#536: Beach Pebble Guide

Came across a cracking little guide to the pebbles on the beaches of Scotland (in particular) by the Scottish Geology Trust.

It's a free PDF download from this link.

Scottish Geology Trust ©2021 This work is licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence. 

#517: Anthropocene - are we living in it?

The Anthropocene is an era which is contested - some believing we are still in the Holocene, which began at the end of the last Ice Age, 11, 700 years ago. Others believe that we have changed the planet in many ways which mean humanity has changed the planet's surface and atmosphere (along with our plastic charged oceans).

This piece in the Observer from January 2023 is well worth reading.

It mentions the Anthropocene Working Group.

They are working out the location of some places where the Anthropocene may have started.

There are nine trial sites

1. Marine sediments in Beppu Bay, Kyushu, Japan

2: Mud layers in Crawford Lake, Ontario, Canada

3: Coral in Flinders Reef, Coral Sea, Australia

4: Marine sedimens in Gotland Basin, the Baltic Sea

5: Ice from the Palmer Ice Core, Antarctica

6: Silt from the Searsville Lake, California

7: Mud from Sihallongwan Lake, Jilin Province, China

8: Peat from bogs in the Sudetes mountains, Poland

9: Coral from West Flower Garden Bank, the Gulf of Mexico

One site proposed in this paper here is the Trinity Site. (PDF download)

This was the site for the testing of the first atomic bomb as profiled in the Christopher Nolan film "Oppenheimer".

#175: Oxford University Museum of Natural History

This is a place which should definitely be on a list of places to visit for those who want to explore palaeontology and see a wealth of artefacts from various historical periods. It is next door to the wonderful Pitt Rivers Museum, which is an anthropological treasure house as well, and will have its own post on the blog. If you can get to Oxford, this is well worth a look.

 The Palaeontology page is good. They have artefacts from William Buckland and Mary Anning in their collection. The building is dramatic and impressive and based over several floors. The pillars are made from different rock types, which covers geology as well.

I've visited a few times.

Image: Alan Parkinson - shared under CC license

Over half a million of the museum's collection of items have now been digitised and can be accessed online.

The museum also offers a range of learning workshops, including some for GCSE. One can imagine that if the new specification offers a suitable structure for these that the museum might develop something specifically for the GCSE Natural History.

#158: Ancient Earth

Exploring the development of the world's continents and its changing tectonic history is part of the suggested specification.

Discover when you home was last under the sea with this interactive globe of the Earth's changing sea levels over the last 135,000 years.https://t.co/xfV3bnurdx pic.twitter.com/1O1BC0ew1U

— gmapsmania mapstodon.space/@mapsmania (@gmapsmania) November 2, 2023

Check out the map here.

About 300 million years ago, Earth didn't have seven continents, but instead one massive supercontinent called Pangaea, which was surrounded by a single ocean called Panthalassa.

This would go well along with the Ancient Earth map, which allows you to go back through phases of life on Earth.

This is an interesting area of the proposed specification. I will be interested to see whether this remains in the final document as it is quite a different period of natural history - when certain species emerged for the first time according to evidence in the fossil record.