Snap, crackle and Rock

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 in photography!  I didn’t take it out on site – I laid the rock horizontally on a picnic table in our back garden when the sun was just at the right angle.  The height of the table also made it comfortable to take the photo.

To set the photo in its context: The Lincolnshire Limestone (but the piece in the photograph came from Ketton Quarry, in Rutland) was formed roughly 155 million years ago, in the Jurassic Period.  The area that is now south-east England (and a lot wider area, actually) was then a warm, sub-tropical sea.  It would have been rather like the seas around the Bahamas are now!  The seabed was subject to some quite strong currents, so the ooliths were being rolled around and coated in calcium carbonate.  Rutland may be England’s smallest county but, with an impressive record of changing climatic and depositional environments, it is certainly not the least interesting from a geological point of view.

100Photos #17

When cream oozes honey

I noticed a huge fungus at the base of an oak tree as I was walking to the shop yesterday morning (it's just gone midnight as I'm typing this). Being me, I walked over to have a closer look at it, and I took some photos. I was taken with the way the surface of the fungus had shedloads of droplets of liquid oozing out onto it. There was even a fly trapped 'Jurassic Park'-style in one droplet at the top of this photo! I have to confess that I didn't see it until I looked at the photo on my laptop. I looked this one up on a Famous Search Engine, and it's an Oak bracket fungus - sometimes known as butt-rot fungus(!).

Yes, I got a couple of funny looks from passers-by while I was taking the pics, but I'm used to that! I'm a geologist by training and I take photos of rocks and stone-built walls, often macro shots that need me to have the camera just a few cm away from the subject.

I'm trying to improve my photography at the moment so I've been blogging some of my 'archive' photos here along with new ones,and I've realised when selecting them that actually, my palette does tend to lean towards creams, golds, and blues when I'm shooting in colour. Much of my photography - like this photo - is opportunistic but I'm starting to use a tripod more and I'm experimenting with a lightbox.

I was also thinking, as I took this photo, just how handy it is to have a digital camera that's light enough to always carry, be it in a phone or a dedicated camera. That was rapidly followed by the thought that it's really good not to have to send a roll of film off for developing at quite some cost before you know what you're really got photo-wise and that you can discard as many photos as you want to with no cost implications. I graduated from a cheap and nasty APS camera that used film rolls of 25 exposures to a 7MP digital camera (Fujifilm FinePix S5700), and then to smartphone cameras, which do me proud! This one was taken with a Samsung A23. I do still use the FinePix sometimes.

#100Photos #16

 

A little bit of Cornwall, in my soul

 

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 have been lucky enough to visit a number of geological sites in Cornwall  - as well as the Eden Project and the Lost Gardens of Heligan - and a number of places with interesting and very different geology in Devon, the next county to the east. 

The snowy-white mineral making up the bulk of this sample in this photo is plagioclase feldspar, the grey is quartz, and the black and shiny ones are varieties of mica (biotite and muscovite respectively).

#100Photos #15

A shine of paperbarks

 

This isn't what I'd call an 'arty' photo:  A friend and I went to look at the 2012 Olympic Site in Stratford, London to assess the Earth science interest of the site, but there are many things that catch your eye as you walk around.  I loved these paperbark trees, a.k.a. Tibetan cherries - the bark was so well oiled (yes, that's apparently a thing) and the grove really well planned. I'll bet it looks amazing when those lights are on!  I also reckon that the collective noun for this species should be a 'shine.'

(We had a look at the fossils in the Jura Yellow - a very fossiliferous Jurassic marine limestone, full of cephalopod and sponge fossils - floor at the Westfield Centre as well, but that's another story, for another time.)

#100Photos #14

Stained light

There's no deep backstory to this photo; my partner and I were out in Sheffield for the day, learning that it's a lovely place with some great sculpture in the streets, sweet winter gardens (which were hosting Luke Jerram's amazing giant E. coli artwork at the time), and stars dedicated to famous sons and daughters of the city - including Olympian Jessica Ennis (now Jessica Ennis-Hill), Paralympian Grace Clough, and comedian, actor and traveller Michael Palin.  I'd been to Sheffield before before, but I'd only been through the city centre on the way to or from a conference or meeting venue rather than having the time to explore; it was my partner's first visit.

It also boasts two no fewer than two cathedrals.  We had a good look around both of them, and I was captivated by the light shining through one of the stained glass windows in the Anglican one, the Cathedral Church of St. Peter and St. Paul, colouring part of this column beautifully.

#100Photos #13

Paddington assumes a mantle

 

I'd be quite hard-pressed to say why, but I quite like London Paddington station.  It's not because of convenience; I always get there on the Circle Line and it's a fair hike from there to the main concourse.  It's not because of the association with a certain Bear (although that certainly doesn't make me dislike it!).  Yes, I like it partly because of the amazingly fossiliferous limestone it's paved with, and partly because it feels airy and has amazing architecture, but that's not 'it'.  The station just has something about it.

I went through there on Saturday on my way to visit Oxford University's Museum of Natural History, which was a Bucket List (caps intended) trip for me.  At least one photo from the museum will no doubt appear on here at some point, but here's a photo I took of Paddington on the way through.  Standing on the dividing line between two arches, it feels like the station is mantling you with its wings.

#100Photos #12 

Monochrome

There is no backstory to this photo, and no reminiscence attached to it.  It's just our kitchen.  I was looking at the in-camera filters last week, and I took this photo in black and white.  It's definitely not perfect in terms of composition, but I loved the light and the work surface and how shooting in monochrome gives the room a completely different feel, so instead of putting it in Room 101, I'm sharing it.

#100Photos #11
 

Under the skin of a predator

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 Gadus morhua, more commonly known as… Cod.  Yes, cod, as in fish and chips.  Humble to us, but the bane of prey species including other bony fish, crabs, lobsters, squid, mussels and other molluscs, and worms.

I was really pleased with this photo, which I took in Leicester's New Walk Museum; pics taken through glass aren't always the best.  This one definitely deserves a place on this blog.

#100Photos #10  .

Did theropods dream of armoured sheep?

Sophie the Stegosaurus in all her skeletal glory

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 a coloured model of the brain inside it.  The brain is about the size of a plum.

I remember reading, far longer ago than I would like to admit, that steggies had two brains - one tiny one in their heads and another one near their pelvises.  Current thought is that the 'second brain' was more probably a glycogen body, so their tiny brains, at well under 100g each, were all they had by way of grey (and while) matter. 

Yes, they were predated by theropods (hunter-killer dinos), and yes, they defended themselves with their tail spikes (known as Thagomisers, but that's another story).  There is fossil evidence of an injury to an Allosaurus caused by a steggie using its tail spikes in self-defence, but their anatomy does also suggest that they were no Einsteins.  They were dim, they probably roamed in herds and they grazed.  A bit like armoured sheep in a way.  Now, I like sheep and I see many more sheep and cattle than I do people most weeks, but it does have to be said that they're not the brightest animals on the planet.  Sheep brains weigh in at about a comparatively large 140g, by the way.

Again, yes, Sophie is an amazing specimen; when I look at this photo, I still feel the awe I felt when I was standing in front of her.  Allosaurus were probably not so impressed, but I bet that they dreamed of hunting Sophie and her kin.

Yes, if you followed my earlier blog on this site, you will have read about this photo before.  Sorry (not sorry) 😊 - it bears another look.

#100Photos #9

Transported - to the past

 

It's funny how something can instantly take you back through the years!  I remember once walking through town, here on the edge of the Fens in the UK, on a really hot day.  The smell of hot dust and the harsh light on the limestone of a historic local hotel transported me through space and time to Malta, where we lived for a few years when I was a child.

This morning, I was looking at bowls for ramen (our cereal bowls are on the petite side and just aren't up to the job).  Looking at all the crockery instantly took me back to when I was a teenager, leaving home and buying what I needed for life in my first flat.  It was an amazingly strong feeling and unleashed a flood of nostalgia.  We're still using the cutlery set one of my friends gave me then but I only bought one or two of everything else to start with. We do seem to have bought multiples of things since then!

I've just worked out how many years that cutlery has been in use for.  Don't ask.

#100Photos #8

Mud, mud, pristine white mud...

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 dry weather.  During the week, we had looked at geology everywhere from Staithes on England’s east coast to Shap Quarry in Cumbria.  The last morning was a practical assessment in a quarry in County Durham - and even Noah would have been impressed by the rain that fell that day!  I was lucky enough to have borrowed a weatherwriter to keep my notebook dry, and I saw a lot of clear plastic bags being put to good use protecting other notebooks and hands.  Our boots got absolutely covered in beige mud created by pulverised magnesian limestone – it looked as though someone had melted a Farley’s rusk factory.  When we got back to Durham there was much changing of footwear before the afternoon’s further assessment and homeward travel!

Then, thirdly, there’s Mud.  I was in a chalk quarry some distance south of where we live.  You don’t need me to tell you that (most) chalk is white – think in terms of the White Cliffs of Dover or the Seven Sisters cliffs on the East Sussex coast.  Chalk is soft, it pulverises very easily, and quarry machinery is heavy.  It had been raining earlier so the mud was shiny and you just know what the quarry floor is going to be like, even before you get there. 'Claggy' would be an understatement.  'Glutinous'?  'Porridge-like'?  Any and all of these, quite possibly combined.

When chalk quarries are not your usual habitat (our local quarries, which I am much more used to, are honey-coloured Jurassic limestones or grey clay) the quarry floor is startlingly snowy-white and strangely beautiful, holding sharp impressions of quarry activity or shoes.  Walking across it, it feels like you’re in the Antarctic, especially on a January day when the wind feels like it has come straight off the South Pole like it did this day. It did not help that there was one thing I didn't know at the outset:  I was coming down with an awful cold at the time.  No wonder it felt even colder than it actually was!  In spite of that, it's the colour I'll never forget from that day.

The chalk there is food quality, by the way, and yes, you did read that correctly.  Have you ever had bread or cereal with added calcium?  This is where the calcium comes from.  They grind the chalk to a fine powder, roast it, and sell it to the bakers/manufacturers.  Genuinely.  Have you taken any white pills today? The active ingredients are mixed with chalk. Salt is not the only mineral to come from the ground!

I also know a fellow geologist who tells me that he keeps a lump of chalk on his bedside locker for when he gets indigestion.  I know him well enough to believe him.

100 Photos, #7