Dr Kaydy Pinetown and I just gave a workshop on methane – from its formation, to measurement, to in-ground assessment to fugitive emissions and the legislation governing that. We were at the 42nd Annual Meeting of The Society for Organic Petrology (TSOP) in Beijing, China. TSOP is the premier international organisation that looks at all […]
Our group has just published a paper, with the research headed by Alex Wheeler, in Evolving Earth (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eve.2026.100156) on the palaeoecology of an area in Laurasia. This is the fourth paper on our efforts to unravel the paleoclimate, paleovegetation and paleoecology of the Early Cretaceous in the Central Asian region*. We still haven’t found any […]
Colombia has spectacular landscapes, spectacular people and of course … spectacular geology! Since I first went to Colombia almost 10 years ago, I was impressed with its abundance of … well,… almost everything. But one of the abundances it doesn’t have so much of anymore (and it is getting less abundant each year) is natural […]
The control of fire is arguably mankind’s most important learned skill. Yet … …Yet, we humans are still at the mercy of fire (natural or otherwise), which, when uncontrolled can obliterate not just forests, but whatever gets in the way, such as houses, infrastructure and even whole towns and communities. So, we take notice. And […]
One of the nice things about not being a tourist in places like Mongolia (as an example) is that you get to see a much fuller cross section of the place you are visiting. There are those who take the ‘high-road’ by only taking the ‘low-road’ travel options (though unless they’ve walked there from home, […]
If you have not already, please check out the review of the book “Coal and Coalbed Methane: Future Directions and Opportunities (2nd Edition) by Romeo M. Flores and me. You can find the review here: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.coal.2025.104756 (International Journal of Coal Geology, v. 304, 104756). Prof Smith from Curtain University in Perth, Australia is one of […]
In March I had the pleasure of accompanying the PhD candidate Edafe Ominigbo (School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, Queensland University of Technology) to Kalimantan, which is the Indonesian part of the island of Borneo. We were there to collect mafic rocks as part of his study. I know very little about igneous petrography (I […]
Like in many other places in the world, the country of Mongolia is endeavoring to move away from coal. And it is trying to be both practical and realistic. There are not many people in Mongolia, just 3.3 million for an area that stretches to 1.56 million square kilometers. People are spread pretty thinly over […]
How the newly published paper “Constraints from lamprophyre petrogenesis on the timing of Eocene lithospheric thinning and associated rifting of Borneo and Sulawesi” (Murphy et al., 2024) came to be has an interesting history. Well, to me anyway. If we take the Way Back Machine* to the mid-1980s, when I was doing my PhD field […]
I returned the other week from an extremely enjoyable trip to Patras, Greece where the 39th Annual Meeting of The Society for Organic Petrology (TSOP) was held. The meeting occurred in tandem with the the 74th Annual Meeting of the International Committed on Coal and Organic Petrology (ICCP). A big shout out to the organisers […]