Finally, back to the rocks!

Meet the Department Student experience 9th June 2021

In our latest post, Professor Jonathan Redfern celebrates the return to fieldwork for Earth and Environmental scientists.

Large scale cross beds, Helsby formation, part of the same formation that is a reservoir for gas offshore in the Morecambe Bay, and will soon be a site to sequester CO2.

With the start of the relaxation of Covid restrictions, we were finally able to take our MSc students to look at some rocks! It had been a long wait following a year of running the course “virtually” with online lectures, practicals and even digital field courses. Student feedback has been very positive, but the staff were keen to take advantage of the first opportunity to run some day trips to build core skills in rock description and to develop an understanding of scale and the evolution of the basins.

Manchester is surrounded by some great places to go, the Derbyshire Pennines to the east, with Carboniferous carbonates and clastics, and to the east, the Triassic red beds, exposed along the coast and in some inland outcrops. All no more than one hour’s drive.

Beautiful compound bar forms from a Triassic river that was flowing across the Wirral 200 million years ago! Offshore, we can see the huge wind farms that part of the UK new renewable energy revolution!

We were lucky with the weather, which we all know even in May can be a challenge in the UK. Geology is a sociable science, you learn so much from these field trips and at last, after months of “Zoom”, we could actual meet the students face to face!