“I’m sorry sir, but that flight is fully booked and there are no more today”, said the man behind the counter at the Bogotá airport. It was 5:30am and sleep was still making an armed assault on my eyes. The day before, our 2pm flight had been changed to 7am without explanation and now they […]
I once visited a coal seam gas reservoir. The year was 2008. The seam was 950 m below the surface. We accessed the reservoir thanks to the helpful personnel of a Chinese mine located just south of the city of Shenyang. It was hot and none to confortable. But a great experience to see and […]
It was Ron Stanton (U.S. Geological Survey) who instilled in me the importance of proper representative sampling and John C. Ferm (University of Kentucky)* who drove home the concept of variability. In understanding the character of coal beds, these two concepts should mess seamlessly together. Or so you’d think … As it turns out there […]
To most people, a rock is hard, static and immoveable. But like most things in life, that is all relative. Take a drive through almost any mountain range and you’ll see rocks that have been twisted and folded, contorted and pressed. These dynamic scenes are almost always composed of rocks rich in minerals (think sandstones, […]
If your idea of heaven is noodles, then when you die, you will come to Taiyuan. In case you didn’t know, the Shanxi Province in China is the noodle capital of the world and the capital of Shanxi is the city of Taiyuan (at least in terms of noodles). I had come to Taiyuan to […]
It was springtime in Xuzhou and the flowers were blossoming. Although not a small city by any measure – other than in China – the 8.5 million people seem a quieter type than elsewhere. Populated by parks, wide streets and relatively low buildings, the overall feeling one gets of Xuzhou is balance, politeness and a […]
Arriving in Bandung at 11pm on an early February evening the first thing I noticed was the coolness. Of course I already knew that Bandung, being over 750 m above sea level, is much cooler than Jakarta. But I was travelling from Brisbane, Australia where the temperatures had been above 35ºC and often over 40ºC […]
The lyrics of Neil Young* were going through my head as we trundled down the decline of a mineshaft at 3000 m elevation. We had left the brilliant blue skies of the Andean cordillera moments before, plunging into the darkened tunnel; we were headed for the Guaduas Formation (Late Cretaceous – Paleocene), which contains some […]
It looked like machines and the weather were conspiring against us. The last flight from Denver to Gillette, Wyoming was ‘temporarily’ delayed (which in airport speak means “quite possibly cancelled”) and then there was the weather. I had flown the previous day from Brisbane, Australia to Denver to meet the field trip participants at one […]
Why does Indonesia have so much coal? This might be like asking why is the sky blue? – but, like that question, it is fundamental and few seem to have considered it. A new paper by Mike Friederich, Tim Moore and Romeo Flores (“A regional review and new insights into SE Asian Cenozoic coal-bearing sediments: […]