: Geology

On Saturday 21st September Amgueddfa Cymru ran their annual Beachwatch event. This involved fantastic family science activities in the morning attended by 41 members of the public and seven members of staff. Participants looked at strandline and rockpool animals and seaweeds as well as fossilised corals and snails. Inspired by the fossils and shells that they had seen, the children went on to create wonderful pieces of artwork using Plaster of Paris on the wet sand of the beach.

After lunch, the volunteers gathered to clean the beach and do a litter survey recording all the items they found. The beach clean was attended by 59 volunteers including many of the families from the morning activities.

The results will be sent to the Marine Conservation Society who will collect the data from this beach and hundreds of other UK beaches that were cleaned this weekend. As well as making the beach safer for people and marine life, the Marine Conservation Society also use the data to find out where beach litter comes from and contribute to marine conservation.

As you can see from the photo we found a lot of rubbish including 9 tyres, half a canoe and a traffic cone! A huge thank you to our wonderful volunteers, Ogmore Beach now looks even more beautiful!

Fossils are cool, and everybody knows it. Dinosaurs, ammonites, trilobites – all extinct but living on in our imagination, in films and books and documentaries and children’s stories. We watch ‘JurassicPark’ and ‘Ice Age’ on TV, collect fossil bones and shells on the beach, and amuse the kids with a remote-controlled plastic dino until the batteries run out.

But what about all those fossils that no film director wants to know about? 99% of all organisms that ever lived on Earth are extinct. Only a fraction of these were dinosaurs, so what about the rest? Billions of species have evolved and disappeared, and most have only ever been heard of by small groups of scientists who devote their lives to charting the history of evolution. Here’s a little test: do you know Lepidodendron, Meganeura, Rhynia, Bothryolepis, Calycocoelia or Lambelasma? Two of them are plants, one is a dragonfly, one fish, one sponge and a coral - ten points if you can put them in the correct groups.

Sometimes those bizarre fossils that only geeky scientists are interested in develop an unexpected life of their own. I am interested in corals – but not those colourful ones that make up the Great Barrier Reef, this beautiful living structure that can be seen from space. No, I picked an obscure group of corals that has been extinct for 250 million years. These corals are called rugose corals, and they look a bit like ice cream cones. They lived in the sea of course, little tentacles sticking out of a hard skeleton, some in shallow water, others quite deep. Most were only little, a few centimeters in size, although there are some that grew to half a meter in length. One of these has just reached a certain level of fame, and this is its story.

The mystery fossil

Two years ago two colleagues of mine were looking for brachiopods and trilobites in a remote corner of northeastern Iran. It was hot and dry, and where we in Britain have road signs warning of mud and flooding, in Iran they have signs warning of blown sand and collisions with wild camels. Doing geology is great in these areas, because you do not get any pesky vegetation growing in the way of beautiful rocks.

My colleagues, Leonid Popov (Amgueddfa Cymru - National Museum Wales), and Mansoureh Ghobadi Pour (Golestan University, Iran), did find plenty of fossils that day in the desert, but one rock contained something unusual. It was mostly buried inside the rock but the little bit that was sticking out looked a bit like a rugose coral. Leonid and Mansoureh knew exactly how old these rocks were. What they did not realise at the time, when they brought the fossil back to Cardiff for me to check out, was that they were too old for rugose corals.

Old corals

Corals are an ancient type of organism. Several different kinds have existed, most groups of corals are now extinct. The rugosans are not the oldest, but they are pretty old. Early rugose corals have been found in Northern Europe, North America and Australia, in rocks of Upper Ordovician age (about 450 million years old). The rocks in Iran which Leonid and Mansoureh were walking on are Middle Ordovician (462 million years). Therefore, if this new little fossil from Iran really was a rugose coral, it was going to be the earliest known one. Excitement all around, because everyone wants to find a first, but you have to do this sort of thing carefully, because you do not want to claim a first, then be proved wrong and make a fool of yourself. Because there are some sponges at that time which also look like ice cream cones, so we needed to be sure before shouting it from the roof tops.

Identifying rugose corals is not easy. You need a geological lab to make at least a couple of thin sections of the fossil. These are slices of rock thinner than a human hair, so thin that you can shine light through them and look at the structures inside. At the National Museum, we have the lab and we make lots of thin sections. But this is a destructive technique – in the process of finding out what’s inside the rock you lose your fossil. What if you only have one or two fossils, and you don’t want to destroy it? I started looking around for what we call non-destructive analytical techniques, and after a couple of unsuccessful attempts ended up at the Diamond Light Source synchrotron in Oxfordshire.

Fossils and X-Rays

Synchrotron X-Ray Tomography works a bit like an X-Ray in hospital, when you have broken your arm. Only the X-Rays are much more powerful – they can penetrate rock. At the Diamond synchrotron, this had only been tried once before, and the fossil then was preserved very differently (as pyrite) compared to ‘my’ coral (calcite and silica in a carbonate rock). Leonid came to Diamond with me, and together with Robert Atwood from Diamond we worked around the clock for three days – in that time I only had four hours sleep and I was completely shattered at the end of it. But just doing the analysis was not the end. The data coming out of the synchrotron were only ‘raw’, and they needed to be rendered, cleaned, edited, loaded into a different programme – this is what Robert did, and only after all that we found out whether the technique actually worked.

Robert did some amazing magic with the data, and it turned out that the technique really had worked. We were looking at a 3D reconstruction of the beast inside the rock, without ever having touched the rock. The fossil was still intact, it was still partly buried, and we also had the information we needed to describe it. For a palaeontologist this is pretty amazing stuff.

Mystery solved

From the images and the 3D reconstruction it was immediately obvious that this fossil was not a sponge, but that it really was a rugose coral. This was the second sensation. Definitely a rugose coral, we are certain of the age of the rocks, and it predates the previously known oldest rugose coral by 5 million years – quite a margin, even in Palaeozoic palaeontology. We called it Lambelasma because it has some characteristics of that genus – even though in the future we will probably find that it is actually a new genus, but we need more fossils to be able to decide that. That is quite difficult to organise, due to the remoteness of the area where this one came from.

A conference in Oxfordshire and another one in Dublin, scientific publication, press release, and radio interview later, everything calms down. Until, six months later, an e-mail from the Diamond press office asks if I can come to the Cheltenham Science Festival in two weeks’ time. Apparently, 14 year old Christy Au from Headington School in Oxford picked our research as the subject to write about as part of Diamond’s ‘Light Reading’ competition; and won it! Her little story describes the feelings and experiences of the little fossil inside the rock, waiting to be discovered, and it is absolutely amazing.

Science and Art

This was all quite short notice, but a sudden burst of activity and a lot of help from many different people – most of all Sheng Yue from the University of Manchester – meant that Diamond was able to produce an upscaled 3D model of the coral. The model was nearly 20 cm long and much more presentable than the 1.8 cm long original fossil.

Christy came to Cheltenham thinking she was just part of a normal school trip to the Science Festival – but then, to her amazement, got ushered into the VIP area for a an award presentation. She met some of the team involved in the research, met the fossil and the 3D reconstruction, was photographed from all angles, and her story was read out by Professor Alice Roberts. Suddenly, Lambelasma had taken on a life of its own. This obscure little fossil, that, normally, would only get half a dozen geeks excited, was now on a public platform. Everyone was talking about it. It definitely had the X factor.

So what about Lambelasma now? It has all gone quiet again, and the fossil has gone back to the collections at the National Museum in Cardiff. Maybe you’ll come to visit the museum and happen to see it there. Look closely, because it really is only little. Hopefully you won’t think ‘Oh, it’s just an obscure little fossil, half-buried inside a small piece of rock’. Instead, think how much work it is to uncover the secrets of our Earth, and what wonderful stories are hidden inside each piece of rock.

Sunday 4 December 2011

A bright, clear, sunny morning gave us our first good look at Macquarie Island, its straight steep eastern side plunging into the sea. On the shore we could see a beach packed with King penguins.

We had hoped to take the zodiacs out to cruise amongst the swimming Kings but a southerly wind was too strong and the swell too big for safety. But the Kings came to us instead. They are curious birds, and hundreds of them swam all around the ship.

Soon it was time to leave and we set off along the eastern side of Macquarie and out into the Southern Ocean. Once well out of sight of land, we were accompanied by several pairs of light-mantled sooty albatross which soared alongside our ship.

Below, skimming the waves, flashes of blue were Antarctic prions, while farther out, the huge white wingspan of a wandering albatross swept back and forth low above the water.

Monday 5 December 2011

It's going to take us two full days at sea to our next landfall, at Hobart in Tasmania, where my Antarctic journey will end. So all day today we've been rolling back and forth in the swell of the Tasman Sea and we've another day of it to go.

This is the time to look back on where we've been and what we've seen. A visit to Antarctica is always special, but this visit to the Ross Sea has been truly extraordinary. It's a difficult place to get to - we had to break our way through 900 miles of pack ice to reach 77o 50° South - and the landscape is like no other. It's one of those places where you find it hard to believe that you are really there.

It's been an amazing and moving experience to visit the century-old huts of the Scott and Shackleton expeditions, and one can only be in awe of their achievements, not just in their exploration of new lands but in the scientific work they did here, often in the severest conditions.

Having been to their expedition bases and to some of the sites they visited, I'm looking forward to re-reading the accounts of their expeditions, and especially that of Scott's last expedition, the centenary of which will be marked next year with a number of events in the UK.

I'm sure that much of what I've seen and experienced on this trip deep below the Antarctic Circle will enhance our forthcoming exhibition,

, and the activities we have planned around it. But for now, it's back to the rolling sea.

Sunday 27 November 2011

We’ve been slowly breaking through heavy pack ice as we travel around Ross Island to see the Ross Ice Shelf. But we’ve the view of the volcanoes of Ross Island, including Mount Erebus, which has made up for it.

We saw a rocky headland at the eastern end of Ross Island - Cape Crozier, the site of an Emperor penguin rookery, famous as the destination of The Worst Journey in the World. Edward Wilson, Birdie Bowers and Apsley Cherry-Garrard of Scott’s last expedition sledged the 60 miles from the other side of the island in the intense cold and 24 hour darkness of the Antarctic winter to collect Emperor eggs, believing that these would shed light on the evolutionary relationships between reptiles and birds. The journey was an epic one, with temperatures down to -60oC. It was so cold, their teeth cracked. Their tent blew away and they nearly died. Cherry-Garrard’s book is a classic of Antarctic exploration literature.

Passing Cape Crozier, ahead of us loomed the huge white cliff of the Great Ice Barrier, the edge of the Ross Ice Shelf. Discovered by James Clark Ross in 1841, it is one of the great natural wonders of the world. A vertical wall of floating ice rising 30 metres above the surface of the sea (and about 270 metres below), the edge of the ice shelf extends for 600 km. The ice shelf itself is enormous - a mass if floating ice the size of France.

Strong winds were blowing off the top of the ice shelf today, carrying snow in great sweeps down the face of the ice cliff. James Clark Ross saw it as a formidable barrier to southward travel.

Thursday 1 December 2011

The Ross Ice Shelf is about as far south as you can take a ship on this planet, so from here the only way to go is north. Our original plan was to head towards the west coast of the Ross Sea for some landings on the mainland, but the sea ice is way too thick.

Down by the Ice Shelf, we were in a large area of open water, but the current in the Ross Sea carries the ice clockwise and it has piled up against the west coast. So instead we’re heading out of the Ross Sea. We’ve spent three days breaking through the pack ice and broke into the open water of the Southern Ocean last night. It was foggy and snowing this morning. We’re now about 570 miles from Macquarie Island and skirting the eastern side of a deep low pressure system. The waves in that low are about 8 metres high, but here they are only 5 metres or so. Around us, albatrosses wheel in the wind.

These days at sea are times for lectures and other activities. This morning I lectured on the links between Wales and Antarctica and the support Scott’s expedition received from Cardiff and Wales. There was a lot of interest in our planned exhibition and a number of people have expressed an interest in coming to see it. Some are even thinking of coming from the US and combining visits to the exhibitions in London and Cardiff, which would be great.

Saturday 3 December 2011

We’ve not been on land since last Saturday. We spent three days breaking ice in the Ross Sea and another three in the rolling waters of the Southern Ocean.

It’s not been quite as calm as it was on the way south. We’ve been rolling at about 30o and pitching as well, so we’ve had an uncomfortable time being thrown about. But now land is in sight. We’re sailing along the coast of Macquarie Island. It’s in the middle of nowhere, a sliver of land in the vast southern ocean.

It’s a cold, grey, damp and foggy day. We landed near the northern end of the island at an Australian research station and staff there showed us around their facilities, which, being an Australian base, includes not only a bar, but a brewery. The station is surrounded by a sturdy fence to keep out the elephant seals, big, heavy, noisy, smelly animals that would flatten anything and everything. Outside the station, they are everywhere. The geology around here is fascinating. The island is a slice of ocean floor which has been uplifted along the boundary between the Australian and Pacific plates.

After lunch we landed at a bay on the island’s east coast on a beach crowded with King penguins and the much smaller Royal penguins with their bright yellow crests. Walking through the surf along the shore, with penguins come in and out of the water around my feet was a special experience. A short walk north along the shore took us to a colony of King penguins where it was hard to believe that the comical, dumpy, brown, fluffy ‘okum boys’ which are the immature Kings would eventually turn into such beautiful adult birds. At the back of the beach, a penguin highway busy with Royals led uphill to a huge, noisy, densly packed throng of many thousands of the birds, some with tiny chicks at their feet.

Thursday 24 November 2011

This morning we landed by helicopter on the beach at Cape Bird on the northwestern side of Ross Island and hiked north to an Adelie penguin rookery, with perhaps 70,000 pairs of birds.

Much smaller than Emperors, these are feisty little beasts, the most southerly breeding penguin in the world. It’s always entertaining to watch them carrying pebbles to add to their stone nests, squabbling with one another, and waddling back and forth across the ice to the water. On previous trips to Antarctica I’ve seen two Adelies go at one another with a scary degree of fury.

While we were watching the Adelies, it started to snow and we witnessed a real Antarctic scene as the black backs of the penguins turned grey and then white. The wind grew stronger and visibility dropped, so we had to abandon our landing and get everyone back to the ship.

Friday 25 November 2011

We’re now the furthestmost south ship on earth, and have the weather to prove it. Our plans today were a visit to see the facilities at the large US McMurdo Station and New Zealand’s Scott Base. Also here is the hut from Scott’s first expedition in 1902. But the weather wasn’t on our side. It’s been blowing a blizzard all day (well it is summer here, after all) with the windchill temperature down to -40, the temperature at which the Celsius and Fahrenheit scales meet.

The ship is covered in snow, the wind plastering it to the superstructure. But during a brief lull in the storm this evening, we did get a view of a partial solar eclipse, which was a great bonus. We’re staying here tomorrow to see if the weather improves enough to fly the helicopters.

Saturday 26 November

By this morning the blizzard had died down, but the wind was still too strong for the helicopters to fly. We waited all morning, then just as the ship was pulling away the wind dropped just enough. So it was a quick dash to get changed and grab a sandwich, then out to the helideck for a 20 minute flight south to the site of the hut from Captain Scott’s first expedition.

The hut is situated at the end of a long peninsula at the southern end of Ross Island. It was convenient not only for Scott’s Discovery expedition of 1902-04 but also for later Scott and Shackleton expeditions. The interior contains artefacts from all of these, most notably from the Ross Sea party of Shackleton’s Imperial Transantarctic Expedition of 1914-16. Seals killed by Shackleton’s men nearly 100 years ago lie on the verandah on top of sails from Scott’s ship. Seal blubber inside still drips oil onto the floor. Their last meal can still be seen in the frying pan.

Next to the hut is the large US base of McMurdo Station. Looking like a frontier mining town, it’s not the most attractive site in Antarctica, but it is an important staging post for the scientific field parties heading out on the ice. A short distance away is the New Zealand Scott Base which fulfills a similar role and also provides facilities for the Antarctic Heritage Trust who have been conserving the historic huts.

The view today was spectacular, across the fast ice to the high ice covered mountains of the Royal Society Range.