Had a great day out on Wednesday.
In the afternoon I introduced Ella to the Guild of Students and to the campus of The University of Birmingham, including a good look around the Great Hall in the Aston Webb Building:
In the evening we attended The Shell University Lecture in the Earth Sciences Department. The speaker was Dr Tina van de Flierdt (lecturer in Isotope Geochemistry at the Department of Earth Science and Engineering at Imperial College London) and the topic was "Reconstructing the History of the Antarctic Ice Sheet: Clues from the past for the future". If you have an interest in such things, the lecture can be experienced online here.
I met a few staff that were there during my undergrad days, and Ella studied the specimens* on display in The Lapworth Museum of Geology. My thanks go to the Curator, Jon Clatworthy, for the guided tour of the recently refurbished and modernised Petrology Lab, and for the pre- and post-lecture refreshments.
Afterwards, we went for another walk around the campus:
* undergrad lads as well as old fossils š
THE SMALL(ish) PRINT... (updated 23/07/2016)
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Thanks for the lecture link Stef - Fascinating stuff. Watched it this morning.
It is interesting listening to first hand research rather than the usual fourth-hand AGW crap.
Very interesting that CO2 levels were massively higher in the 'warm period'. The dangerous level for CO2 is actually 180 as that's when the Ice Age cometh and most life stops dead... There doesn't seem to be an upper dangerous level, to my mind.
Glad you liked it, Alan.
The next one (Disposing of Fossil Fuel CO2) should be interesting if it keeps to the abstract, as it will be post-Copenhagen: http://www.geolsoc.org.uk/gsl/.....e6444.html
I might attend that one too.
I do like that 6th photo down in particular. It looks like a spooky 3D computer game. Excellent.
Not that the intellectual stuff and the climate change angle don't appeal to me too, of course.
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Cheers, Scott. Just for you, I've made the pics clickable so that you can see all the "noise" in the larger versions. Next time I'll take the tripod and do a bit better.
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"...do a bit better"
You're losing me now - I assumed you'd absolutely nailed the effect you were after. Were you no' happy with them?
I'll be honest here - these are just casual snapshots. I was faffing about in the dark with the camera after taking the first few pics outside the museum, trying to set a bigger aperture and a shorter exposure because I didn't want too much camera-shake due to it being hand-held. What I didn't realise until later (= too late) was that I'd twatted it up by accidentally changing the format from RAW to JPG and the white-balance to whoknowswhat, hence the unwanted noise on the later pics. If I'd started with the tripod, I'd not have faffed. Mind you, they'd not be as casual, I suppose. A lesson learned.
Well, I may not know much about the technicalities, but I know what I like.
love that moon/cloud shot....