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 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, […]
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 […]
On the 7th of June, 9pm Brisbane, Australia time I’ll be giving an invited lecture on some of the palaeoclimate, palaeovegetation and palaeotectonic studies we’ve been doing in the Hailar Basin, Inner Mongolia, China. This is for The Society for Organic Petrology. Read the abstract for the talk below. It’s ONLINE and Open to All! […]
Over the last seven months Cipher’s Experts have been working with Mongolian colleagues to assess the coalbed gas resources of Mongolia. The report was signed off just before the 30th of June, on time and to budget. The Australian Mongolian Extractives Program (AMEP – phase 2)/Australian Aid funded the work and our Mongolian team consisted […]
Colombia is an utterly magical place and the geology is awe-inspiring. If you haven’t visited yet, make a booking. Today. Especially if you are a geologist. We’ve recently published a paper* on the Late Cretaceous (possibly Paleocene) Guaduas Formation in the Eastern Cordillera Basin. The formation is consistently organic–rich and coal beds are common and […]
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 […]
Of all the particles in a sedimentary basin, organics are arguably the most insightful. Think about it: they tell you how hot things got, millions and millions of years ago, and that is both within the basin at depth but also at the surface when they were deposited; they tell you what plants were evolving; […]
I was flying through the chill Christchurch air with my arms outstretched like some newbie superhero about to make a hard landing on frosty, frozen gravel. I had just been cycling through Hagley Park on my way to work thinking about how to put together a disparate set of papers for a book when I […]