Whilst at Martley Rock on Saturday (11th Jan ), erecting the ‘plaque’ a local resident struck up with me.  She volunteered her view that the site looked disgusting, that you could not see anything and that it should never have been opened up.  My response was to ask her if that’s what she thought.  Receipt of an affirmative answer persuaded me to continue with the task at hand.

So there you go.

Your thoughts?

Firstly our evening talks re-commence at Martley Memorial Hall on January 27th Monday 7.30pm–do come along, you will be most welcome.  Tom Jones’s talk is entitled
“What Crystals in Ash can tell us: Examples from Mount St. Helens”
Studies of the crystal component of ash gives us ideas of ash production processes, ash interactions in the plume and below the surface. Example 2004/8 eruption of Mt St Helens

The GeoPark Way that runs through Martley parish and in particular along the fast flowing Teme at Kingswood, is almost impassable owing to severe subsidence. This has been reported to the County Council but no doubt the local group, the Path-or-Nones will carry out some maintenance in an attempt to make the route easier to negotiate.  Much of the banks of the Teme are on the move, but made much worse in places by massive earthworks carried out at the top of the banks.  Here are some pictures but they really do not show the extent of the problem:

Our friend, mentor and newly appointed President gave the TVGS Christmas lecture, held at the Crown Inn Martley, December 9th 2013. Paul’s topic was Volcanoes in the Solar System, and a crowd of over 50 squeezed not too comfortably into the room arranged for the evening. Using his now familiar overhead projector with acetates and later a slide projector—slides NOT Power Point, note, Paul took us on an astonishing journey through our Solar System. The advent of space exploration has revealed a tremendous variety of volcanoes and volcanic effects that were not dreamt of previously.

We are familiar with volcanoes here on Earth, fast flowing Hawaiian lava from low, broad shield volcanoes to the thicker explosive lavas and pyroclastic flows from towering crags e.g. Mt St Helen’s, Vesuvius. We also fully accept how plate tectonics affects the shapes of the continents and that plate boundaries provide a focus for earthquakes and eruptions.

We have always been able to see many craters on our moon, thousands of them, but whether all impact or some volcanic was not clear. Exploration now shows, Paul explained, that past heavy impacts pierced and shattered surface rocks making a way for magma to flow to the surface from the then (2500Ma) molten interior. This heavier basaltic material spread out leaving what we now call mare or seas; satellites reveal that these smoother, darker areas have a higher gravity than their surrounds in support of the above theory.

Venus is cloaked in thick dense cloud, and is hot to the point of making rocks themselves semi molten and sticky. Radar survey show a tremendous amount of volcanic activity has and possibly is still occurring. Strange circular, depressed areas, ‘pancake domes’ and more normal volcanoes with smoothed flanks are a result of the extreme temperatures and pressures on the planet.

Mars has very apparent evidence of vulcanism, strangely grouped in one area with possibly six volcanoes still active. Owing to low gravity, a very thin atmosphere and the absence of plate tectonics, eruptions enable huge, high mountains to build and the ejection of erupted materials well above the atmosphere into space. Olympus Mons, the monster of the bunch, is around 79000 feet high, dwarfing anything here on Earth. Other huge Mars features belie volcanic activity, in particular a huge canyon thousands of miles long, deeper than the Grand Canyon—thought to be collapsed magma chambers.

Beyond Mars to the gas giants of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune with their many and varied moons. These too, in a number of instances, display volcanic features, though not as we know them (Jim). Gripped by the gigantic gravity of their parent, moons are squeezed and stretched, with consequent heating and resultant volcanic activity, often exceptionally violent and continuous. There are sulphur volcanoes on Io (Jupiter), ethane seas and methane rain and rivers on Titan (Saturn), and even nitrogen volcanoes on Triton (Neptune), as distances from the sun increase and local temperatures and conditions favour totally foreign and ‘out of this world’ (literally) forms of vulcanism.

Thank you, Paul, for taking us with you on your space ship to explore our neighbours, opening our minds in the process to the wonderful and strange processes that take place in our Solar System. We look forward to your Christmas lecture next year and wish all TVGS friends a very happy Xmas season and educative New Year.

If you were not there then you missed one of your Society’s great evenings.  For a start there was Adrian Wyatt giving a memorable ‘Rock of the Month’ on a local term used to describe solids found in the Mercian mudstones—Skerry.  Nothing to do with Old Norse or rocky islands this is a local term and it took Adrian a bit of Sherlock to discover its meaning.  Well done Adrian.

Professor David Siveter, Emeritus Professor of Palaeontology, Leicester University

David came to speak to us about fossils discovered recently (1996) in volcanic (bentonite) deposits in the Coalbrookdale Formation of the Wenlock Series (Silurian), in Herefordshire.  He is one of the team investigating this unique find.  The locality of the deposit is a closely guarded secret, and one suspects that this secrecy extends too, to some of the terms they use.  For example, the nodules housing the fossils from around 425 million years ago have the code name….’potatoes’.  Some of the other words that David used seemed like code to most of us, too – lagerstatte—uhh—OK German for ‘storage-place’, to palaeontologists a storage of fossils preserved with exceptional detail including soft body parts.  Offacolus kingi, Colymbosathon eplecticos (a creature that the Sun newspaper memorably headlined as having a 425 million year old ‘todger’—Sun readers amongst you will no doubt recall it), Kenostrychus clementsi, and many others being names given to the new species discovered.

We felt at home immediately with David, a ‘Black Country boy’ from Dudley, easily able to describe his work in terms that we could all understand and answer our questions with clarity and humour.  We were, I think the expression is ‘blown away’, by the beautiful slides of delicate creatures from all those years ago, most completely new to science.  The importance of the HL is that it opens a window into the very detail of shallow sea life from the Silurian, one of the few examples worldwide and the one providing the most detail.  David said that this places the deposit in the top 20 in the world, alongside much better known locations such as the Burgess Shales (Cambrian) in Canada.  Does Herefordshire realize its fame?

Back to the fossils.  Forget dinos and horsehair ferns, these guys are tiny, tiny, housed inside ‘potato’ sized limestone nodules, visible only when cracked in two—thereby exposing, but in two dimensions only, creatures from less than 1mm to around 20mm in size.  How they were actually captured by a rare fossilization process remains a mystery, subject of much debate.  Examination by current non-destructive techniques such as CT scans and X Rays gave poor results (although there is hope for the future) so the team had to resort to a destructive method coupled with digital photography and computers to reveal innermost details. Briefly, a very small amount is ground off the face of the kernel holding the fossil, and the face photographed.  Carried out repeatedly, thin section by thin section, a comprehensive digital dataset is saved to computer. 

Clever software puts it all together and allows the scientist to add false colour, rotate the view in three dimensions and reveal startling new information about the evolution of life itself. The detail is truly remarkable, very fine cilia are seen and in cases the whole internal structure and organs show up.  I hope that the few photographs reproduced here from the team’s work, illustrate this clearly, but you really needed to see David’s animated slides rotating the creatures—amazing.

Following his talk and stopover in Martley, I was able to show him Martley Rock site, Scar Cottage and the Chantry geology garden.  He was most amused and could not understand how there was such an active society yet none of the committee are geologists.  He loved what we are doing and Janet has booked him to appear again at our AGM in November 2014 to talk Chinese fossils—may I suggest you start learning Mandarin right away?

For a readable article with much more information, also here

The Geological Association’s annual bash for its outlying societies, when those that can afford the trip to the capital, are allowed to venture into the hallowed halls of the Geological Society/Association in Burlington House.  This is directly opposite Fortnum and Mason, in Piccadilly.

A finger buffet with wine and fruit juices preceded ‘the annual meeting’ chaired by President Professor Rory ‘chalk’ Mortimer (dated to visit TVGS in April). Yours truly represented Martley and aroused a few indignant jeers from the South-Easters by stating that we had more geological diversity than any other area in the country.  True or not everyone present now knows about TVGS and where we are—until that time the River Teme was either in Devon or the North East.

I was proud to stay awake actually, the room being warm and not all of the discourse arresting.  Several novel and worthwhile ideas were put forward and I suggest we move on with some of these.  My choices–GeoLab—a free geology day, part classroom part field, for adults, directed by GA to their syllabus, taught by staff they would sent to the regions.  There is a realisation that a gulf exists for many (I agree!!) between the average lay person’s knowledge and the professional’s and that some quality, down to earth, keep it simple learning would be a good idea.  A second initiative is that of Rock Watch, 20 years old, the geology society for young persons, a simply wonderful organisation full of ideas, courses, field trips, competitions and so on with great hands on educational activities.  We are keen to imbue a love and appreciation of geology in the children of our eleven local primary schools and it seems most sensible to develop this with guidance from the Rock Watch team.

Day two, an early start, with me wrestling my suitcase of leaflets, laptop, camera, toothbrush etc from train to platform to pavement at St Pancras, along to Gower Street and the magnificent University of London venue for the geology exhibition day and where Ian and I met up.  We quickly put up our ‘stand’ alongside Paul and Sue Olver’s Woolhope display, found a coffee and settled in to the enjoyable experience of a day meeting a wide variety of most interesting and interested people.  We sold two geology audits (only three left, note), some maps, jotted down the names of likely speakers and chatted to most of the geological society stallholders.  There were 34 stalls, of these 14 were geological societies, mainly fairly local, 8 other stands selling rocks and minerals, 7 with books, the rest miscellaneous.  A separate large room was devoted to Rock Watch, with many activities including radio controlled trilobites, fossil hunting, fossil modelling and so on—excellent.

A most worthwhile trip, good ideas, new friends, publicity for Martley and for our efforts.

Dave Cropp, Elspeth Fry, Hollie Kirk and myself visited Sentheim in Alsace, France, 23^rd to 26^th October.  Our purposes in visiting Sentheim with our two LEADER co-coordinators from County Hall, were to learn how the centre operates in all ways and to explore the concept of geo-villages.  We see the geo-village idea as a way in which local communities can discover, conserve and make known their local geology to aid the local economy by adding to the enjoyment of visitors. The trip was financed through European transnational co-operation funding (good if you can get it).  We also visited the LEADER group for the area and received and gave presentations.

Sentheim is a small town of around 2000 situated in the Alsace region of France against the flanks of the Vosges Mountains that rise to 1424m.  Nearest big town is Mulhouse, airport is at Basle (20min from Mulhouse by car).  There is much local industry scattered across the very flat old rift valley between the Vosges and the Black Forest, as well as in the main towns.  Potash mining was an important employer for 100 years from 1904. Wine growing, some of the highest quality in France, is carried out on a long narrow strip on the southerly facing slopes of the hills.  Very beautiful villages and castles are scattered through the hills.  Geologically very similar to our area in that there is the old filled in sunken braided river system with faults either side (as our East Malvern and Inkberrow faultlines) with hills, but on a grander scale and with somewhat generally younger rocks.

The centrepiece of geology is the wonderful museum established by two brothers 20 odd years ago and the whole operation very naturally uses the building as its HQ.  Marvellous display of minerals, rocks and fossils downstairs; library, teaching space, more displays, computer and printer upstairs.

The centre is staffed by Stephanie, geologist and two other part time workers.  There is one 5 km trail in most beautiful undulating countryside in the foothills of The Vosges. Several old quarries are to be seen, displaying Jurassic, Carboniferous Sandstone and Dolomite with some evidence of the intensive industrial workings that finished middle of last century.  Fossils can be sought and there is one naturally formed cave to venture into.

The centre receives visits from school parties and the general public; they provide a leaflet and offer guided walks.  All of these are charged for.  It differs from Martley in that regular meetings are not held, rather more ad hoc events such as the recent one where the centre worked with important local vineyards, to explain how the localised geology affects the wine grown on it.

A unique evening was held in the company of Ingrid, a lady who tells mesmeric stories to old and young alike.  These stories are aimed at teaching about geology in a simple, truthful but gripping style and were enjoyed by all, with much admiration for Ingrid’s dramatic skills.

We were fortunate to be taken by Stephanie and Monique to the area’s last closed potash mine, an industry that had 19 shafts at its peak and lasted for almost one hundred years from 1904.  The potash, mined from deep in the graben between the Black Forest and the Vosges, the remains of very ancient dried out lakes full of minerals from surrounding mountains, gave great wealth to the area.  We very much enjoyed meeting two ex-miners and the director’s secretary—all now retired of course and part of an active volunteer group managing the museum and visitors’ centre.  It was a real privilege to meet these people, so proud were they of the mine and their part in it and that they had been able, through their own hard work, to keep a small part of it alive for visitors.

We would all recommend a visit to the area—for its top class wines, wonderful scenery, incredibly beautiful villages, local cuisine, national museums and oh yes, there are a few rocks too!

Find out more about the centre at http://www.geologie-alsace.fr

For the record: we wanted to erect the beautiful maps that we had had made before the GeoFest walk to be held on 8^th June.  Each map cost £300, one being funded by the Path-or-Nones from monies they themselves had raised, the other from the Martley Geology Project Phase 2.  We are most grateful indeed to the County Council, Rights of Way Dept for the graphic design of the maps, donated to us owing to the work done over many years by The Path-or-Nones in maintaining footpaths.  Thanks June and George Lawrence and Richard Jackman for donating materials to make up the maps’ lectern.  Andy Palmer and I made and erected the lectern, being most irritated when during a short lunch break we received a phone call of complaint about its (unfinished) appearance.  No discussion or positive feedback, straight in with ‘what the heck are you doing…..’  No wonder there are so few volunteers.  Ah well.

In addition to the £600 spent as above, a further £50 was given from each of the above organisations to fund the village noticeboard–£250 had been asked for!  Some of you might wonder why two volunteer groups should be asked for funds.  We still do.  No other group contributed.

After all of that, we know that our maps have made a notable and important addition to our village facilities and will attract visitors; no other village that we know of has these types of maps-for normal walking and for geology.  Shortly we hope that all of our walk leaflets, not only for our geology trails, will be available.

It has been our aim for some time to install a bench at Martley Rock. Our ideas were somewhat accelerated by amusing comments in our well used visitors’ book-‘could do with a bench’, ‘why not donate a bench?’, ‘benches r’us’, ‘when can we have a bench’. Thanks to the kind donation of timber by Mike and Chris Nott of Upper Hollings Farm and a bit of work by us–there is now a bench.  Thanks for the visitor book comments.

The second of two geology walk days as part of the three month long GeoFest, organised by The Herefordshire and Worcestershire Earth Heritage Trust.  As for the one held 8th June, the shorter of our two new trails commenced at 11am and trekked around 3 miles and eight geological features spanning 450 million years, all within a few hundred metres of Martley Memorial Hall.  Some stalwarts met again at 2pm (bit of a rush for the leaders–grabbing a saani and choccies from the shop in the short break) to be joined by a fresh cohort, to enjoy the much more strenuous 6 mile trip passing each one of our four new Interpretation Boards.  Lovely weather, good company–18 for both walks, 36 total, a successful presentation of Martley’s treasures to visitors from as far as Norfolk!

Not great photos but anyway: