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The steep, towering cliffs along the Yorkshire Coast of northern England have become a favoured field excursion destiny for petroleum geology students. Excellent analogues to the Middle Jurassic Brent reservoirs in the North Sea make a perfect excuse for students who need practical exercises in sedimentology.
“Land’s End”: is there a more evocative place name in the world? A visit to England’s furthest south-west corner reveals a land of extremes, with a wildly beautiful coast, picturesque coves, bleak granite moorlands, and some unusual and fascinating rocks.
Spectacular, extraordinary, awe-inspiring: Table Mountain and the Cape Peninsula are more than just a list of superlatives, with much of interest to offer the visiting geologist.
Inspiring and educating future geoscientists is vital to ensure that innovation in Earth science can continue. The Rotunda Museum in Scarborough in the UK, as well as being the world's first purpose-built geology museum, emphasizes geoscience learning with interactive exhibits and 'hands-on' events.
Iguaçu Falls is one of the most spectacular natural sceneries in the world, caused by a wide-spread volcanic event in conjunction with continental rifting in the Early Cretaceous. This rifting episode has also meant a lot to the hydrocarbon potential on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean.
Just 25 km west of Denver, the Dakota Hogback at Dinosaur Ridge offers an opportunity to explore striking rock exposures and vistas, ancient dinosaur tracks, and oil seeps at the edge of a major oil and gas producing basin.
With a commanding view of the magnificent Canadian Rocky Mountains, a close up look at the southern foothills of Alberta reveals a history rich in oil production, mining, ranching, and aboriginal traditions.
A beautiful but frequently overlooked area, the Welsh Marches of Shropshire, not only has delightful scenery, ranging from rural rolling fields to bleak moorlands, but is also one of the cradles of geology, where both the famous geologist Roderick Murchison and naturalist Charles Darwin formulated many of the founding principles of the science.
Gateway to huge offshore oil reserves, Rio de Janeiro and southeast Brazil offers stunning scenery and geologic evidence of ancient mountains and the forces that spawned two continents.
When visiting the Dolomites of northern Italy, you can combine hiking, biking and climbing with scenery dominated by towering pinnacles and plateaus. This spectacular Late Cenozoic mountain range, home to many well known ski resorts, consists of carbonate rocks deposited in the vast Tethys Sea in the Triassic, more
than 200 million years ago.
To safeguard their geological heritage, China has established a network of National Geoparks; important geological sites that provide essential information for understanding the Earth’s processes and evolution.
Island jumping in the Azores is highly recommended. In this way you can experience the geological wonders of these islands, which all owe their existence to the plate tectonics
within a triple junction setting.
Standing on the bird migration
highway between Europe and
Africa, this jewel of an island
offers more than a supreme
‘twitching’ experience. Qeshm
aims to be a major ecotourism
destination as well as an
upstream player.
The extremes in landscape that characterize Death Valley National Park yield striking
landforms, dramatic and colorful scenery,
and underlying geologic mystery.
This is the ultimate experience
for a keen geologist:
Seven days of rafting through
300 million years of flat-lying
sedimentary rocks of the
Palaeozoic
era and an intriguing
record of Precambrian
sedimentary
and crystalline
rocks.
The dramatic landscape with glaciated fjords surrounded by high, alpine mountain tops makes a visit to Hornsund a special experience.
The main objective of the European Geoparks is the
promotionof
sustainable development of their territories
in Europe. In addition they serve the purpose of
protecting geological heritage for the benefit of the
next generations.
In northern Ireland, at the heart of one of Europe’s most magnificent coastlines, the Giants Causeway with its rugged symmetry is visited by half a million tourists each year. The Causeway consists of an amazing array of massive black basalt columns.
In AD 79, the cataclysmic eruption of the volcano Vesuvius completely
buried the towns of Pompeii and
Herculanaeum with up to 30 m of ash. The volcanic debris gently preserved the city from decay for almost
1,700 years, so today tourists can wander around the streets of this ancient Roman town.
Found in five western states, the Jurassic Navajo Sandstoneand the equivalent Nugget Sandstone is one of the largest wind-deposited formations in the geologic record. The sandstones that form spectacular cliff exposuresare both the focal points of tourist cameras and the primary reservoir targets for oil and gas drillers in the central Utah and the Utah-Wyoming thrust belts.
A few days of holiday can be well spent by walking leisurely through an almost complete Mesozoic succession along the south coast of England. Outcrops of colourful shales, sandstones and carbonates can be studied without the need for detailed prior knowledge.
Despite an abundance of truly amazing cultural and archaeological features, one of the greatest sights in Egypt remains the simple phenomenon of the Nile Valley. When seen from the air one can appreciate fully how the river is the life force of the country, carving a fertile green channel sometimes less than a mile wide through the otherwise endless desert.
With relatively easy access from Longyearbyen, the Festningen Section is a very popular geological attraction that displays an almost complete section of sedimentary rocks throughout the Mesozoic. Scientists, students and oil company geoscientists
come every year from all over the world to learn basic principles of sedimentology and sequence stratigraphy.
Several thousand years ago, between the rivers Euphrates and Tigris, the rich and fertile soil of Mesopotamia gave birth to civilization. Today, deeply buried oil and gas reservoirs provide Mesopotamia with energy resources that are seen by many to be the cause of geopolitical conflicts and simultaneously fuel and threaten our civilization.
Glacial meltwater and subaerial erosion after the ice age has sculptured a badlands landscape within Upper Cretaceous clastic sedimentary rocks. Abundant dinosaur fossil bones and skeletons have been exposed making the Dinosaur Provincial Park in Canada the richest dinosaur locality in the world.
After many years of civil unrest and terrorist activity Peru has now experienced relative economic and political stability for more than 15 years. A well-established hydrocarbon industry offering attractive terms has helped rebuild this beautiful country. However, faced with rising internal energy consumption, the country is trying to attract foreign companies to undertake exploration in new, possibly high-risk areas like the remote Madre de Dios Basin. Can Peru ever become self-sufficient in hydrocarbons again?
White chalk, forming spectacular cliffs, is found outcropping in England, Denmark as well as France. For the layman these cliffs are favoured attractions on holidays, for geologists they constitute excellent outcrops for studying the stratigraphy and sedimentology of the chalk as well as being analogues for some of the North Sea fields.
For a geoscientist, hiking the Grand Canyon is a trip through two billion years of the past, making on average an impressive 60,000 years back in time for every step. This geologic showpiece, the greatest gorge on Earth, has been carved out by the Colorado River in a mere five million years.
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