After three and half years we made the journey back to China and back to the Early Cretaceous of Inner Mongolia. We know that it was hot in the Early Cretaceous, even at high latitudes such as that of Inner Mongolia but our first stop in Beijing had us sweating and swearing in very real […]
Excellent paper* just out by Alex Wheeler reconstructing palaeoclimate and palaeoecology in the Early Cretaceous of Inner Mongolia. Amazing what studying organics can tell you!!! I was lucky enough to work on this paper with him and co-authors Prof Jian Shen, Dr Marvin Moroeng,and Dr Jingjing Liu. We did the sampling of this back in […]
It’s a Virtual Meeting you shouldn’t miss! And it’s FREE to all TSOP members – if you are not a member, it still will only cost you the price of joining TSOP for a year ($US25 for professionals and $US15 for students). Check out the meeting website: https://tsop.org/TSOP2022/index.html The Society for Organic Petrology (TSOP) is […]
Ever get that sinking feeling? Well, if you were standing in the Kutai lakes area in central Borneo you’d be right to think so. And its not just because it is full of peat and wetlands. Located about 100 km from the nearest coast and surrounded by low, heavily vegetated hills, that border on becoming […]
It is already the most downloaded paper for the International Journal of Coal Geology*. No wonder – a fundamental attribute of any rock is knowing how it gets there. Sure, coal comes from peat, but it is those small changes in peat type that result in large differences in coal type and those differences result […]
My father worked for the phone company all his life. Actually, that isn’t completely true. In 1943, during World War II, he joined the Marines, got married and managed not to get killed. After the war he returned to his job at the C&P Telephone Co., played around on boats in and around the Potomac […]
Thirty seconds seems like an incredibly short amount of time. But a lot of things can happen in thirty seconds. I had removed one of my gloves to turn the page in my field notebook to jot down some measurements on the coal we were sampling. It was a bad idea. In that short amount […]
The Hailaer Basin in Inner Mongolia, China has a lot of coal, mostly of Cretaceous age; some beds are over 40 m in thickness. Setting aside any of its economic uses, the scale of peat accumulation is phenomenal. The basin itself is tectonically dissected into coal fields ranging in size distribution from 20×80 km to 40×120 […]
As we travelled between Katowice and Krakow, the Polish translator switched effortlessly back and forth between English, Chinese and her native language. I can vouch that her English was impeccable and can only guess that her Chinese was too, based on the intensity of the exchange and the frequency of the erupting laughter. I confess […]
I just couldn’t let it go. Even after 27 years I still looked. Not continuously of course, but whenever I discovered a book that I’d had for a long time but not opened in a while I’d turn it upside down and riffle its pages to encourage anything jammed in there to fall out. Or […]