Geological Society of Glasgow

Geoconservation training
2021-05-06 16:00 - 18:00 (Europe/London) | Online event
The Scottish Geology Trust is running a free online training course in geoconservation, in partnership with Geoconservation UK. The course consists of three sessions that will give an overview of geoconservation in Scotland and the monitoring and designation of Local Geodiversity Sites. The sessions will take place on three consecutive Thursday afternoons, on May 6, 13 & 20. All sessions will be on Zoom, and will include exercises and time for discussion. Sessions will be recorded and available afterwards for anyone who cannot attend the live sessions.
Details of the programme can be found on the Scottish Geology Trust website.
You can register for the meeting on the Zoom website.

Book launch: A Guide to the Geology of Islay, Jura and Colonsay
2021-04-28 19:00 - 20:00 | Online event
This is an event to launch A Guide to the Geology of Islay, Jura and Colonsay, Volume 2, written by David Webster, Roger Anderton and Alasdair Skelton. This is a companion volume to A Guide to the Geology of Islay, published in 2015, which describes twelve geological excursions on Islay.
This new volume contains six excursions on Jura, three on Colonsay and a further four on Islay, that tell the fascinating story of the islands’ geological past from 2 billion-year-old gneiss to the Ice Age. The geology of each excursion is explained at an introductory level with maps and photographs, and the walks range from leisurely rambles to more demanding treks and sea-kayak expeditions.
You can register for the launch event on the Eventbrite website and the book can be pre-ordered on the Ringwood website.
A revised edition of the original guide is also available. This has some updates and improvements to key excursions and a revised geological framework section. You can order both volumes at a special price on the Ringwood website.

Catching a Shooting Star (online lecture)
2021-04-08 19:30 - 21:00 | Online event
Dr Queenie Chan, Royal Holloway, University of London
It is not easy to catch a shooting star, but when we find one, we make the most out of it by studying it in every detail to learn its secrets. Although the building blocks of life in meteorites could be vulnerable to extreme conditions, e.g. toasty temperature during a meteorite’s fiery entry into the atmosphere, the interiors of meteorites are buffered from those conditions. Trapped liquid water and life’s precursor molecules could have been preserved like “mosquito in amber” and therefore studied in the laboratory.
Queenie Chan is a planetary scientist. Her work involves the analysis of the chemical and organic contents of astromaterials including meteorites and asteroidal/cometary samples returned by space missions. In this talk, she will discuss how water and life’s simple building blocks were delivered to the early Earth.
Queenie completed her PhD in Planetary Science at Imperial College in 2011, and undertook post-doctoral assignments at the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and NASA Johnson Space Center. Until 2020 she was with the Open University and has recently been appointed Technology Lecturer at Royal Holloway, University of London.
This lecture will be held as a Zoom meeting. Society members for whom we have email addresses will be sent an invitation a few days before the event. If you are a member but are not on our email list, or a non-member who would like to join the meeting, please email the society’s meetings secretary to request an invitation.

Terrane tectonics in southern Britain (online lecture)
2021-03-11 19:30 - 21:00 | Online event
Dr Dave Schofield, British Geological Survey, Edinburgh
During the 1970s, the recognition of allochthonous terranes as discrete lithospheric fragments gave geologists a new tool kit to help describe the mosaic-like complexity of orogenic belts. Understanding that terranes could be dispersed and recombined accompanied realisation that strike-slip translation contributed significantly to orogenic development.
In applying this to understanding the, largely concealed, late Neoproterozoic and Lower Palaeozoic record of southern Britain, conflicts in nomenclature, scales of observation and focus of the geologist’s themselves has led to a confusing picture where terranes are essentially reduced to snapshots in time rather than lithospheric entities evolving in both time and space.
This talk takes a look at this problem and uses summaries of isotopic data to contrast Neoproterozoic rocks with their Cambrian cover successions in southern Britain and those in the Caledonian-Appalachian Orogen as a whole, and looks at when the component terranes may have been assembled and largely stabilised.
Earlier interpretations of the orogeny compare southern Britain with Avalon Peninsula in Newfoundland based on the similarity of their Cambrian shelfal sedimentary successions and cold water faunas, known as East and West Avalonia respectfully. However, isotopic studies of the Precambrian basement to southern Britain show that it more closely resembles that of other terranes that formed around the continental margin of West Gondwana, Meguma of Nova Scotia and Ganderia of Central Newfoundland and New Brunswick of the northern Appalachians.
Similarly, U-Pb zircon provenance studies of the overlying Cambrian cover successions show that North Wales and the Midland Platform of England most closely resemble Meguma while those of Anglesey (Monian Composite Terrane) and the Leinster-Lakesman Terrane most closely resemble Ganderia. While in the northern Appalachians these terranes largely travelled separately before their accretion in a piecemeal fashion onto the continental margin of Laurentia; in the UK they were juxtaposed during the Early Ordovician Monian Orogeny, after which southern Britain and Ireland probably travelled as a single terrane before arriving on Laurentia during the Silurian.
David undertook a PhD at Keele University in 1995 and has worked with the BGS in various roles since then. Currently he is Director, Energy Systems and Basin Analysis, having previously been Chief Geologist, Wales.
This lecture will be held as a Zoom meeting. Society members for whom we have email addresses will be sent an invitation a few days before the event. If you are a member but are not on our email list, or a non-member who would like to join the meeting, please email the society’s meetings secretary to request an invitation.

Large-scale CO2 removal via enhanced rock weathering (online lecture)
2021-02-11 19:30 - 21:00 | Online event
Professor David Beerling, University of Sheffield
Enhanced silicate rock weathering (ERW), deployable with croplands, has potential use for atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) removal (CDR), which is now necessary to mitigate anthropogenic climate change. ERW also has possible co-benefits for improved food and soil security, and reduced ocean acidification. The talk will discuss the challenges and opportunities of ERW deployment, including the potential for excess industrial silicate materials (basalt mine overburden, concrete, and iron and steel slag) to obviate the need for new mining, as well as uncertainties in soil weathering rates and land–ocean transfer of weathered products.
Further Reading
Beerling, D.J. 2020. Potential for large-scale CO2 removal via enhanced rock weathering with croplands. Nature, 583, 242–248.
David is the Director of the Leverhulme Centre for Climate Change Mitigation and Sorby Professor of Natural Sciences in the Department of Animal and Plant Sciences (APS) at the University of Sheffield.
He has written two popular science books: “The Emerald Planet” and “Making Eden”.
This lecture will be held as a Zoom meeting. Society members for whom we have email addresses will be sent an invitation a few days before the event. If you are a member but are not on our email list, or a non-member who would like to join the meeting, please email the society’s meetings secretary to request an invitation.

The geology of the Mendip Hills (online lecture)
2021-02-04 19:30 - 21:00 | Online event
Dr Doug Robinson, University of Bristol (retired)
Somerset is a unique county with more geological periods present than most other English counties. The city of Wells is well known as England’s smallest city but within its immediate backdrop the rocks record a longer geological history than any other English city – a 200 million year (Devonian to Jurassic), 6,000 km journey from the southern tropics across the equator into northern latitudes.
This lecture will be held as a Zoom meeting. Society members for whom we have email addresses will be sent an invitation a few days before the event. If you are a member but are not on our email list, or a non-member who would like to join the meeting, please email the society’s meetings secretary to request an invitation.

Palaeosols as evidence of terrestrial climate change at major Palaeozoic vertebrate evolutionary events (online lecture)
2021-01-14 19:30 - 21:00 | Online event
Dr Tim Kearsey, British Geological Survey, Edinburgh
Climate change is a major driver of evolution. Palaeosols (fossil soils) are one of the few direct indicators of terrestrial climate and provide a record of climate changes and landscape architecture, and are critical in understanding the terrestrialization of vertebrates in the Carboniferous and the Earth’s largest mass extinction at the end of the Permian.
Further Reading
Otoo, B., Clack, J., Smithson, T., Bennett, C., Kearsey, T. & Coates, M. 2019. A fish and tetrapod fauna from Romer’s Gap preserved in Scottish Tournaisian floodplain deposits. Palaeontology, 62, 225-253.
Tim is a survey geologist and sedimentologist with BGS in Edinburgh. He has research interests in Palaeozoic stratigraphy and sedimentology; palaeosols and palaeo-environmental reconstruction; and geostatistics.
This lecture will be held as a Zoom meeting. Society members for whom we have email addresses will be sent an invitation a few days before the event. If you are a member but are not on our email list, or a non-member who would like to join the meeting, please email the society’s meetings secretary to request an invitation.

Annual General Meeting
2020-12-10 20:45 - 21:15 | Online event
The society’s 2020 AGM will be an online event and will be held immediately after the December lecture. A link to the AGM papers and an invitation to the meeting will be circulated before the event.

Bird evolution from the Late Cretaceous onwards (online lecture)
2020-12-10 19:30 - 20:45 | Online event
Dr Daniel Field, University of Cambridge
Daniel will talk about evolution of birds across mass extinctions, and the timescale of the modern bird radiation. The end-Cretaceous (K–Pg) mass extinction dramatically affected vertebrate life worldwide. He and his colleagues are trying to decipher how this event affected birds and other vertebrates through fieldwork and lab-based studies. When in Earth history did the first evolutionary divergences among modern birds take place? How old are the major avian clades?
Further Reading
Field, D.J., Benito, J., Chen, A., Jagt, J.M.W., Ksepka, D.T. 2020. Late Cretaceous neornithine from Europe illuminates the origins of crown birds. Nature, 579 397-401.
Field, D.J., Berv, J.S., Hsiang, A.Y., Lanfear, R., Landis, M.J., Dornburg, A. 2020. Timing the extant avian radiation: The rise of modern birds, and the importance of modeling molecular rate variation. PeerJ Preprint of in-review manuscript: https://peerj.com/preprints/27521/
Daniel is an evolutionary palaeobiologist at the University of Cambridge (Department of Earth Sciences). He hails from Alberta, Canada and is a graduate from the University of British Columbia. He did his PhD at Yale and worked at the Smithsonian and Denver before coming to Cambridge in 2018. He uses the vertebrate fossil record to help answer questions about how, where, and when Earth’s modern biodiversity arose. He is passionate about natural history, evolution, and science outreach, and enjoys studying and photographing Earth’s vertebrate biodiversity in the field.
This lecture will be held as a Zoom meeting. Society members for whom we have email addresses will be sent an invitation a few days before the event. If you are a member but are not on our email list, or a non-member who would like to join the meeting, please email the society’s meetings secretary to request an invitation.

Mapping a remarkable life: a virtual introduction to the Lyell Collection
2020-12-10 13:00 - 14:00 | Online event
This event is being organised by the Centre for Research Collections, University of Edinburgh. It will reveal the exciting work currently being carried out at the university with the geological collection of Sir Charles Lyell, which includes his notebooks, family papers, and geological specimens.
Elise Ramsay, Project Archivist, will introduce Lyell and show several key pieces of the collection using the Centre for Research Collection’s new innovative visualizer technology. This collection includes specimens collected by Charles Darwin, letters between Lyell and Darwin, and notebooks in Lyell’s own hand during his fateful tours to France and Italy. Dr. Gillian McCay, from the Cockburn Geological Museum at the Grant Institute, will connect Lyell’s legacy to modern scientific perspectives. Each will discuss adapting working practices over the past year to continue opening up this rich collection of earth science material.
This is a free event. For further details and to register, visit the Eventbrite website.

The Argyll Group: two beauts (online lecture)
2020-11-12 19:30 - 21:00 | Online event
Professor Bruce Levell, University of Oxford
The Neoproterozoic Argyll Group (Dalradian Supergroup), is a well-exposed, 10 km thick, sequence recording a transition from glacial through shallow marine to slope and deep-water sediments and pillow lavas. It probably represents the rift-to-drift sequence of the Laurentide margin of Iapetus.
Two units are presented: the Port Askaig Formation, probably the Sturtian phase of “Snowball Earth”, and the Jura “Quartzite”, a 5 km thick cross-bedded, sandstone. These allow general points to be made about “Snowball Earth” and preservation bias in the sedimentary record respectively.
Bruce has a DPhil from the University of Oxford. He worked for Royal Dutch Shell from 1978 to 2013, when he became a visiting professor back at the University of Oxford. With Shell he worked as an explorer in Sarawak, Sabah, USA, UK and Oman, and as a researcher on basin modelling, seismic stratigraphy, and regional geology. He was variously Exploration Manager in Petroleum development Oman, VP of New Ventures in Shell Global Exploration, VP Emerging Technologies in Shell Research and Shell Group Chief Scientist for Geology. Within Shell he led several advanced training programmes in geology and in leadership. He was awarded the Silver Medal of the Petroleum Group, Geological Society of London, in 2009. He is currently editing a sedimentology textbook as well as being engaged in research projects in Scotland, Oman, and Zambia.
This lecture will be held as a Zoom meeting. Society members for whom we have email addresses will be sent an invitation a few days before the event. If you are a member but are not on our email list, or a non-member who would like to join the meeting, please email the society’s meetings secretary to request an invitation.

Return of the Rock Docs (online event)
2020-10-17 14:00 - 16:00 | Online event
Neil Clark and John Faithfull will be hosting an online event to help you identify your summer finds. If you have a picture of a rock, mineral, fossil or geological structure that you would like identified and explained, email the picture beforehand to pres@gsocg.org. All welcome, all ages (Precambrian to Recent).
If you don’t have a specimen for identification but would like to join the meeting to see the specimens being discussed, you would welcome to do so.
This event is part of the Scottish Geology Festival and will be held as a Zoom meeting. Society members for whom we have email addresses have been sent an invitation. If you are a member but are not on our email list, or a non-member who would like to join the meeting, please email the society’s meetings secretary to request an invitation.

New isotopic age determinations from the Northern Highlands and their implications (online lecture)
2020-10-08 19:30 - 21:00 | Online event
Professor Matthew Thirlwall, Royal Holloway, University of London
Over the last 15 years we have carried out a large number of new age determinations on metamorphic rocks from the Moine and its basement inliers. Some of these are published and some not. They include Lu-Hf and Sm-Nd ages on garnets and Rb-Sr ages on white mica and biotite. Lu-Hf garnet ages are probably close to crystallization ages, while Sm-Nd garnet ages in most cases represent stages on a cooling trajectory. This can clearly be demonstrated on a few samples where core Sm-Nd ages are younger than rim Lu-Hf ages. White mica ages are in some cases substantially younger than Sm-Nd garnet, and in other cases agree well.
We see a long record of Proterozoic events, but there are few if any Archean ages on the basement inliers. There are almost no Silurian ages, neither from garnets, nor from white micas, implying that Scandian events did not result in substantial new garnet or mica growth. White mica ages largely cluster in the late Ordovician around 445Ma, and are clearly too old to reflect final collision.
Background reading: Bird, Anna; Cutts, Kathryn; Strachan, Rob; Thirlwall, Matthew F.; Hand, Martin. (2018): First evidence of Renlandian (c. 950–940 Ma) orogeny in mainland Scotland : Implications for the status of the Moine Supergroup and circum-North Atlantic correlations. Precambrian Research, 305, p. 283-294.
Matthew was an undergraduate in Oxford and did his PhD in Edinburgh, on the Late Caledonian volcanic rocks. Since 1984 he’s been employed by Royal Holloway University of London, and the last few years has enjoyed only 20% employment.
This lecture will be held as a Zoom meeting. Society members for whom we have email addresses will be sent an invitation a few days before the event. If you are a member but are not on our email list, or a non-member who would like to join the meeting, please email the society’s meetings secretary to request an invitation.

Virtual walk round Glasgow Necropolis
2020-09-30 19:30 - 20:30 | Online event
Margaret Greene will present this online event. It will consist of a virtual walk round part of the Glasgow Necropolis, following the geological trail devised by Strathclyde Geoconservation Group. Margaret will describe the geological context of the site and show examples of the types of rock used in the monuments.
This event is part of the Scottish Geology Festival and will be held as a Zoom meeting. Society members for whom we have email addresses will be sent an invitation a few days before the event. If you are a member but are not on our email list, or a non-member who would like to join the meeting, please email the society’s meetings secretary to request an invitation.

Virtual field trip to the Braid & Blackford Hills
2020-09-24 19:30 - 21:00 | Online event
Dr Angus Miller of Edinburgh University will present this virtual excursion.
The Braid and Blackford Hills, which dominate the landscape of south Edinburgh, are two large tapered masses of volcanic rock. In this virtual geology walk, we’ll travel across the hills to discover two main lava flows of different composition with a thin layer of ash in between. We will explore the volcanic history of the area, the story of erosion and glaciation, and the views from the summits. The deep valley of the Hermitage of Braid between the hills also has an interesting origin, with ice and meltwater picking out the contrasts between different rock types.
This event is part of the Scottish Geology Festival and will be held as a Zoom meeting. Society members for whom we have email addresses will be sent an invitation a few days before the event. If you are a member but are not on our email list, or a non-member who would like to join the meeting, please email the society’s meetings secretary to request an invitation.

Virtual geo-tour of the Fossil Grove and Quarry Knowe
2020-09-21 19:30 - 20:30 | Online event
David Webster will present this online event. It will consist of a virtual field trip to the Fossil Grove, including a description of the geology of the preserved trees and their geological and historical settings, and a discussion of the conservation, preservation and display issues and the future of the site.
This event is part of the Scottish Geology Festival and will be held as a Zoom meeting. Society members for whom we have email addresses will be sent an invitation a few days before the event. If you are a member but are not on our email list, or a non-member who would like to join the meeting, please email the society’s meetings secretary to request an invitation.

Scottish Geology Festival
2020-09-12 00:00 - 2020-10-31 23:59 | Online and various venues
The Scottish Geology Festival, which has been organised by the Scottish Geology Trust, will run from 12 September to 31 October. It will feature both visitor and virtual events across the country. The festival will host field trips, online exhibitions, fossil hunting and talks as well as Geopoetry 2020. The range of events and activities will be of interest to all whether you’re familiar with geology or not. There will be opportunities to get involved and learn about Scotland’s fascinating geology for families, communities, tourists and those making the most of Scottish staycations.
Any in-person events or activities will adhere to relevant Scottish Government advice and social distancing measures will be in place.
Further details, including a full list of events, can be found on the Scottish Geology Trust website.

The geology of Mercury (online lecture)
2020-09-10 19:30 - 21:00 | Online event
Professor Simon Cuthbert, AGH University of Science and Technology, Krakow
Mercury has been recognised as a “wanderer” of the night sky since Babylonian times, but its proximity to the Sun has made it a difficult body to study. The situation has changed dramatically since the recent MESSENGER mission, which has revealed a fascinating and distinctive member of the family of terrestrial planets.
Dubbed the “iron planet” it has a huge metallic core and a relatively thin rocky mantle. In some ways the geology and landforms of Mercury resemble Earth’s Moon with its heavily cratered surface, extensive smooth lava plains and lack of an atmosphere, but it is unusually dark – a possible vestige of a primordial crust made of graphite! Tectonic features suggest that the entire planet has shrunk by several kilometres since it originally solidified.
This presentation will explore current knowledge about this rather uncelebrated planet and consider how its curious nature might be inherited from the special environmental conditions close to the Sun during the very earliest history of the Solar System. A look ahead to the upcoming Bepi-Colombo mission will anticipate some exciting new insights about this mysterious “pink dot”.
Simon is long-standing member of the society and was until recently based at the University of the West of Scotland. He is now Assistant Professor in the Department of Mineralogy, Petrography and Geochemistry, at the University of Science and Technology, in Krakow, Poland.
This lecture will be held as a Zoom meeting. Society members for whom we have email addresses will be sent an invitation a few days before the event. If you are a member but are not on our email list, or a non-member who would like to join the meeting, please email the society’s meetings secretary to request an invitation.

Beach pebbles: windows into Scotland's geological past (online lecture)
2020-09-09 10:00 - 11:30 | Online event
Dr Angus Miller, University of Edinburgh
Scotland’s geology is incredibly varied; this small country has a fantastic variety of rock types formed over a vast reach of geological time. The best place to see this variety is on Scotland’s pebble beaches. How do pebbles form and why do some survive better than others? What processes result in some beaches having a wide range of pebble types and sizes, and others being dominated by a single rock type. What can a pebble tell you about Scotland’s geological history?
This is an online event organised by the University of Edinburgh’s Short Courses department. More information and registration instructions can be found on the university’s website.

Virtual field trip to the southern Rhinns of Islay
2020-08-13 19:30 - 20:30 | Online event
David Webster has been asked to make this presentation by the Open University Geological Society and they are happy for others to join in. This excursion will be a little more technical than David’s previous Islay field trips. It will look at the Rhinns Complex deformation history and its enigmatic contact with the overlying Colonsay Group. Do the newly-discovered conglomerate exposures show us the very base of the Dalradian? If so, how old is it? How many deformations were there? Is the Kilchiaran Shear zone really folded?
The event will take place during the normal Gelogical Society of Glasgow lecture slot – i.e. the second Thursday of the month at 7:30 pm – and will be held as a Zoom meeting. Society members for whom we have email addresses have been sent instructions on how to join the meeting. If you are a member but did not receive an email, or a non-member who would like to join the meeting, please email the society’s meetings secretary to request the instructions.

Virtual field trip to South-East Islay
2020-07-13 19:30 - 20:30 | Online event
This is a live repeat of the virtual field trip to SE Islay that David Webster presented recently at the Edinburgh Geological Society’s AGM.
The trip, which starts and finishes at Port Ellen, looks at the igneous and meta-igneous rocks of the south coast and visits a few distilleries and some historical/archaeological sites too. Some of the localities visited are described in Excursions 10 & 11 of A Guide to the Geology of Islay by D. Webster, R. Anderton & A. Skelton (Ringwood Publishing, 2015).
The event will be held as a Zoom meeting. Society members for whom we have email addresses have been sent instructions on how to join the meeting. If you are a member but did not receive an email, or a non-member who would like to join the meeting, please email the society’s meetings secretary to request the instructions.

Virtual excursion to Colonsay
2020-06-02 18:30 - 19:30
This is the third of a series of virtual excursions to Islay, Jura and Colonsay that David Webster has set up in conjunction with Angus Miller of Geowalks. The talks are part of Angus’s “Lockdown Lecture” series. Details of this talk and others that Angus is giving can be found on the Geowalks website.
These meetings are held using the Zoom platform. If you haven’t joined any of Angus’s talks yet you will need to email him for the link to the meeting. There is no fixed fee for these talks, but Angus asks for a contribution of £5 – £10 per talk if you can afford it. Please consider making a donation, as Angus’s business has been badly affected by the pandemic. Angus’s email address and details of how to make a donation are on the Geowalks website.

Virtual field trip to Islay: the Snowball Earth story
2020-05-28 18:30 - 19:45 | Online event
This trip, the second of David Webster’s series of virtual field trips to Islay, Jura and Colonsay, will focus on the “Snowball Earth” story on Islay. It will be an excursion from Ballygrant to Port Askaig via Beannan Buidhe and the Sound of Islay. Normally this entails two quite long separate walks because one part of the coast is generally impassable, but we have the advantage of being able to “zoom” round the headland. The excursion is going to be included in David’s forthcoming Volume II of “A Guide to the Geology of Islay”; so you will be getting a sneak preview.
We hope that the “expert panel” of Tony Spencer, Ian Fairchild and Alasdair Skelton will be on hand again to help answer questions.
The event will be held as a Zoom meeting. Society members for whom we have email addresses have been sent instructions on how to join the meeting. If you are a member but did not receive an email, or a non-member who would like to join the meeting, please email the society’s meetings secretary to request the instructions.

Virtual excursion to Jura
2020-05-26 18:30 - 19:30
This is the second of a series of virtual excursions to Islay, Jura and Colonsay that David Webster has set up in conjunction with Angus Miller of Geowalks. The talks are part of Angus’s “Lockdown Lecture” series. Details of this talk and others that Angus is giving can be found on the Geowalks website.
These meetings are held using the Zoom platform. If you haven’t joined any of Angus’s talks yet you will need to email him for the link to the meeting. There is no fixed fee for these talks, but Angus asks for a contribution of £5 – £10 per talk if you can afford it. Please consider making a donation, as Angus’s business has been badly affected by the pandemic. Angus’s email address and details of how to make a donation are on the Geowalks website.
The society is also hosting more detailed virtual field excursions to the three islands. Details of these are being circulated to members and are being posted on the website.

Virtual field trip to North Islay
2020-05-21 18:30 - 19:30 | Online event
This is the first of a series of virtual field trips to Islay, Jura and Colonsay being presented by David Webster. It will be an excursion to the north-east coast of Islay, the best place to see the stromatolites of the Bonahaven Fm in all their 3D glory. The trip will also feature a lot of other really interesting geology, some classic Ice Age geomorphology and great coastal scenery.
This is Excursion 9 in A Guide to the Geology of Islay by D. Webster, R. Anderton & A. Skelton (Ringwood Publishing, 2015). It’s a long walk in real life, and an armchair version could suit a lot of folk!
The event will be held as a Zoom meeting. Society members for whom we have email addresses have been sent instructions on how to join the meeting. If you are a member but did not receive an email, or a non-member who would like to join the meeting, please email the society’s meetings secretary to request the instructions.
We are going to be joined at the event by some experts in the geology of this area – Ian Fairchild (who did his PhD on the area and wrote the 1991 Geologists’ Association guide), Alasdair Skelton from Stockholm (an expert on metamorphic fluids and co-author of the 2015 guide) and Tony Spencer (of Port Askaig Tillite fame) who is zooming in from Norway.

Ask the Rock Docs
2020-05-17 13:00 - 15:00 | Online event
Neil Clark and David Webster have set up a Zoom meeting to help you identify geological specimens or structures that may be puzzling you. If you have a picture of a rock, mineral, fossil or geological structure that you would like identified and explained, email the picture beforehand to pres@gsocg.org.
If you don’t have a specimen for identification but would like to join the meeting to see the specimens being discussed, you would welcome to do so.
You can join the meeting at:
https://uofglasgow.zoom.us/j/96462831271
The meeting ID (964 6283 1271) is embedded in the link and no password is required.

Members' Night
2020-05-14 19:30 - 21:30 | Online event
Because of the Covid-19 pandemic, this event will be held by means of a Zoom webinar. The programme is as follows.
7.15: Meeting open – connect to Zoom (instructions sent by email)
7.30: Introduction by Walter Semple
7.35: “Sea kayak trip to the west coast of Jura” by David Webster
7.55: Break (to allow people to clap and refresh beverages)
8.10: Questions to David Webster
8.20: “Contrasting islands: The geology of Eigg and Rum” by Angus Miller
8.45: Questions to Angus Miller
8.55: “The Carbon game: adventures of a globe-trotting carbon atom” by Simon Cuthbert
9.10: Questions to Simon Cuthbert
9.20: Vote of thanks by the president, Neil Clark
Society members for whom we have email addresses have been sent instructions on how to join the meeting. If you are a member but did not receive an email, or a non-member who would like to join the meeting, please email the society’s meetings secretary to request the instructions.
The audience will be muted during the talks by the host to reduce background noise. You can unmute yourself if/when you want to ask a question. There is the facility to “chat”: you can type a question at any time and the chair/host can see these and call on you to ask your question or for the speaker to respond. The questions will be taken at the end of each talk.
David Webster’s talk on Jura is a trial of a virtual field trip; so questions during the presentation are fine as that’s what would happen naturally. Real field trips are usually accompanied by a hand-out, and to help you suspend reality David has created a map for you to print and use as he takes you to the various localities. You can download the map here.

Ardnamurchan
2020-05-08 12:00 - 2020-05-11 12:00
This excursion has been cancelled because of the coronavirus outbreak. We hope to reschedule it for 2021.
Leader: Con Gillen
Field days: Friday (afternoon)/ Saturday/ Sunday/ Monday (morning)
The Ardnamurchan peninsula, which includes the most westerly point of the Scottish mainland, is composed mainly of the remains of an early Palaeogene volcano with three centres of activity. Part of the North Atlantic Igneous Province which includes Mull, Rum and Skye, it was erupted into Moine metasedimentary rocks and overlain by a sequence of thin sedimentary rocks. Ardnamurchan displays classic geology on a colossal scale, with features such as mixed magma, ash flows, ring dykes, cone sheets and examples of “airfall” rocks formed from lava ejected from the heart of the volcano – it is regarded as almost a “textbook volcano”. A drive across the peninsula is a journey through its magma chamber. Its overall structure is difficult to perceive on the ground but from space the picture is much clearer – rings of once molten magma can be seen to define a series of almost perfect circles. These are the lower parts of the volcano after the superstructure has been planed off by erosion, in this case, effectively, by the last Ice Age. We plan to visit significant localities of igneous, sedimentary and metamorphic rocks and there may also be the opportunity to sail to Tobermory (whales!) for those who wish to do less climbing!
Accommodation will be B & B in Kilchoan etc.; transport will be in shared cars.
If you are interested, please contact the Residential Excursions Secretary, Maggie Donnelly, at restrips@gsocg.org as soon as possible, because accommodation is not plentiful and gets booked up quickly.

Islay
2020-04-24 12:00 - 2020-04-27 12:00
This excursion has been cancelled because of the coronavirus outbreak. We hope to reschedule it for 2021.
Leader: David Webster
Field days: Friday (afternoon)/ Saturday/ Sunday/ Monday (morning)
This is a repeat of the 2019 Islay trip. Priority will be given to members who could not come last year because the trip was already full.
The geology of Islay is amazingly varied – 1800 Ma gneiss, Precambrian metasediments and fossil stromatolites, the famous Port Askaig Tillite (possible “Snowball Earth”?), low grade metamorphic Dalradian rocks retaining original sedimentary structures, reactivated and reversed extensional faults, substantial mineralisation, 60 Ma igneous intrusions (opening of the Atlantic Ocean) and a large selection of Quaternary Ice Age features. We plan to visit key localities with the aid of “A Guide to the Geology of Islay” by David Webster, Roger Anderton & Alasdair Skelton.
Boulder of granite in Port Askaig tillite

Accommodation will be B & B in Bowmore; transport will be in shared cars.
If you are interested, please contact the Residential Excursions Secretary, Maggie Donnelly, at restrips@gsocg.org as soon as possible, because accommodation is not plentiful and gets booked up quickly.

Breaching of the Dover Strait and the creation of “Island Britain” (lecture)
2020-04-09 19:30 - 21:30 | Lecture Theatre, Gregory Building, c/o School of Geographical & Earth Sciences, Glasgow, Glasgow City, G12 8QQ, United Kingdom
This lecture has been cancelled because of the coronavirus outbreak. We hope to reschedule it for autumn 2020.
Professor Jenny Collier, Imperial College, London
For much of our pre-history, a permanent land bridge existed between Britain and France at the Dover Strait. How and when it was removed, however, was previously unknown. We analysed a new regional bathymetric map of part of the English Channel derived from a compilation of both single- and multi-beam sonar data, which shows the morphology of the seabed in unprecedented detail.
We observed a large bedrock-floored valley that contains a distinct assemblage of landforms, including streamlined islands and longitudinal erosional grooves, which are indicative of large-scale subaerial erosion by high-magnitude water discharges. Our observations support the megaflood model, in which breaching of a rock dam at the Dover Strait (see artist’s impression on front cover) instigated catastrophic drainage of a large pro-glacial lake in the southern North Sea basin. This flow was one of the largest recorded megafloods in history and could have occurred 450,000 to 200,000 years ago.
We suggest that megaflooding provides an explanation for the permanent isolation of Britain from mainland Europe during interglacial high-sea-level stands. The breaching likely affected patterns of early human occupation in Britain by creating a barrier to migration which possibly explains the complete absence of humans in Britain 100,000 years ago. The breach of the ridge, and subsequent flooding, also may have initiated the large-scale reorganisation of the river drainages in north-west Europe by re-routing the combined Rhine-Thames River through the English Channel to form the Channel River.
Background reading
Gupta, S., Collier, J.S. et al. 2007. Catastrophic flooding origin of the shelf valley systems in the English Channel, Nature, 448, pp. 342-345.
Collier, J.S. et al. 2015. Streamlined islands and the English Channel megaflood hypothesis, Global & Planetary Change, 135, pp. 190-206.
Gupta S., Collier J.S. et al. 2017. Two-stage opening of the Dover Strait and the origin of island Britain, Nature Communications, 8.
Collier, J.S. 2017: A megaflood in the English Channel. Astronomy & Geophysics, 58, 2.38-2.42.
Following her PhD at Cambridge, Jenny undertook post-doctoral studies and lecturing duties at Oxford, Leeds, Cambridge and Imperial College. She was appointed a senior lecturer in marine geophysics at Imperial in 2002, and became a professor in 2018. She is a former President of the British Geophysical Society.
