable evidence on the relationship between global temperature and ice accumulation.
• How floods produced by eruptions into ice drive landscape change.
• Hazards from volcano-ice interactions.
• Recent and ongoing research.
I’ll end with a glimpse into the future, and the potential effects of volcano-ice eruptions in Iceland on its landscape and its society.

Wednesday December 11th

The Herefordshire Lagerstätte: Soft-bodied Virtual Fossils from a Silurian Volcanic Ash
Professor David J. Siveter (School of Geography, Geology & the Environment, University of Leicester)

Our understanding of the history of life on Earth relies heavily on the fossil record, and especially on rare cases of exceptional preservation, where soft parts of animals, and entire soft-bodied animals are preserved.
Such exceptionally preserved fossils provide an unparalleled view of animal palaeobiology, and the true nature of animal biodiversity.
On-going research has recovered spectacular fossils from Silurian rocks (~430 million years) of Herefordshire in the Welsh Borderland. Representing one of the rare Silurian exceptionally-preserved fossil deposits, this biota is of global importance.
It contains representatives of many major groups of animals, including molluscs, echinoderms, brachiopods, polychaetes, and, most especially, a wide range of arthropods.
The animals that are preserved are primarily epibenthic, but infaunal and nektobenthic forms are also represented.
The fossils are preserved as three-dimensional calcite void-fills, in carbonate nodules, and are impossible to extract by standard methods.
The specimens are studied using tomographic techniques to produce high fidelity three-dimensional virtual fossils that yield a wealth of palaeobiological information. These fossils are crucial in helping to fill a gap in our knowledge of the history of life, and to resolve controversies about the relationships, and evolution, of animals that are alive today.

Wednesday January 22nd

The Anthropocene and its deep time geological context
Professor Jan Zalasiewicz (University of Leicester)

Human civilisation has grown around the stable shorelines and climate, and amid the diverse biosphere of, the last ten millenia or so of the Holocene Epoch: the latest of many interglacial phases of the Quaternary Ice Age, and the one that the created the world we live in.
The growth of human civilisation has now put that stability into question. With the explosion in both human numbers and energy use since the Industrial Revolution has come sharp and large-scale changes to landscape, biosphere and climate. These rapid and large-scale changes have led to the suggestion that we are now living through the beginning of a new informal, de facto epoch, the Anthropocene: an interval of geological time dominated by overwhelming human impacts. The term was proposed just two decades ago by Paul Crutzen, the Nobel Prize-winning atmospheric chemist, and has since been widely used – and sharply debated.
Whether the Anthropocene will ultimately be formally accepted as a time term or not, it is, in reality, changing the geology of our planet, bringing in changes that are significant in a deep time perspective. These include physical changes most strikingly represented by the explosive growth of the ‘urban stratum’, the refashioning of sand, clay and limestone into our buildings, foundations and transport systems. Biological changes include the ongoing mass extinction event and the effect of invasive species, while human-made ‘anthroturbation’ is as extraordinary as anything in the fossil record. Chemical changes include the reshaping of the Earth’s natural carbon, phosphorus and nitrogen cycles, with their associated climate and biological impacts. The combined change is of a scale to leave a signal, in strata now forming, that will persist for many millions of years, but that have already taken the planet outside of the baseline conditions of the Holocene Epoch, and in several respects out of those of the Quaternary Ice Ages as a whole. Indeed, some of the planetary changes, such as the rapid growth of the technosphere, are wholly new within Earth’s 4.5 billion-year history.

Wednesday March 12th

Bologna Stone: A Curious Tale of Persistent Photoluminescence
Dr Frank Ince

A story of alchemy and strange luminescence in the 16th-17th centuries, related to the geology and minerals found near Bologna. This subject has a fascinating explanation, and is associated with the recent development of a range of innovative materials that exhibit persistent photoluminescence.