WHEN
Wednesday, 12 March, 2025 starts at 19:30
WHERE
Crosthwaite Parish Rooms
Main Street
Keswick
CA12 5NN
DETAILS
AGM
The society’s AGM will be transacted as swiftly as possible.
Following the AGM we have a talk
Unravelling Himalayan Geology through time
Speaker: Danny Clarke-Lowes
In this talk Danny will take us through the mountains and explain how scientists worked out their evolution; how work undertaken in the 19th C. by the Great Trigonometrical Survey of the British Raj gave us an understanding of the nature of the roots of the mountain chain; how engineers of the East Inda Company searching in Siwaliks sandstones made discoveries of sabre-tooth tigers that helped Darwin with his theory of evolution; how Sir Richard Strachey, undertaking the first geological traverse of the mountain chain and observing dramatic folds and faults, realised that great compressive forces had been at work; how members of the Geological Survey of India, recording the continent’s coal deposits, worked out that India had once been part of a southern continent which they called Gondwana; how the Survey geologists also recorded fossil evidence indicating the rocks of the mountains had once been under the sea; how the Swiss brought understanding of nappes and thrusts to the Himalaya and how they recognised ophiolites in the northern regions of the mountain chain, indicating the former existence of an ocean, the dense foundations of which are now crumpled up in the heights; and finally how British scientists worked out how inverted isograds (upside down metamorphic gradients) were the result of ‘channel flow’ (partial melting and ductile flow in the mid crust) and how lateral contraction of the mountain chain was achieved by stacking of thrust sheets. Through these observations and deductions they came to understand a classic example of a continent-continent collisional plate margin.
Danny Clark-Lowes is a geologist with over 45 years’ experience who has worked in numerous locations around the world including arctic east Siberia. He worked for a number of oil companies, including Shell, before founding Nubian Consulting to focus on the geology of North Africa, particularly Libya. He is the author of numerous scientific publications and books. He is a keen mountaineer who has climbed in the Swiss Alps and in the Himalayas where he has led many geological and trekking trips over the last seven years. His book ‘A Geological Field Guide to the Himalaya, in India, Nepal, Bhutan and Tibet’ was published in November 2022 by the Geologists’ Association (Guide No 76). He is also active with the U3A (University of the Third Age) with which he runs Geology Field Trips in the Lake District.
