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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Sun, sea and subduction: Spain 2016

Spain 2016 outshone Spain 2015 the moment the plane took off from Gatwick Airport. David Hodell, our mighty leader, breathed a sigh of relief when French Air Traffic Control decided not to strike at the same time as the Cambridge fourth-year Earth Sciences fieldtrip. 29 students and 8 demonstrators left the drizzle behind us and landed in sunny south-east Spain. A quick change into shorts in the airport loos and we were ready for terrible sunburn.

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NERC DTP fieldtrip to Newfoundland and Labrador: the industry perspective

Having a career as a geologist in the oil industry, I get my excitement from working on data from all over the world. However, there is only one thing better than this, which is to actually see the data in its original setting as rocks in the field. Hence when the Cambridge Department of Earth Sciences invited me along to the Earth System Science Doctoral Training Partnership (ESS DTP) field trip, I naturally jumped at the chance.

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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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First years get a taste of being a ‘real geologist’ in Arran

The annual first year undergraduate field trip to the Isle of Arran, Scotland took place as usual at the end of March and beginning of April. This is always an exciting trip – first years get their first taste of what being a ‘real geologist’ is all about and the demonstrators get to revisit the truly spectacular wealth of geology the island has to offer.

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Admiring the handiwork of active tectonics in Central Greece

On the 9th of December, the second group (party B) of 16 part-II students set off to sunny Central Greece. This area is one of the most tectonically active regions in the world and experiences regular large (4-6 on the Richter scale) earthquakes. This relatively fast movement, together with the large amount of karstic limestone in the area, allows for evidence of vertical uplift or subsidence (e.g. on the coasts) to be well preserved and provides students with an excellent opportunity to visualize active continental extension. The aim of the trip is for students to explore, observe and then interpret earthquake focal mechanisms, surface expressions of faults (fault scarps) and vertical coastal movements.

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