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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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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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Lava adventures in Central Iceland

Since 2006, Professor Bob White has been operating a seismic network in the centre of the Icelandic highlands in order to understand how melt is distributed beneath the crust and hence how the crust is built. The volcano chosen is Askja, a spectacular composite volcano with 3 impressive, nested calderas. It last erupted in 1961 but its most spectacular eruption was a phreato-plininan eruption in 1875 which caused a mass exodus from NE Iceland. However, this summer, during a routine trip to download the data from the instruments it was side-lined by volcanic activity nearby.

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Trails from the Outback

Part 1 – Tracking the First Colonizers of Land

The Sun was setting fast. Only about half an hour before it sunk beneath the horizon. But that was just perfect. For that’s when the Sun’s low, raking rays clipped the surface of Tumblagooda Sandstone, perched high above the Murchison River gorge in Western Australia. And there, running across the surface, like sets of miniature railway tracks, were three sets of parallel rows of little footprints made by multi-legged arthropods about 430 million years ago. Each trackway was as wide as my hand. One animal had followed another, then veered off to the left. Another, more faint set, had cut across them, moments later. Each trackway marked the activity of these animals for maybe just 20 seconds of their lives hundreds of millions of years ago.

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