Photo Friday: From up above

 

Domestic flights across Iceland are definitely worth bagging a window seat for!

 

Photo Friday: Modern-day Glaciation

Hello there! Long time no see! Apologies for the absence over the past few weeks, I’ve been a busy little bee. Firstly, I went off on a week-long jaunt to the south-west to visit some friends from uni. I had a jam-packed itinery, hopping around most of south Devon before heading up to the metropolis of Bristol. As a Devon virgin, I was very pleasantly surprised at how beautiful it is, especially in the slightly damp low-season where I was the only tourist. And just for confirmation, it does look exactly like the picture on the front of the Ambrosia tin. For the past two weeks I’ve been at a new (yet again part-time) job, so I’ve been working 7 days a week, with little time for blogging! I’m sure other recent graduates can relate, right??

Anyway, I digress, back to glaciers.

I visited Iceland way back in the summer of 2009, before I started studying geology A-Level at school. I’d done GCSE geography and have a rather nature-keen dad, so I had a vague idea of what was going on. However, on the rediscovery of all the photos I took (which is a LOT!) after completing a Geology degree, I can make a lot more sense of the processes and mechanisms acting upon this little island in the middle of the Atlantic. What this means is that you’d better brace yourself for a barrage of photos!

Coastal management and the financial debate

A news article has surfaced recently revealing the (somewhat common-sense) reality that the UK Environment Agency can’t afford to protect every home in Britain against coastal erosion and flooding, and therefore some will have to be sacrificed to the sea. The issue raised in this article is the lack of government compensation to homeowners forced to move or evacuate their homes before the sea claims them.

This is a very interesting debate, with many reasonable issues raised on either side of the fence, discussed with varying degrees of eloquency in the 1081 comments on the article. However, as a geoscientist I personally think it highlights the lack of education, or just plain ignorance, of today’s modern and increasingly disconnected society with regard to nature and the great outdoors. We continue to live in our own little bubbles, and when something comes along to burst it, it is someone’s fault and someone else will have failed to do something to prevent it. It is ignorance of the fact that the nature is transient and things change. Mountains grow and disappear, oceans open and close, sea level rises and falls, and coastlines change. 

Under the microscope

After a little hiatus last week, (I think I’m still working off the post-Christmas cheese hangover) I’m back with some images of a slightly different type. Although it can be said that a large proportion of geoscience study can be conducted using large scale observations and “in hand” specimens*, the microscope is an invaluable tool, even to us geologists who prefer sturdy boots to lab coats.

Once a rock is cut into a 30µm thick slice, known in the trade as a “thin section” (imaginative, I know), a whole new world of information opens up as soon as it is put under a microscope. A vast amount of knowledge can be gained by looking at a chunk of rock in your hand, but being able to make crystal-scale observations can mean access to the next level of information on mineralogy, post-depositional processes and structure.

Thin sections can be viewed in two ways; under plain polarised light (PPL) and crossed polarised light (XPL), which highlights the optical properties of individual minerals and allows for easy (ish) identification. In the interests of curiosity, I’ve got examples of both.

Photo Friday: When mountains collide

 

If only all outcrops were this exposed and obvious eh! For this weeks photo Friday here’s a lovely little exposure of some metamorphic gneiss, which just so happens to have fractured and broken off to provide the perfect cross section!