March News

More Covid lockdown … so more virtual fieldtrips, as industry and academia alike are unable to venture outdoors en masse for geological fieldtrips and fieldwork!

Although the main day-to-day focus for industry geologists is invariably to understand the sub-surface, available data from the sub-surface are typically sparse, biased, low-resolution, and/or remotely imaged, and successful companies have long understood the benefit of field geology to provide important context for their sub-surface activities. For academia, the lack of field geology this year is also a major blow – there is a longstanding belief that undergraduates who are training to be the next generation of professional geologists will always need exposure to real rocks in outcrop.

So to the first trips of this year: two separate programs, both for industry clients, both with focus on the Zagros. One was a single session to give a broad overview of regional tectonics and a selection of representative outcrops; the other a series of ten trips that delved deeply into many facets of Zagros geology, all with an overall focus on showing how geology seen in outcrop can give direct insight into the sub-surface. The itineraries for this series of trips combined our regional to anticline-scale interpretations (the “GoogleEarth” scale) with detailed explanations of well over a hundred individual outcrops from the northern Zagros.

GRL interpretation of surface structure and stratigraphy, draped over topography in Google Earth (NE Kurdistan).