A very modern Library

Brum (Birmingham, UK) was very different from how I remembered it.  I'd been through the city a number of times, changing at the horrendous New Street station (the above-ground part of the station has been refurbished now, and is quite something in scale as stations go, but the platform areas are still gloomy and unpleasant). I'd been to Brum once, by car, to see Runrig at the Symphony Hall.  I'd never looked around the city centre, though, until one day I was at a meeting at the Library. I'm not used to this sort of architecture but I really liked the geometry and the complexity created from circles. I took this photo while we were out on the roof terrace at lunchtime.

Oh - and the Library, inside, is amazing!!

#100Photos #48

A twist(er) in the tale

We (the local geology and palaeontology group) were in a huge quarry In Rutland one Saturday. We'd been collecting marine invertebrate fossils in the morning - I'd collected enough fossil shellfish to make a decent gumbo.  There were mussels, horse mussels, clams, sea urchins, all from a warm, tropical sea in the Jurassic, all living in their own trophic niches.  Some of my friends found fish teeth – bony fishes and hybodont (peg-toothed) sharks.

During the morning, the sky had become more threatening, and we had to run to try (and fail) to avoid the downpour that came with a thunderstorm.  Luckily, this quarry has excellent facilities including a warm, dry room with a coffee machine, chairs and tables. It’s not a pretty room but it’s a very welcome one.  Anyway, this was a good time to have lunch, so we did, then we started to move out to another area with rocks and fossils deposited in a freshwater environment.

I was a little behind some of the others, as I’d stopped to chat to one of the group who was still eating his lunch.  As I was walking to join the others, I looked up at the sky behind me and saw this.  Being me, I took a quick snap even though I hadn’t realised what I was looking at – you don’t expect to see something like this funnel cloud.  It was only when I saw the structures in this photo on my laptop screen that evening that I realised what I’d seen!  It was rapidly moving away from us and it was pretty much over the horizon by the time I caught up with everyone, and they were more interested in looking down and at coprolites than the sky.  I was probably the only person in the group to have seen this, and I suspect that minus this evidence, I’d not be believed when I tell the tale!

#100Photos #47

Cloudscape: Sky doughnut

 A detail of a wider cloudscape photo I took one day; I was intrigued by this formation.  Yes, I've deepened the blue.

#100Photos #46

The South Bank

To someone more urban than me, this is probably a rather pedestrian photo.  I see more sheep and cattle than I do people most weeks, and I'm happy with that.  This, though, was a rather special night:  I had ticked off a major item on my bucket list, hearing Holst's Planets live at the Royal Festival Hall in London.  I was still in musical heaven as we left and I took this photo of the lights and colours of the South Bank.

#100Photos #45

Suffolk Coast

This almost feels like it should be painted or printed on canvas!  This was the Suffolk coast (eastern England) on a Summer's day.

#100Photos #44

Peppers on a market stall

I don't call myself a street photographer but I couldn't resist opportunistically 'papping' these peppers as I walked past them on my way to buy a cappuccino one morning (why, yes, I was on my way to the office. Why do you ask?).  I did buy some nice juicy plums from the stall!

#100Photos #43

Golden sands set hard

Well, as they say, a picture is worth a thousand words - but sometimes you need words to tell the story of the picture. 

Take this one, for instance, which I took twenty years ago with a stupidly cheap and nasty APS camera.  I think it was my first or second post in the earlier version of this blog (hence comments from that time).

You wouldn’t know from the photo but standing in front of this quarry face was at the start of an adventure and the start of a new career.  It was my first field trip as a student, doing a science foundation course that I hoped would lead to a career as a biologist or ecologist.  Little did I know that by the end of the year I would be hooked on Earth Science and changing tack towards a geosciences degree!  

What you can’t see from the photo is that the quarry was an absolute suntrap and that after taking the said photo I promptly retreated to the shade and sat on a rocky ledge fanning myself with my notebook while I was trying to take in all I was learning that day.  You also won't see from the photo that the 'bird poo' you can just about make out in the bottom left quadrant photo is artfully faked, so we were gleefully informed, with white paint for a wildlife documentary!

Oh – and for those who are interested:  The photo shows an exposure of cross-stratified sandstone, dating back to the Cretaceous Period, in a disused quarry at the HQ of the RSPB in Sandy, Bedfordshire (England).  The interesting thing about it is that this was being deposited in a locally-shallowing sea while global sea levels were rising as a result of  temperature rises leading to 'Greenhouse Earth' conditions.

#100Photos #42

The sorry-looking Coelacanth

I grew up reading about the coelacanth and about how it had been rediscovered in 1938 when it was thought to have become extinct millions of years ago.  When I first saw this specimen, in London's Natural History Museum a mere decade ago, my first reaction was an almost child-like wonder.  Here in the actual flesh was this living fossil (well, this example wasn't living, obviously...).  It was a solid, primitive, hefty-looking fish and looking at it felt like looking at a living dinosaur.  Yes, I know...  It is fair to say that as a species it isn't an underwhelming fossil fish this month (if you know, you know) or any other month.

My second reaction was that it actually looks rather sorry for itself and this particular one is in fact underwhelming.  Like everything else that has been 'pickled' the way this one has, it has become pale and colourless over time. It really is a shame - and not just because live ones are the most amazing blue that would suit what seems to be my usual palette very well! Unless you know how special these fish are, this one isn't going to inspire you at all.  It didn't help, from a photography point of view, that of course you're trying not to photograph the reflections on the glass at the same time.  I didn't have a camera with me the first time I saw it, but when I went back to the NHM to spend a little quality time with the marine reptiles, I also made a point of looking for the coelacanth again.  If I'd started my bucket list at the time I saw it, the coelacanth would definitely have been on it.

Looking at the photo again, it seems only right to make it monochrome rather than leave the poor creature looking as washed out as it is in its tank.  It's not a technically good photo by any means but  this specimen creates deep if rather mixed feelings in me.

#100Photos #41

Beauty among the grey

When I took this, I was one of a group of people walking down into a uniformly grey quarry.  The ground was grey, and the quarry faces were grey. We were orange in our hi-vis.  There was a bank of clay waste alongside the track we were on, and in places the wildflowers brought very welcome colour to the scene.

#100Photos #40

Crinoids in the hall!!

In general, people don't really expect floors to be interesting but, just sometimes, you come across something like this.  Before I tell you about this stone, and the fossils in it, I'll tell you about the day I took this photo.

 

It was Sunday just gone, and for me it was a Red Letter Day.  I have a bucket list, and one of the items on it was to hear Mussorgsky's 'Pictures at an Exhibition' live.  If I could hear 'Night on the Bare Mountain' at the same performance, that would be a real bonus.  This Sunday, the Philharmonia Orchestra were performing both at the Royal Festival Hall on the South Bank, London, and Steven Isserlis was the soloist for Kabalevsky's Cello Concerto number 2 in addition.  The whole concert was a real treat and well worth the trip to London.

I'd got there early - a couple of hours early.  Deliberately.  That allowed for rail delays and gave me time to buy lunch (this was an afternoon performance).  It also gave me time to look at the floor - there is some refurbishment going on at the Hall at present, so there were was nobody milling around where I was admiring the said fossils and trying to get a decent photo of them with my mobile phone (it's a Samsung A23, if you're interested and you want to look up details of its cameras).  I was half-aware that there was somebody nearby, and he came over to ask me about the photos I was taking.  If you know me, you know that means I'm going to go into some detail with an equal amount of enthusiasm.  After he introduced himself, he asked to take my photo - he is a very talented portrait photographer, and I'm really looking forward to seeing the result.  He was shooting on actual film!  We then spent a good few minutes looking at the floor and in my case, trying to take a decent-ish photo of it.  I am pleased to say that Gavin, as I learned his name is, was as enthusiastic about the crinoids as I was, especially when I showed him a photo of an extant species.  I'd be interested to see the photos of them he took.  We swapped Instagram details so I no doubt will.

Coming back to the photo:  Quite apart from the fact that I'm a tad arthritic nowadays, taking a photo of a polished slab is a s*d because the camera tries to focus through the surface rather than on it, and also the surface is worn so that the edges of the fossils are no longer crisp and distinct when you really zoom in to them.

Having made my excuses for this photograph:

This is Derbydene Stone, a limestone from Cromford in Derbyshire (I didn't know that when I visited Cromford many years ago!). It is full of the stems and ossicles of crinoids (sea lilies).  These are animals in the same family  - echinoderms - as sea urchins and starfish.

What is a amazing about these crinoids, though, is their age.  They - and the stone they are preserved in - date back more than 330 million years to the Lower Carboniferous Period, long before the evolution of dinosaurs and mammals.  In fact, when T. rex was learning that that bright flash was really bad news, these animals had already been fossils for 264 million years. We're way closer in time to T. rex, at 66 million years, than T. rex was to these crinoids.

#100Photos #39

A rite of passage

 

Every summer, the Open University used to hold a residential course, SXR260 The geological history of the British Isles, based at Durham University. For a week’s study, you didn’t just need your everyday clothes; you needed your outdoor gear (not forgetting waterproofs!) and boots, camera, books, stationery, sunblock, hairdryer... you get the picture.  You tended to gain the odd hand specimen of rock to take home for your reference collection as well; not many, of course, but choice.  If you’re interested enough to be reading this, you have probably been on the same course or on a good few field trips so you know what I’m talking about in terms of luggage!

Durham Station did not have lifts.  At the end of my week (I was there in 2005), there I was, struggling to carry my case down the stairs.  I’m not tiny but the case was hefty.  Bang on cue, this chap and his girlfriend overtake me and said chap takes the chance to impress his girlfriend with his gallantry. “Can I help you with your case, love?”  “Yes, please,” said I in my most pathetic voice.

Chap picks up the case, which is clearly heavier than he expected. “What have you got in here, rocks?”  “Funny you should say that, I’ve just been doing a week’s geology...”  The look on his face clearly said that he couldn’t have made up that story if he tried.  I know I couldn’t have done, and I've often wondered whether he told the story in the pub that night.

One of the visits during the week had been to Shap Quarry, in Cumbria.  I had heard so much about Shap granite during the previous 18 months that it had assumed almost numinous status. Since then, I've seen polished slabs of it on walls and used as counter tops, and the bollards outside St Paul's (London) are carved from it. 

When we visited, we were actively encouraged to take a bit of the granite each away with us – the quarry get lots of goodwill and a bit of waste rock removed for free and the student gets a specimen for their collection.  Win-win!  The smokers (as I was then) were sitting playing chimneys on a wall outside our accommodation and we all agreed that while we had been fascinated by all of our site visits, visiting Shap quarry had genuinely felt like a rite of passage with our hand specimens feeling like tokens of that rite.

Needless to say, the granite at the top of this post is the piece I brought back with me.

#100Photos #38

Yellow Chalk?!

Or is it, though?  Is it not lemon mousse?  Well, I for one would not want to try to serve this into a bowl with a spoon... And neither are the orangey lines toasted sugar.  This is harder than your average chalk - which in turn is far from bring the boring white featureless mass that you might think. When you look at it you see details, structures, layers and beds.  It tells tales of a greenhouse Earth, of the movement of continents and the growth of mountains.  It tells tales of the life that lived in the seas where it settled.

This is West Runton in Norfolk on the east coast of the UK.  You're standing on the top of the Chalk (with a capital 'C') and looking up at huge blocks and rafts of chalk which have been driven uphill by glaciers. Yes, glaciers can do that - they can do whatever they want. The chalk now finds itself surrounded by much younger sediments that tell the tale of temperatures falling into an Ice Age.  West Runton was home to a Steppe mammoth, excavated there and now on display in Norwich, and to a variety of other terrestrial and freshwater fauna and flora.  Norfolk isn't flat and it certainly isn't boring!

#100Photos #37

Mosses and a tiny 'shroom

 

Rather typically of me, I got into another project and haven't visited this blog recently.  Nevertheless, here is a photo from my walk to the local supermarket this morning; mosses on the stump of a felled tree.  That tiny mushroom, though!

#100Photos #36