In June, after the mad rush of exams and vivas, I found myself back at my secondary school in Birmingham, boarding a coach with some of my old geography teachers and over 60 Year 10 students. I had been asked to come along to highlight some of the amazing geology on show along the Jurassic coast.
Continue reading “Back to school: introducing GCSE geographers to the geology of Dorset”
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.
Continue reading “Impressions from ‘not a geologist’ – the Dorset section of the 1B South West trip”
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.
Continue reading “Crossing the Moho and exploring the crust in Cornwall”
