Tag: Part IB

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Impressions from ‘not a geologist’ – the Dorset section of the 1B South West trip

Day 1 – Off we go!

I’d never been to any part of the southwest so I was very much looking forward to my second Earth Sciences Department field trip – third if we count an afternoon at Ketton Quarry. My first big trip had been to Arran the previous year, to my mind it would take a lot to surpass that experience. This account will contain little to no geological verbiage in order not to bring shame to myself or the department.

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Crossing the Moho and exploring the crust in Cornwall

This year’s Cornwall leg of the SW of England field trip was bigger and sunnier than ever – tanned faces, record number of students, big smiles and lots of lovely igneous and metamorphic rocks. The trip starts in Falmouth to show the second year undergrads some world-class geological localities and then to Bude for impressive structures associated with the formation and closure of the Culm Basin. The challenge for our enthusiastic second years being how to align all this new geological information with the broader tectonics of the Variscan Orogeny and Devonian & Carboniferous geology.

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Following in the footsteps of Adam Sedgwick in Sedbergh

On the 23 September 2014 the new 1B students, fresh from a summer of forgetting everything they knew for their exams, disembarked from the train at the, to them, remote Oxenholme station for the Sedbergh mapping trip, led by Nigel Woodcock. Waiting to meet them from the train was local coach driver, John, a true northerner and unflappable even in the face of 60 Cambridge students, some of whom seemed to have brought the kitchen sink with them. The group squashed onto the buses and made the winding journey into the Yorkshire Dales (despite still being in Cumbria).

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Honing geological mapping skills on the Isle of Skye

Between the 23rd of June and the 5th of July the usually tranquil village of Ord on the Sleat peninsula of the Isle of Skye once again played host to a cohort of new Part II students as they set about honing their geological mapping skills. After a few quiet years, Cambridge returned in force to the quartzite hills of the Ord window: at any one time, up to thirty four students and ten demonstrators could be spotted roaming the bogs, streams and ridges in search of contacts, dykes and fault-planes.

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