Special golf clubs for playing on lava flows?

Recently, I got a research enquiry, seeking a nice fresh olivine tholeiite (a kind of basalt). The specimen had to be big enough to allow a decent-sized offcut to be taken for destructive experimental use.

After a brief search through the Hunterian museum rock collections, I found an ideal rock (R21646).  It had been collected in the 1920s by MA Peacock and GW Tyrrell, from the post-glacial  Hvaleyrarhraun lava flow, on the Reykjanes peninsula in SW Iceland. Here's what it looks like under a polarizing microscope:

Hvaleyrarhraun olivine tholeiite lava between crossed polars. FOV about 2mm wide. Very little actual olivine in this view: mostly greyish plagioclase crystals, and brighter coloured clinopyroxene, plus dark holes in the slide (bottom left and right).

I've worked with igneous rocks from all over the world for quite a long time, but to my shame, I've never really got to grips with Icelandic lava terms, or places, so I took to the web to find out more about this locality.

This link appeared near the top of the Google results, indicating that the lava flow (dating from ca. 950 AD) now hosts a golf course.

I don't own this T-shirt, but it's a pretty good summary of my views on golf. However golf on a lava flow sounds better than normal golf. And, even better, it seems as though special clubs may be required:

the front nine holes feature no grassed roughs, only closely mown turf, semi-rough and lava. No bunkers can be found on these holes, only on the older back nine where they are very much an integral part of a links concept. Unlike many other lava golf courses, e.g. in Hawaii and Tenerife, golfers at Keilir are able to play recovery shots from the lava areas. Indeed, many golfers carry a special „lava wedge“. This is quite unique, since on most lava courses, lava is treated as a lateral hazard.

 A "lava wedge"?   This sounds excellent. However, Google has so far failed to reveal any pictures of such a gold club. Their use is hinted at for courses on Hawaii and Bali, but I can't find any pictures, or videos of such a thing in use.

Any contributions welcome...

PS The Icelandic "..hraun" suffix seems to be used to name particular lava flows when used in placenames. The "Hvaleyrarhraun" means something like "Whale sandbank lava".  This flow is also described as "helluhraun" to indicate smooth-topped, ropy lava. Usually today, geologists use the Hawaiian word "pahoehoe" for this type of flow - I hadn't heard of this Icelandic alternative.

Rock against.... the Poll Tax

This item has being lying around in my office for around 20 years.

My new curatorial colleague, Nicky Reeves, spotted it the other day, and was intrigued. It's a cheque, carved on a broken slab of "Emerald Pearl" larvikite, a Permian alkaline igenous rock from near Oslo, in Norway. Here is its story.

As older readers will know, the Poll  Tax, (officially known as the "Community Charge") was introduced by Margaret Thatcher's Tory government in Scotland in 1989-90, where it proved record-breakingly unpopular. The following year, it was introduced in England and Wales, where it soon became equally unpopular.

At this time, I was working in the excellent Leicester University Geology Department, and living in and enjoying the fine and mysteriously-underrated city of Leicester. Leicester had a Labour council, who hated the tax, but were forced to rely on it for income.

This left me in a dilemma. Paying the tax would be taken as support for it. Or at least acquiescence to it. Not paying the tax would deprive the council of money needed for schools, rubbish disposal, roads, museums, etc. What was I to do?

I had discovered that cheques did not need to be written using the official bits of paper from a cheque book. It was "well known" that a cheque had been written on a cow by a disgruntled farmer, and found to be legally valid. (I believed this at the time, but see here ). So I decided to write cheques on tablets of stone. This would be enjoyable, appropriate for a geologist, and would ensure that my money was accompanied by a clear and forceful statement of protest. Also, when it comes to messages, you can't get better than tablets of stone.

 I inscribed the stone (using a pneumatic air pen like these) , and then took it to the bank, where it was slid under the security glass at the counter (In one later case, where a larger slab was used, the teller had to come came out to collect it). Staff at the Midland Bank (now closed; this building on London Road in Leicester) took the process entirely in their stride, and the money was taken out of my account, and transferred to the council at record-breaking speed. I subsequently paid several more Poll Tax bills in the same way.

My protest clearly helped* By the time I returned to Scotland in 1992, having got a job at Glasgow University, the Poll Tax was obviously doomed, and it finally expired in 1993/4.

A few years later, I was revisiting Leicester, and wondered what had become of my stone cheques. So I went into the Midland Bank branch on London Road, and enquired. All cheques have to be retained for some statutory period. Rather amazingly, two of my stone slabs were still "on file", I think in the same branch. All I had to do to get my slabs back was to write a couple of paper back-dated replacements to go on file in their place, and I was able to walk out of the bank with the stone cheques. One (on slate) is now in the numismatic collections of the Hunterian Museum, while I have kept this one.


* It would be interesting to know if anybody other than the bank staff in the London Road branch of the Midland Bank ever got to know of the existence of my stone cheque protest. Realistically, probably not. but I like to imagine that they did play some small, and perhaps decisive part in the demise of the Poll Tax.

University of Glasgow Spain field trip 2014 - team photo!

Here are the Glasgow final year Earth Science students and staff, on a beautiful sunny day in the sandstone hills north of El Chorro in Spain.

Another great day on a fantastic field trip. The rocks under and behind us represent the filling of almost the last channel connecting the Atlantic and Mediterranean, between 7.3 and 6.2 million years ago. Once the Mediterannean became isolated, it dried up completely for around 400000 years, before being refilled through the Straits of Gibraltar.

Spanish chameleon and dog

I am currently on the Level 4 Earth Science field trip to southern Spain, with 35 students and colleagues Tim Dempster, Trevor Hoey, Martin Lee and Cristina Persano. Weather is scorching, and rocks are great (more on this elsewhere), but first, some animals.

First, a squashed and mummified chameleon, seen two days ago in  Carboneras Fault zone

in SE Spain:

Today we were working around Sorbas, and at the Cuevas de Sorbas car park, during our assessement and summary lecture-ette sessions, we we joined by a very nervous Spanish dog. She eventually got up the courage to come close enough for a pat, and was eventually rewarded with a ham sandwich from Viviane.

Scottish gold!

Last week, I drove a Land Rover up to Tyndrum to collect a large sculptural block of rock for the Hunterian's forthcoming Scottish Gold exhibtion. Chris Sangster, the Scotgold CEO kindly accompanied us, and we were able to drive right up to the Cononish mine along the access track.

Although the mine is currently being developed, the mine dumps are mostly the result of development work carried out by Ennex in the 1980s, and it's amazing how quickly the rock surfaces are becoming colonized by mosses and lichens. However, we managed to find a nice large block of rock cut by abundant quartz veins:

Having the vehicle beside the dump makes collecting such large blocks easy!

Afterwards, Chris the designer, and Neil the photographer spent a long time standing in the river with a fancy camera on a tripod, capturing the essence of the gold-rich landscape.

Blockbuster exhibition opens on 14th March!

The Brighton Medal

Yesterday, a medal arrived in the post.

In early December 2013, a week or so before the AGM of the Geological Curators Group,  I'd received a  phone call from Mike Howe, who was just finishing his term as Chair of the GCG committee. I'd been nominated for the Brighton Medal, probably the only award for geological curators anywhere in the world. I was not having a good day, and feeling stressed and a bit isolated, so this was astoundingly nice news from the outside world. I was gobsmacked.

Unfortunately, I was unable to attend the meeting in Canterbury at which the award was to be made. I proposed a high-tech virtual presence via Skype - I would make an acceptance speech from a laptop screen. Having had the agenda for the meeting, I waited by my computer and phone. And waited. And waited.

Somewhere between Canterbury and Glasgow things had gone wrong.  The award was made, but I was unable to say "thank you" at the time. Now it's arrived - and I'm very grateful and honoured.

You can read Mike's citation for the award here. 

This is the first medal I've had since the Duke of Edinburgh's Bronze Award (some time ago!), and the first unsolicited one I've ever received. It's extremely encouraging to feel appreciated by others, and I'm very grateful (and suprised) that my work has been conisdered of significance. Looking at the other recipients, inlcuding my mentor at the University of Leicester, Roy Clements, two feelings arise: firstly, can I really deserve this? And secondly, I must be getting old, if my career is long enough to honour. Anyway, I'm very grateful

 

The Brighton Medal was inaugurated in 1992, and named after the pioneering curator Bertie Brighton, of the Sedgewick Museum at the University of Cambridge. It is awarded "for outstanding service to the service of geology in museums", and struck in silver. The award is made every two or three years, whenever the chairperson of GCG stands down from the committee. I was the 10th recipient, and got the last of the original batch of medals, struck by the Tower Mint, in London in 1992.

Loveliest rocks displayed at VMSG 2014

My favourite rock images from the posters presented at the 2014 Volcanic and Magmatic Studies Group meeting in Edinburgh:

A. Outcrops

If Carlsberg made outcrops... a mouth-watering pair of outcrops in the Leka Ophiolite, western Norway (Brian O'Driscoll)

B. Section images

A difficult choice here, so here are four good ones:

Large elongate/skeletal olivines in picrite dyke, Skye (Holly Spice)

The freshest mantle peridotites you could wish for. They've got garnet+-spinel, and come from alkali-olivine basalts of Pali Aike, in Argentina. Possibly the finest mantle xenoliths in the world? (Eve Rooks)

A terrible blurred picture of a beautful rock. These phonolitic tuffs from northern Tanzania have the most lovely zoned Na-rich clinopyroxenes. And they've got hominid footprints on the top of the ash bed. (Anna Balashova)

Not an optical microscope image, but fantastic images of great rocks. QemScan images of variolitic picrite from Rum and chrome-spinel layer in anorthosite. (Alan Butcher, FEI)

An excellent meeting, made even better by explosive duck-volcano.

Good and bad rocks

The beautiful and varied rocks of Mull have been one of the biggest influences on me. Even when very young,  I realised that not all rocks were the same. Some made lovely outcrops. Some were just one colour. Others were sparklingly varied.  Some contained interresting crystals. Best of all, some had big garnets, or even small sapphires. From an early age, I had strong views about rocks, and was accustomed to judging them on how much I liked them.

Me, aged about 9 (?) investigating beautiful Moine semi-pelites below Dun a' Gheird, east of Uisken on the south coast of Mull. Note the "hard rock" sized hammer.

Although I have been a professional geologist for nearly 30 years, I still can't help making these kind of judgments. There are individual rocks I like. And there are individual rocks I don't.

These judgements can be applied to a landscape or outcrop, or to a hand specimen, or at a microscopic scale. Ideally, a rock should be pleasing at any scale.

Some things that tend to make for a good rock:

• medium-coarse grain size
• pristine igneous or peak-metamorphic assemblages
• some glass  (but not just glass - crystals needed as well)
• inhomogeneity: drusy cavities, banding, layering, magma-mixing, immiscibility etc
• a nice ringing or musical tone when hit with a hammer
• exotic chemistry

Some things that tend to make for a bad rock:

• fine grain size
• homogeneity
• faults (except pseudotachylites, or where nicely mineralised)
• retrogression
• alteration 
• low-temperature shearing/deformation
• small-scale joints or cracks
• low mechanical strength
• mundane chemistry

Of course, this is quite illogical, unjustifiable and many of my criteria are mutually inconsistent. Low temperature equilibration of higher-temperature assemblages creates our inhabitable world. To say that chemistry is mundane, is just to say that it is common, and therefore really important. However, this is not really the point. The alteration of feldspars may be critically important to our Earth, but it doesn't usually produce nice rocks, and a little part of my brain will thus always regard it as a bad thing.  Is this just me? Does anyone prefer a weathered rock to a fresh one? (Apart from microbes).

I must look out some example images of good and bad rocks.