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 […]
Sign up now before it is overbooked! 4 September 2026 Join us at the 42nd Annual Meeting of The Society for Organic Petrology, Beijing, China (register here: https://tsop2026.tiemeeting.com/EN). This one-day workshop explores the fundamentals of measuring methane from resources to fugitive emissions. Methane is both a commercial source of energy but also a greenhouse gas […]
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 […]
40th Annual Meeting of The Society for Organic Petrology Decoding the shift: Organics and Critical Minerals in Future Energy Everything is in Place! Abstracts are coming in and registrations are being made. Don’t miss out! This meeting is one of the most ambitious annual conferences to be undertaken by TSOP. If you want a truly […]
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 […]
Decoding the shift: Organics and Critical Minerals in Future Energy ABSTRACTS DUE: 1 July 2024 It has been four decades since the first official TSOP meeting at Tyson’s Corner, Virginia (USA) in 1984. Although the aspiration was always for TSOP to be an internationally recognized professional organization, I think few of us could have imagined […]
It is no secret that the mere mention of the word coal is divisive. Yet, people on either side of the debate have a far from adequate understanding of what coal actually is. Practically no one who is talking about coal these days has the faintest idea of the conditions under which it is formed, […]
As a New Zealand Citizen, I am always amazed at the grandeur of its landscape. Although I have lived outside New Zealand for the last 10 yrs, I can never forget just what a wonderful place it is. Thus, when there was an opportunity to head back both for work and pleasure, how could I […]
As the world’s population passes the 8 billion mark there is little doubt the strain that puts on the Earth’s resources†. Just think on that for a moment. Clean, potable water is at a premium. Unprocessed food stuffs are not available to a large part of the population. And energy to power washing machines, schools, […]
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 […]