Posts by Richard Jones

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…

More geo-conservation work for Natural England (and the Joint Nature Conservation Committee) again this month, to finish off the current Geological Conservation Review in the Lake District and Northern Pennines that we reported back in December. The photos here are from Warnscale Bottom, where rocks of the Ordovician Borrowdale Volcanic Group (BVG) are juxtaposed with…

The Tectonic Studies Group of the Geological Society of London is celebrating its 50th birthday this year! Back in the 1970s and 80s the group’s annual three-day conference quickly became established as an essential fixture for British and Irish geologists working in structural geology and tectonics, with a healthy blend of academic and industry attendees.…

In these Covid-ridden times it’s great to be able to get out on the fells for some fieldwork. Natural England, as a member of the Joint Nature Conservation Committee, is currently carrying out a Geological Conservation Review of many of the country’s geological Sites of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI’s). As part of this we are…

As the energy transition becomes progressively more established, many industry geoscientists are considering how the commercial landscape is likely to change in upcoming years, and how the current structural reorganisation from oil and gas to energy companies might impact on the global need for geologists. Characterisation of fracture systems is one of GRL’s core areas…

A decade ago CCUS (carbon capture, usage and storage) had a high profile, even in the mainstream media, and looked poised to be adopted as a key technology in global and national efforts to mitigate the effects of CO2-related climate change. At that time we worked as part of a large consortium (LR Senergy, British…

Great to see the results from our GNSS and lidar monitoring of the Humbly Grove gas storage site in southern England published this month in First Break. Our ground motion monitoring, together with InSAR, provided high definition temporal and spatial constraint on any surface displacements over an 18 month period (i.e. more than one complete…

It seems strange not to be out-and-about at conferences, workshops and trade meetings during these strange times of Covid-lockdown, though we’ve all managed to adapt rapidly to the new normal of communication via Skype, Zoom and Teams. This month we’ve enjoyed presenting some of our latest monitoring technologies remotely to the Northern regional group of…

The latest in a long line of papers on fracture systems in basement rocks has just been posted in the “Online First” section of the Journal of the Geological Society of London. Following-on from Bob Holdsworth’s recent papers on the Lancaster field (see here and here), in the paper posted today Ken McCaffrey has collated…

More research on fractured reservoirs just published in the Journal of the Geological Society, London. The latest paper is from Loraine Pastoriza’s PhD work to characterise fracture attributes in a geothermal reservoir at Southern Negros in the Philippines. Situated on an active plate margin, the high heat flow in the Philippines is a viable geothermal…