I think the Mole says it all.......

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?