News

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 19^th 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.

WHEN

Wednesday, 12 February, 2025 starts at 19:30

WHERE

Click here to open Teams Meeting

DETAILS

Speaker: Dr David Schofield

*Please note that there’s been a change to the meeting arrangements.* This meeting will now be held via Microsoft Teams. You don’t need a Teams account. You will be able to join by using the link above – the meeting will open in your browser in a similar way to Zoom.

Meeting opens at 19:20, 10 minutes before scheduled start.

Details if prompted:

Meeting ID: 339 826 984 49

Passcode: hU9Fr3UH

Dr David Schofield is the Chief Geologist at Nuclear Waste Services. He is a  Chartered Geologist with over 27 years professional experience much of which has been spent in the survey geology and international development fields. Throughout this experience David has contributed to geological aspects of a number of nuclear sector safety cases including leading a significant task withing the National Geological Screening process as part of the current Geological Disposal Facility (GDF) development.

Illustrative example of a GDF © gov.uk