Event: Prof. Peter Haughton (UCD School of Geological Sciences)

Wednesday January 28th – we have the great pleasure of inviting you to a talk by UCD geologist Prof. Peter Haughton, the title and abstract of which are below.

The talk will be in UCD itself [in room G01 in the UCD School of Geological Sciences] at 6:30 pm; there will be tea and coffee and biccies beforehand at 6:00 pm in the department’s foyer area, from which we can clearly see the back door and so let people in. Because the venue is UCD, we advise you to arrive in good time to get fully legal parking spaces [the clampers out there are legendarily strict – please be warned!].

See you there!

Going subsurface –adventures with a drill rig in west Clare

Peter Haughton

The Namurian (mid-Carboniferous) geology of Clare is world famous, partly because it is so well exposed in the high sea cliffs around the mouth of the Shannon and extending to the north all the way to the Cliffs of Moher.  The succession, over 2 km thick, is arranged in a major shallowing-upwards sequence passing from deep-sea deposits upslope into a series of delta units, all deposited at a time when the Earth was plunged into an icehouse period.  Although the Clare Basin lay in the tropics close to the equator, the growth and collapse of polar ice sheets drove numerous high frequency cycles of deposition much like we see in the Quaternary.  Recently, a major drilling programme on the cliff tops has acquired continuous cores through the deep-water sections behind the cliffs and extending beneath the level currently exposed.  This talk will describe some of the insights and real surprises (some good, some bad!) arising from this project and explain what we plan to try and do with the cores and data that have been collected in the boreholes.