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 […]
The speedboat skipped from wave to wave effortlessly; Tanjung Dewa was on our left and then it was gone. A head of us I could see the Senakin Peninsula, its dark forests tangled with cloud. The chill morning air made me smile. My three colleagues, Mr Mike Friederich, Prof Hendra Amijaya and Dr Ferian Anggara, […]
It was an early morning start and the topical air of South Kalimantan (Borneo) already hung heavy and thick. We boarded the wooden powerboat that was more than just a little tippy. It held a party of six, which consisted of colleagues Joan Esterle, Sonny Pangestu, Hermes Panggabean plus Pak Juwady, our pilot, and a […]
The next morning we woke up in the Miocene. After two full days of living in the present, we found ourselves fossicking around in sediments that were 15 million years old. They say a lot can happen in an afternoon, and indeed a lot did happen in the previous 5 billion afternoons. The march of […]