A shutterbug of stone

  This photogenic, fossil-rich, limestone hails from Somerset in England's West Country. It's not often that a polished slab of stone photographs decently with just a smartphone, but I was really pleased with this photo.   The main issues I find with this sort of shot are (i) holding the phone rock steady (genuinely no pun intended), and (ii) the fact that cameras tend to focus straight through polished surfaces onto something – often the photographer! – being reflected.   This slab is inside a glass case, which tends to add an additional complication in terms of reflections, but I was lucky here and this photo didn’t need to have a filter used or to have any adjustments made. Incidentally, this variety of stone (which dates back to the Lower Jurassic) is not actually a 'true' marble in the sense that geologists use the term - limestone metamorphosed by heat and pressure - but stonemasons use the term to describe any limestone that takes a good polish. This one certai...

One Saturday morning, I was on my way from Exeter to spend some quality time with the red cliffs just along the coast at Dawlish when the train went past the Warren, and I took this atmospheric photo through the train window. Dawlish Warren is really important for its coastal geomorphology, so it has a good Earth science interest in its own right. Looks idyllic, doesn't it?   It’s what the photo doesn’t show that comes to mind when I look at it.   Out of the window on the other side of the carriage, the sky was black.   Not just grey, but black-with-menaces.   The sort of black that a daytime sky has no business being.   As we rounded toward the small town and seafront station of Dawlish (which is now famous for the railway line being washed away there in a later, rather more massive storm and equally famous for the Herculean work of the 'Orange Army' who repaired it), the heavens opened.   As those of us who were getting off the train there did just th...

If there's a type of stone that characterises London, especially the Government estate and major historic buildings including Buckingham Palace and St Paul's, then that stone is Portland Stone. It's a limestone, dating back to the Jurassic Period; some facies (varieties) are very fossil-rich, with Grove Whitbed being rich in oysters, and Roach Stone being famous for it's 'Osses' heads' (Trigoniid bivalves) and Portland screws, a variety of gastropod mollusc.  Other facies are freestones, very suited to carving by stonemasons. There's a reason for the popularity of  Portland Stone in London, and for its use to rebuild St Paul's after the Great Fire of London in particular - Sir Christopher Wren owned shares in a certain quarry on the Isle of Portland!  His use of the stone set a trend, and now, in addition to the buildings I've already cited, think in terms of Regent Street, the Old Bailey, the Bank of England...  One of my favourite buildings is ...

A macro photo of Ketton Stone, demonstrating the ooliths it is composed of A lot of photos don’t really come out like you hope they  will.  They are fine, yes, but nothing to write home about – bog-standard landscape shots or whatever...   On the other hand, one occasionally does come out like you were really hoping it would, a landscape that takes your breath away or a detail of something you’ve seen.   This was one such photo, and yes, it does look like a certain well-known breakfast cereal!   I don’t think milk would soften it much, though. This particular photo is a macro shot of a piece of oolitic Lincolnshire Limestone, so we are  looking at a fairly small area of it.   The ooliths, which are each smaller than 1mm in diameter, are formed of layers of limestone – calcium carbonate – which have formed around a tiny piece of sand or shell.   I was lucky in that when I took the photo, the sun was shining – the lighting makes all the difference i...

  When you see granite in an urban setting, it's usually a polished slab on the wall of a bank (or former bank which is now occupied by purveyors of mediocre coffee) or rough-dressed as setts.  Sometimes it is scuffed and scratched so still very interesting to look at but not good for photography unless the scuffs and scratches are the subject of the photo. This particular piece, though, is rough-dressed and at a perfect height for photography.   It's in the wall of an extant bank in Peterborough city centre, UK.   It comes from Cornwall (SW England), and it tells a story:   It is a minute part of the Cornubian batholith which shapes the modern landscape; the said batholith was emplaced some 280 million years ago in the early Permian Period as magma solidified underground after the Variscan mountain-building episode further to the south.   Cornwall is a lovely county, famed for its scenery, it's pasties (a historic local food), and its geology.   I h...

If you mis-spent your youth hanging around natural history museums, you've seen a good number of skulls. You've almost certainly seen the cast of a T. rex skull, and probably the skull of an Allosaurus as well; you may have seen the skull of my favourite dino, Stegosaurus, or the pointy Triceratops.  You'll know that Diplodocus had peggy teeth, and that hippos have scary ones. Sabretooth cats were, well, scarytooth cats, and Megalodon teeth are all the more impressive when the teeth of a great white shark are displayed next to them. This, though, is the only skull so far that has made my partner exclaim “What the hell is that ??” when he’s seen the photo on my monitor.  Just look at that jaw mechanism, the pointy head, the spiky bones at the base of the skull.  Do first impressions tell the whole story, though?  What is this, and where does it, or did it, fit into its ecosystem? Gentlebeings, this is the skull of an active predator.   May I introduce you to ...

I had a 'free' afternoon, having a morning in the office that day and an evening meeting in London.  I cleared it with my Team Leader that I'd take the afternoon out  and I made my way to the Natural History Museum to look at the fossil marine reptiles.  After I'd spent quite some profitable time perusing those, I made sure I had a good look at Sophie, the most complete Stegosaurus ever found and the only one on display in Europe. Steggies are my favourite dinosaurs (yes, I'm a grown-up with a favourite dinosaur. I'd bet you a tube of fruit pastilles that I'm not the only one!) so visiting her was a must. After you have been awed by her size and her plates, the one thing you do notice is that she has a tiny 30cm-ish (about 1 foot in British terms), narrow, head in relation to her size. The species name, S. stenops, actually highlights this.    On a balcony overlooking the skeleton, the NHM have a clear Perspex model of a Stegosaurus' skull, and this has ...

Pristine, beautiful, white mud There’s mud, there’s Mud, and then there’s Mud .   There’s your normal mud, like you find in fields; I remember trying to walk my way across a wickedly muddy field with a group of my friends one December day.   The sky was a glorious pale blue, the shadows were seasonally long, but the ground...  Oh dear, the ground.   We were sure there was a path there somewhere  - or so the map was telling us!   It wasn't dignified.   The mud didn’t ruin the walk, but the memory of it does elicit a wry smile.   It was just mud.   The greater memories of that day are the amazing National Trust Property we were going to see, the red kites soaring overhead where we were parked, and the superb lunch in a country pub afterwards.  This was the day I developed a taste for peppercorn sauce. Then there's Mud:   Like the last day of an Open University summer school (SXR260, anyone?) that had otherwise enjoyed d...

Hertfordshire Puddingstone - pebbles of flint in a fine matrix. When I was knee-high to a tabby cat, my parents had the most wonderful atlas.  It was huge!  It was a good 50 cm high by 30 cm or more across and quite thick. That's not just me looking back at it through the eyes of a child, although I  remember having looked at it when I was about 7 or 8 years old.  I'd never seen anything like it!  I know it was that size because we lugged it around various RAF stations until (a) it was falling to bits and (b) it was given to me when I left home.  I eventually binned it when it had totally disintegrated.  I really do wish that I'd kept some of the pages but the actual atlas was fairly much obsolete by then, and that was before - for example - the break up of the USSR!  That's another thing - when we were growing up, countries felt eternal and absolute.  Who knew just how ephemeral they are and how quickly local and world events can split them ...

  "Why did you choose geology?" asked the tutor of each of us in turn. "Well, I suppose it was 'Once a rock chick, always a rock chick" I replied.   I actually had that as my tagline in my course's message board signature at the time, and one of the other students commented that she had seen me and the said tagline on there. It was true for more than one given value of the word 'rock'. I had listened to a fair bit of it during my teens and early twenties; Deep Purple's 'Black Night' still puts a smile on my face (Incidentally, I know that it's a rather heretic view, but I actually prefer Steve Morse to Richie Blackmore).  I can take or leave quite a lot of rock nowadays – but I get really excited by a good orchestra(!) I had become fascinated by geology and palaeontology in the very early parts of my degree (and I still am). I'd planned to study biology and ecology, but my foundation course was multi-disciplinary and I contracte...

Portoro marble - looking more like a dessert than a rock The day I took this photo was a feast for the eyes and the soul; whilst a rehearsal for the following week's Trooping of the Colour was underway nearby, my Other Half and I were visiting the [then] Queen's Gallery  at Buckingham Palace, London. It was the first time we saw any of the Royal Collection. We saw a Fabergé egg for the first time, and it was as beautiful and as finely wrought as we had imagined it would be.  We saw the golden Exeter Salt, we saw sculptures carved from the finest marble, we saw paintings by Old Masters and we saw, for the very first time for either of us, sketches by Leonardo da Vinci with notes in his mirror writing! One thing I also drank in, though, was this polished slice of Portoro marble. Stonemasons often refer to any stone that will take a polish as a marble, but Portoro is a true marble, i.e. a limestone that has been altered (metamorphosed) by heat and pressure; it comes from La Spezi...