Geological Society Founders’ Day Lecture

This year Dr Cherry Lewis, HoGG committee member, will give the Geological Society’s Founders’ Day Lecture. Hogg members can attend the lecture free of charge. Her talk entitled James Parkinson and the Founding of the Geological Society will be held at The Geological Society, Burlington House, Piccadilly on Wednesday 13 November, 2013. 17.30 Tea & coffee 18.00 Lecture […]
50 years of plate tectonics

It’s 50 years this week since Vine and Matthews published their paper that confirmed the theory of plate tectonics. Read the full story.
Two exhibitions of interest

Two exhibitions of particular interest to historians of geology are on at the moment. Fossils: the evolution of an idea can be seen at the Royal Society in London until Friday 8 November, 2013. It combines an exhibition of books and archives from the Royal Society Library with fossils from the Sedgwick Museum of […]
Marie Tharp, the woman who discovered the Earth’s backbone

Marie Tharp was born July 30, 1920 in Ypsilanti, Michigan. As a young girl she followed her father, a soil surveyor for the United States Department of Agriculture, into the field. However, she also loved to read and actually wanted to study literature at St. John’s College in Annapolis, but as women were not admitted […]
Strata: The Remarkable Life Story of William Smith, the Father of English Geology – John L Morton

William Smith was the first man to realise that rock strata extended right across the country – that fossils found in Dorset were the same as those in Yorkshire because the rocks were of the same age. In 1797, he drew up a list of twenty-eight rock strata beneath the town of Bath from the […]
Strata: The Remarkable Life Story of William Smith, the Father of English Geology – John L Morton

William Smith was the first man to realise that rock strata extended right across the country – that fossils found in Dorset were the same as those in Yorkshire because the rocks were of the same age. In 1797, he drew up a list of twenty-eight rock strata beneath the town of Bath from the […]
King of Siluria: How Roderick Murchison Changed the Face of Geology – John L Morton

From joining The Geological Society in 1825, Roderick Impey Murchison became its President only seven years later! He went about his investigation of older rocks in Wales and Eastern Europe with boundless energy and was the first to differentiate and name the Silurian, Devonian and Permian periods of geological time. After extensive research, John L. […]
King of Siluria: How Roderick Murchison Changed the Face of Geology – John L Morton

From joining The Geological Society in 1825, Roderick Impey Murchison became its President only seven years later! He went about his investigation of older rocks in Wales and Eastern Europe with boundless energy and was the first to differentiate and name the Silurian, Devonian and Permian periods of geological time. After extensive research, John L. […]
The Making of the Geological Society of London – CLE Lewis and SJ Knell (eds), 2009.

Founded in 1807, the Geological Society of London became the world’s first learned society devoted to the Earth sciences.
Continental Tectonics and Mountain Building: The Legacy of Peach and Horne – R D Law, R W H Butler, R E Holdsworth, M Krabbendam and R A Strachan, 2010.

The world’s mountain ranges are the clearest manifestations of long-term deformation of the continental crust.