This is geology B with all of us trampled.
Many countries have National museums that house collections
of rocks, minerals and fossils, but the UK has two major
collections. The one at the Natural History
Museum in London. And in addition the National
Geological repository located at keyworth near Nottingham which
is part of the British Geological Survey and which
actually has the larger of the two collections.
Mike, how is head of the National Geological repository
under his leadership? The British Geological Survey
has become a world leader in promoting access to the
collection through digitization and web delivery.
Perhaps most remarkably 3D digital models have been made
from 3D scans of over 2,000 of the type fossils in the
Repository. Mike, how welcome to geology B,
it's a pleasure to talk to you what distinguishes, our national
repository from a museum collection.
Well, the tends to be only one National repository per country
and they often concentrate on borehole corn samples,
particularly, for mineral ball holes or hydrocarbon Wells.
They underpin the development of key mineral resources and can
contribute significantly to the country's economy.
Now safely, drilling a borehole is very expensive.
If it can be easily a million pounds, plus on Shore, and often
10 times that offshore, you can't just drill down 2,000
meters and take out a 2000 meter long, stick of core.
Put it in boxes, you have to do it a few meters at a time and
it's the pulling everything out, retrieving the core and then
putting it back that takes the time and costs the money if you
were to re-drill everything in our Our store, we estimate.
It would cost, probably over 200 billion pounds.
If you're an oil company, considering Drilling and
exploration, well, being able to study the cause and samples
drilled by other companies, nearby enables you to reduce the
risk and increase the likelihood there for are actually investing
in a particular project. So can you give us an overview
of what the repository contains? It is wide.
We have over 600 km of Bohol core.
So if you are drilling for oil, for example, as you drill down,
sometimes you take solid sticks of core so that you can study
the the sedimentary rocks or the Rocks you encounter in detail,
and that's often the case, if you're drilling a borehole to
look for minerals or cold, you'll probably take solid rock
out of that. And if you took all these sticks
of core that we've got put them into end, it's over.
Hundred kilometers in addition to that, we've got another
probably couple of million samples from boreholes and then
a million other rock and mineral specimens three or four million
fossil samples. And the whole total comes to
something like 60 million, specimens course that's
enormous. What is the national repository
used for? Where, the collections used
party for queuing reports, maps and Publications.
And more importantly, the samples are available.
For new projects, probably using different role, new techniques.
The so-called repurposing studying one of our archive,
boreholes is often more productive than drilling a new
ball hole because there's often already a lot of data available
and we actually encourage the subsampling of the course and
samples for further analysis, on the condition that the data and
results returned and added to Archive.
The repository collections are also used for Education and
Training. And each year or normal year, we
accommodate a large number of commercial and academic
visitors. And we even loan smaller
specimens for specialist research and for exhibitions
could you pick out some particular items from the
collection that you find especially interesting?
Well if we look at Coors to start with one of those I'd like
to highlight is call from the 40s oil field.
This is the largest oil field in the North Sea discovered by Ibp
and 1970, and oil started to flow in 1975 and it changed the
economic fortunes of the UK. Now, the reservoir for this oil
is roughly 60 million year old Sandstone.
It was formed from the rapid erosion of Scotland, due to the
uplift related to the volcanism that was then going on along
the, The Western Isles on the west of Scotland.
And because it was deposited rapidly.
It's not that strong is cemented, but it represents
really a resource that the times.
I think accounted for something, like, a fifth of the petroleum
needs in the UK. So it was a major player in the
UK's economic fortunes during the 1970s and 1980s.
And if you go onto our website, we have high resolution,
photographs of all, the core from hydrocarbons, Wells.
And you can actually locate some of this poorly Consolidated, 40s
and stone. If I think of another thing when
you drill a borehole, it is or an oil.
Well, it is very expensive. And there are other ways of
working out what's beneath the ground?
You can extrapolate from a surface map or you can use
geophysics. You can measure gravity and that
can give you an idea of the density of the Rocks below.
You, you can check magnetics and you can do seismic studies.
Normally it works. They well occasionally get it
slightly wrong and a good example of that is the ma Chris
ball hole on the northwest coast of Wales.
It's a very deep hole 1938 meters deep and they expected
from the geophysics. That would be in lower Paleozoic
rocks. That's rocks of 400 500 million
years, very similar so much of what you find in Wales but they
actually found was tertiary and Jurassic rocks.
It's so that's rocks from sort of 50 to 200 million years,
they're in much younger than they were expecting and that's
because of a major fault between the mockers ball hold and the
rest of Wales. Another good example, is The
Rook hope ball hole in weirdo. North East England.
Now there was a lot of discussion on the origin of the
mineralization in the northern pennines in Cornwall, the
mineralization is clearly related to the emplacement of
the granite. And it was suggested that the
same happened in the Northern pennines and geophysics studies.
In fact, picked up a lighter, Granite around, 400 meters depth
below Weirdo. And when it was drilled in
1960s, they indeed found a granite at 390 meters down the
bore hole, but they also have a surprise.
They were expecting that the granite had intruded, the
Carboniferous rocks at the base where the mineralization is.
But in actual fact, Fat, it turned out that the granite was
at least 50 million years older. And there's an unconformity.
In other words, you could see in a Rosy of surface, on the, top
of the Granite representing this break of some 50 million years
between the exposure of the granite and then the D position
of the Carboniferous rocks. So, in this case, it wasn't the
direct emplacement of the Granite that had produced, the
mineralisation, although it is believed that the emplacement of
the granite. Has affected ground water,
circulation that actually promoted the mineralization.
Could you give us an example from the collection of fossils?
Yes, I think one of my favorite projects has been working with
the so-called Ed car and all Precambrian fossils.
We've got a really interesting example.
We've actually got 120 square meters of silicon rubber molds
and plaster, cast of a bedding plane in the local Charter of
forest ediacaran rocks. This is a very famous area for
Ed car and fossils. Now, the story actually goes
back to 1848, we have a letter from James Holley, a local
naturalist to Professor, William macgillivray of Aberdeen
University describing how on a visit to a place called Green
Quarry. He had discovered some fossils.
That included. He described it as seal, like
Impressions, like an ammonite. So they assumed that these were
some sort of primitive. Fossils.
It was visited by survey officers in the 1850s and they
interpreted the Rings as seaweed actually being sort of rotated
by the tides and the swelling, the sea.
But then in the 1870s to Cambridge Patrol, adjusts looked
at them and because they were virtually circular.
They thought that they were relatively recent inorganic
compressions, The logic was that if they were original fossils,
when The Rock was deformed into slate, they would have been
deformed into ellipses, but the story continues in 1957 when a
local school boy along, with couple of his mates went
climbing in the Quarry and they found as well as the discs are
frond. Now, it looked like a plant
though, it's subsequently turned out not to be a plant but they
reported their findings. First through their school
master and it got to Trevor Ford who was a lecturer at the
Leicester University he visited. And realized it was definitely a
fossil. Definitely in Precambrian rocks
and he published it in 1958 on, on the basis of this definite
discovery of Precambrian fossils.
Some Australian fossils that have been found a few years
earlier in a sequence of rocks, from the Precambrian into the
Cambrian and therefore interpreted as very early
Cambrian, fossils were now realized to be Precambrian to
probably some examples of fossils in the collection that
helped us nail down the dates of certain sedimentary strata.
Yeah, a good example of that. We have very large collections
of fossils called grapdelites. Now, this is a extinct, Colonial
organism, planktonic organism in the group of hemichordate It's
related to wrap the pleura and careful a discus that are
actually alive. Today, these are Colonial
animals that in crust Pebbles on the seafloor off the south coast
of England and bottom of Norwegian fjords.
But their relatives, the grapdelites were planktonic and
very widespread. They also evolved quickly, which
means that they are excellent for correlating rocks and trans
lapworth, who was a Schoolmaster demonstrated that you could use
them in the the southern Uplands of Scotland which is a
fossilized subduction zone in the late 19th.
Century to actually tie the bits of rock in the area together and
to put them into the correct sequence because the rocks are
strongly folded and faulted and it is very difficult to make
sense of what seems to be a large thickness of black shells
and Peach and Horn used. This work and amassed large
collections of grapdelites when they were studying and mapping
the southern Uplands to put structure and understanding into
the whole area. But we still have these
Collections and a modern interpretation of the
grapdelites earns means that we can actually increase the finest
of the correlation by a factor of 10 without actually going
back out into the field, but purely using the collections,
That peach and Horn had put together in the late 1890s.
Early 1900's, was that possible in part because the grapdelites
evolved rather rapidly. So, you could quite easily
distinguish different layers because of the morphological
changes. It's exactly that and grabs a
lights are really good. Example, because the shell,
there's actually secreted by the grapdelites and it's a slightly
strange way of doing it. It's not like a mollusk that has
a mantle That just seems to secrete the shell around it in a
fairly fixed path. In the grapdelites.
They actually have secrete re organs that they can move
around. So they actually add the shell,
like a series of bandages almost.
So they have quite a lot of capabilities of changing that
rapidly in evolutionary terms. And of course, if you've got
these rapidly evolving, but widespread fossils.
And if you find it, Nuclear species or subspecies in let's
say, Wales and Scotland and probably Norway and Sweden maybe
Australia as well. Then, you know, that those rocks
were laid down as exactly the same time give or take perhaps
100,000 years and given that you're talking about 400 million
years ago, that's a very precise date.
You have a collection of over 7,000 type fossils.
What exactly is a type fossil and And what do you some of your
favorite examples? Every time somebody describes a
new species of fossil, you have to select one example that
represents that species and you cite it in your descriptive
paper and that then becomes the reference sample for that
species or subspecies. I'm trying to be cramped lights.
The been cases, where ideas or interpretations of species have
been a little vague. So many grapdelites for
described initially from Flat material, and then when they
found material preserved in a write-in for three dimensions,
certainly there was a little bit of confusion as to which 2D
species were equivalent to which 3D and if you've got at least a
type specimen, then you've got some way of going Going back to
try and work out, exactly what a species concept is.
And because, of course, the survey collections go back a
long way, and fact, they go back prior to 1835, because we have
material that was in the collections of the Geological
Society of London and that goes back to 1807.
So because we've been around a long time, we have amassed a
large collection of these reference or type fossils.
And these are the ones that Intelligence visit on a regular
basis to compare with material that they've collected to see
whether or not their species are the same as the type or not an
interesting story. Also in the collection we've
discovered material that may have been around a little while
and its significance is only much later realized and that's
the story of conodonts. Now kind of dance.
Look like Teeth their microfossils made a calcium
phosphate first described in G6 and say they look like very,
very small teeth. There are mini meter or
thereabouts in size, but initially, because they showed
very little where there was doubt as to whether they were
teeth or not, but they do occur in many shapes Dickie cones
blades some platforms. So presumably, they do represent
slightly different functions. Now, over time, they realized
that there were certain commonly found associations or sembly
jizz So you quite often find particular cones blades and
platforms together and they were very rare examples particular in
Shale of a whole assemblage of cones Blaze maybe platforms
preserved in life position and they seem to give you an idea
what the fossil might have looked like or at least the
orientation of the Kona don't. But nobody have any evidence as
to what the actual fossil itself was it was Uma bleep.
He had no other hard Parts than the confidence and had never
been preserved. But and this is a good example
of the value of historic collections in February 1982
paleontologist. You and Clarkson was visiting
the Edinburgh collection and Peter brand.
Our curator at the time commented to you.
And here's a strange creature, it's official some kind and when
you and examine them, he realized that around where the
mouth would have been the worst. Set of conodont.
He borrowed, the specimen, took it to London, talked to another
cana-don't expert and a third expert happened to be in London
for a meeting. He looked and agreed, they all
agreed that this was indeed the conodont animal and the
discovery was announced in 1983. So it had been sitting in the
BDS collections for good number of years.
Before its full significance was realized you've been a world
leader in Making your collection accessible to the public.
Tell us how you did that. We started in the early 2000s
with online databases as specimens first with rocks and
minerals and then fossils, and then bore holes.
And then by 2012, we started adding high resolution images to
some of these. So the first ones were
high-resolution, photographs of all are United Kingdom,
continental shelf, that's hydrocarbon.
And we followed on with high-resolution images of thin
sections of our rock collection. And so we have photographed, all
the slides we have of our reference collection of rocks
and they're all online for anybody to use and study.
And we have, it's not just a few.
We actually have 160,000 of these online.
Go pretty much anywhere that you can look in Britain.
You'll find that we've got a thin section with photographs
online. What about access to the fossil
collection? Again, there's an online
database and we've also laser scanned 2000 of the best fossils
to produce 3D digital models. And that's what we call the GB
3D type fossils, online database, and they're all there
for anybody to use, purely free for academic and personal use.
That's a fantastic resource. Will put a link to GB 3D on the
podcast webpage. Geology bias.com.
You also created something called the Geo index.
What's that? Or do you index?
It's a GIS system or geographical information.
System, is basically a map of Britain with a couple of hundred
data sets that you can select and turn off and on that, will
you can look at a map and you can pull up for example, the At
a variety of scales 50k. For example, is the standard one
that gives you normally the most usable detail.
You can pull that up and then you can click fossils, or rock
and mineral samples. And if you select the rock
collection, you'll see little triangles for wherever, we have
a rock in the collection and if those are black triangles, it
means that we've actually got a photograph of a thin section.
So as I say, in total there's about there's about David
different datasets ranging from bore hole locations, there's
geophysics including gravity magnetics, there's areas of
outstanding, natural beauty mineral planning areas.
There's at hols wave of different data sets.
The main Geo index. We have is the onshore one but
we have another very important one for offshore as well.
Yeah, it really does have an extraordinary number of layers
that one can choose to display. I came across one of Building,
Stone building sense is excellent.
The selection of just under 5,000 building, Stones all
photographed at fairly high resolution that you can use gain
for any sort of academic personal projects.
And will also put a link to that on the podcast.
Webpage, my count, thank you very much, many.
Thanks, I've really enjoyed talking to you for more about
geology b, as well as pictures and diagrams that illustrate
this podcast. You can go to jail.
Geology B.com.