Today I’m blogging about Day #5 (Friday) of the 35th International Geological Congress (IGC), which I attended last week in my home city of Cape Town, South Africa. You can also read my posts about Day #1, Day #2, Day #3, and Day #4.

On Friday I spent the day attending talks on a variety of subjects, namely ophiolites, megafans, and gold. I saw a number of excellent talks, but in this blog post I’ll briefly discuss three interesting talks that I attended.

The first interesting talk was related to ophiolites and was given by Paul Robinson. The talk was titled “The significance of zircon in oceanic mantle peridotites and chromitites”. The talk discussed the presence of felsic minerals, such as zircon, in ultramafic rocks (peridotites and chromitites). Geologists aren’t quite sure why these felsic minerals are found (in low abundances) in ultramafic rocks. Understanding the origin of the zircons, including any possible recycling of zircon from older rocks, has important implications for geochronology studies since zircon is a target mineral for U-Pb dating techniques.

The second interesting talk was about megafans and was given by Justin Wilkinson. The talk was titled “Africa’s megafans and their tectonic habitat.” I learned two important things from the talk. First, I learned what the term “megafan” means. A megafan is a very large fan of fluvial sedimentary material. There isn’t exact consensus in the literature on the size requirement, but generally fans that are larger than 100 km in size are considered “megafans”. Second, I learned that there are many more megafans on Earth than scientists realized even a few years ago. Some of the famous megafans, such as the Okavango megafan in Botswana, have been known about for years. However, others have only recently been identified, mostly through remote sensing mapping. Amazingly, we’re still learning about the surface of our planet. While many megafans have been identified over the past few years through focused efforts, there are likely many more to still identify — for example, there are likely some underneath jungle vegetation in places. Dr. Wilkinson works for NASA and uses satellite data and astronaut handheld photography to study features such as megafans. The use of the astronaut photography to conduct geology is pretty cool — I’d never heard of that before. If you want to learn more about astronaut photography,  here’s a neat-looking book authored by Justin Wilkinson on more than 40 years of astronaut photography. I think I need to order a copy of this book for my coffee table!

The third interesting talk was about biology and gold and was given by Hartwig Frimmel. The talk was titled “Early Life and Ancient Gold” and focused on the possible role of biological processes in the formation of the enormous Witwatersrand gold deposits. Frimmel’s talk focused on a recent paper of his (written with a colleague Quinton Hennigh), which has the delightful title of “First whiffs of atmospheric oxygen triggered the crustal gold cycle”. I’d read the Frimmel and Hennigh paper before the talk, but it was great to hear one of the authors explain the theories himself. There were a few skeptics in the audience, but in general Frimmel’s talk was well-received. I certainly enjoyed the talk and think that there is much merit in some of the ideas, even if there’s more work to do to unravel some of the details and the unanswered questions that remain.

After attending talks most of the day, I met up with fellow AGU blogger Callan Bentley as well as another conference attendee Nadja Drabon. Callan and Nadja bravely joined me for some kayaking along the Century City canals, my usual training spot! We had a great time chatting on the water and also at dinner afterwards. Great to see you in South Africa again, Callan, and great to meet you, Nadja!

This is the last of my official daily posts about IGC, but stay tuned for some additional snippets about the conference here and there.

 

Today I’m continuing my blogging about attending the 35th International Geological Congress (IGC) in my home city of Cape Town, South Africa, this week. You can find my first two posts here and here. The congress finished today, but I still need to write up my blog posts about days 3, 4, and 5. I’ll write about Day #3 today and then will write about the last two days over the weekend or early next week.

On Day #3 (Wednesday) of the congress I attended talks on a wide variety of topics. I spent the early morning listening to talks about diamonds and kimberlites, then I spent the late morning attending talks about sustainability in the mining industry, and finally I spent the afternoon attending talks on gold geology.

One of the great things about a large geological conference such as IGC is that you can attend a wide range of talks. At the conference this week I made a point to attend a few talks on topics about which I knew very little. Geology is such an interdisciplinary field that I never know what sort of geological research could be relevant to my own fields of study. It’s great to cross-pollinate ideas across different geological disciplines. Also, I really enjoy learning about new (to me) areas of geology… I find pretty much all geology interesting!

On Wednesday I think that I enjoyed the talks on sustainability in the mining industry the most… although of course I found the talks on diamonds, kimberlites, and gold fascinating, too!

I consider myself to be an environmentalist and a humanist, and I’ve been working in the mining industry for more than four years now. Mining is essential, now and in the future, to provide raw materials required by the rapidly growing population of the Earth. However, mining of course has environmental and social impacts and needs to be carried out in a sustainable manner. As an employee of a mining company, I believe that I have an obligation to strive to make mining more sustainable. The talks on sustainability and the mining industry were extremely informative and useful for me. I hope to learn more about this field of expertise in the future.

On the sustainability note, I was pleased to see that there was a donation box for offsetting the carbon footprints of the conference attendees:

Travel can have a large carbon footprint, especially if you fly a long distance. For many of the readers of this blog, as a 2013 New York Times article elegantly states, “your biggest carbon sin may be air travel”. I’m not sure that this little donation box substantially offset the travel carbon footprints of the thousands of geologists attending the congress, but it’s a great start — I hope to see more boxes like this in the future, and I hope that people donate to them. At the very least, the prominent placement of this box in the exhibition hall hopefully made people stop and think, even if only for a few moments, about the carbon footprints of their travel.

In addition to attending all of the talks, on Wednesday I also spent about an hour touring a fantastic exhibit called Messengers from the Mantle: Diamonds and Craton Roots. I’ll write up a separate post just on the exhibit, but for now here are two preview pictures:

That’s all I’m going to write about Day #3… stay tuned for the posts about Day #4 and Day #5!

This post continues my daily blogging about the 35th International Geological Congress (IGC) being held in here in my home city of Cape Town, South Africa. You can read my post on Day #1 here.

Today was another busy day at the congress!

In the morning I attended a few talks on the history of geology and was particularly interested in a talk by Martin Pickford on the history of geological research in the Sperrgebiet or “Prohibited Area” of southern Namibia. Since the discovery of diamonds on the southern coast of Namibia in the early 1900s, access to the Sperrgebiet region has been tightly controlled. Thus, compared to most other places in the world, very few geologists have worked on the rocks found in the Sperrgebiet. Of course, a number of geologists working for or on behalf of the diamond mining companies have spent some time in the Sperrgebiet, but even so relatively few geologists have spent substantial time looking at the detailed geology of the region. Furthermore, the diamond geologists generally focused on the diamonds, and relatively little time and energy have been put into other, more academic areas of geological research. Thus, there is still much to unravel and understand about the geology of the Sperrgebiet.

Through my work for De Beers, I’ve been fortunate enough to visit the Sperrgebiet and to conduct a little geological research there, including some collaborative work with some academic researchers. It’s very exciting to work on an area where there’s still so much to understand about the local geology. I hope that in future years more geologists, including more academic geologists, will have the opportunity to work in the Sperrgebiet.

Later in the morning I gave my conference talk, which was about the mineralogy and chemistry of some placer platinum group element and gold grains that have been recovered from diamondiferous sediments offshore of Namibia. My research colleagues and I will be writing a scientific paper about our research, so stay tuned for more details once the paper is published. One of the most exciting aspects of the research is that, to our knowledge, this is the first time that platinum group element and gold grains have been reported in this particular placer, at least in the publicly available scientific literature. I’m very grateful to De Beers and Anglo American for giving us permission to share some of our data with the wider scientific community.

After my talk, I attended a very interesting session on some recent geological mapping, as well as some geochronological and geochemical research, that has been undertaken in northern South Africa and southern Namibia, mostly focused on better understanding Namaqua-Natal Province rocks. There was even some discussion of the geology of Fish River Canyon, which I recently hiked with a group of friends. I really enjoyed hearing about some recent scientific research in the canyon… although having just hiked the canyon I cannot imagine having to hike it with heavy rock samples. I found carrying a sleeping bag, some food, and a little extra clothing was difficult enough!

After lunch, I spent most of the afternoon attending the International Ocean Discovery Program (IODP) sessions. I particularly enjoyed the keynote talk by James Austin, who discussed nearly fifty years of oceanographic research that has been undertaken as part of IODP and the related precursor programs, such as the Deep Sea Drilling Project.

That’s all for today… I’ll write some more tomorrow!

I’ve been neglecting Georneys over the past few months, due to some travel and an extremely busy workload for my day job as an industry geologist. However, I’m attending the 35th International Geological Congress (IGC) in Cape Town, South Africa (my home city!), this week, and I think that blogging about IGC is the perfect way to revive Georneys and, hopefully, to start to blog more regularly for the rest of the year. I’ll write a little about each day of the congress.

Today was the first day of the congress. I spent the morning registering for the congress, uploading my talk for tomorrow, and checking out the exciting exhibition hall. Then in the afternoon I attended the two opening plenary talks and part of the geochronology session, where I heard two excellent overview talks about Ar-Ar and Re-Os dating. Then I attended some private meetings in the late afternoon and went out to dinner with some geological colleagues in the evening.

I really enjoyed the two hours or so that I spent in the exhibition hall today, so I thought I’d share a few pictures from some of the stalls that I visited. The stalls highlight that this truly is an international meeting, with geologists from all over the world. Today I visited the stalls of geological organizations from all over the world, including China, Korea, India, Germany, Norway, Russia, and of course South Africa!

Some of the stalls had some impressive decorations. I think my favorite stall is the one with the polar bear! That stall is run by a group of Scandinavian geological organizations.

I probably only visited a tenth of the stalls today… I definitely need to spend some more time in the exhibition hall later in the week!

Here are a few pictures showcasing some of the international stalls that I visited today:

That’s all for today… stay tuned for more from IGC tomorrow!