I presented a number of talks over the past few weeks and
many of them involved drawing on BGS work. This allowed me to read over a
number of our research outputs and in particular bring myself up to speed with
the impressive work in London and the Thames basin.
At the Goldschmidt conference I gave a talk on the
Geochemistry of London in a session I organised on Impact of the science. My
talk was on a broad subject and in the end it had three parts: atmospheric,
calling on the work from the ClearfLo project; soils (London Earth),
geology and geochemistry; river water, groundwater and modelling.
My conviction now is that
we have enough data and observing systems in place in London to create
an Urban Critical Zone (from tree top/building to bedrock) observatory).
I also talked at the British Cartography Society's 50th
anniversary and joined the Chief Executives
of the Ordnance Survey, Hydrographic Office, Defence Geographic Centre etc. I was struck by how different their approach in pure cartography is to ours, where BGS maps are really to be interpreted
as models of the subsurface or the geological environment. My talk, entitled
"The geological model for tomorrow's world" provides some indication of the direction of travel of the
science programme that Mike Stephenson and I are developing; I think the mole says it
all... can we fit them with nose sensors?
