Occasional musings on meteorology and other bits of Earth science
While there was still a bit of summer left, I took a couple of days off work for a short holiday down in the Scottish Borders. While there, I made an even shorter pilgrimage to a geologically famous spot: Dob’s Linn, in the Moffat fells. This spot is famous because the internationally agreed defining pointContinue reading A geological pilgrimage
I took the car for a spin in the Lammermuir Hills south of Dunbar last weekend, in the hope of re-charging the battery after a prolonged refusal to start from cold. The car’s electrical problems have got worse since, and it is now in the garage, but at least it did not die on meContinue reading The Great Conglomerate
Nearly three weeks later, I have more or less recovered from the geophysics field course. We were back on the Medoc peninsula this year. I blogged about this field area when we went there three years ago, so I won’t re-hash the whole thing. But here are a few random thoughts that occurred to meContinue reading France again
I described some time ago how I set one of our gravity meters up to make a continuous recording of gravity variations. (The live plot of today’s gravity is here.) The main thing observed is the daily gravity tide, caused by the apparent motion of the Sun and Moon across the sky. But the gravityContinue reading Gravity detects geopolitical event
After visiting the Dorset and East Devon coast on our holiday, we headed even further west, to the Penwith peninsula at the far end of Cornwall. The peninsula is almost entirely made of granite, part of a huge intrusion that outcrops on Dartmoor, Bodmin Moor and a few other places. We got a good lookContinue reading Cornish Granite
I’m back home from my summer holidays: a road trip to the far south west of England. One of my wife’s hobbies is collecting UNESCO world heritage sites; the trip was an opportunity to visit the only such site in mainland Great Britain which is listed for its natural attributes rather than its man-made ones.Continue reading A place in the textbooks
This is another in my occasional series of classic lump ascents. Like the first one, this one is in the Canary Islands. A purist might argue that at 608m, Atalaya de Femés is far too impressive to count as a classic lump, especially as it is the highest point in the southern part of Lanzarote. IContinue reading Another Canarian summit
I’m in North Wales for Easter, and the weather (hooray) has been nice enough to get out for a walk or two. I visited Prestatyn Hillside: an impressive north-west-facing limestone cliff. The limestone is of Visean age, towards the old end of the Carboniferous period; essentially the same rock that we spend a week onContinue reading Limestone walk
I went to Malham, in the Yorkshire dales, for the weekend. The trip was worth it for the company, but was otherwise highly unsatisfactory: the weather was terrible and I lost my phone on the drive down. (Fortunately, I managed to recover it on the way home, from the cafe where I had left it.)Continue reading Mr. Grumpy goes to Yorkshire
I mentioned a year or three ago that we are moving to the use of python, with the numpy and matplotlib packages, for teaching scientific computing. I also mentioned that I was having to do some learning myself as I have used R for this purpose over the last few years. A thing that happensContinue reading Dots and snakes.
