Last year (2010) saw the 175th Anniversary of the British Geological Survey, which was celebrated in some style with a seminar at the venerable Royal Institution in London on 28th September, and was attended by many high–profile personalities from the Earth Sciences community, notably Sir David Attenborough, Prof. Ian Stewart, Marcia McNutt (USGS Director), and several hundred others including representatives from government, industry, academia, international geological surveys, students, earth science professionals and science journalists. The day was hailed as a great success, with excellent press coverage, and also saw the launch of a Geological Map ‘App’ for the iPhone and iPad – possibly the ultimate in portable geological maps!
BGS geochemists have also been closely involved in several European projects, notably the GEMAS survey of agricultural soils, the geochemistry of European bottled waters, and in the production of the forthcoming book on Urban Geochemistry (Johnson et al, 2011). With the change of direction of the BGS’s main geochemical survey project G-BASE (Geochemical Baseline Survey of the Environment) away from systematic regional surveying towards more focussed multidisciplinary projects, the last year has seen the completion of a major urban geochemical survey of Greater London. This epic undertaking has involved the collection and analysis of soils from some 6600 sample sites from an area of 1594.7 km2. Work has now been completed, and the dataset will be officially launched at a special meeting to be held at the Institute of Physics in London on May 13th. See http://www.bgs.ac.uk/news/conferences/FTLEseminar/home.html?src=sfb. For more details please contact Cathy Scheib at BGS (Cemery@bgs.ac.uk).
The other major G-BASE activity has been a re-survey of the River Clyde catchment in Scotland, collecting regional soil and stream water data to complement an earlier stream-sediment survey carried out in the early 1980’s. This new dataset also includes high-order stream sediment sampling on the Clyde and its major tributaries, something of a novelty for G-BASE which normally collects stream sediment from 1st and 2nd order streams. The collection of this new data provides a comprehensive integrated geochemical dataset for the Clyde catchment including regional, urban, river and estuarine data with stream sediment, stream water, regional, peri-urban and urban soil for the Glasgow, and estuarine sediment.
Major urban geochemical surveys seems to be a popular current feature, with the Geological Survey of Ireland (GSI) being heavily involved in the SURGE project (http://www.gsi.ie/Surge.htm), a high-density urban soil geochemistry survey of Dublin, carried out in association with the Geological Survey of Norway. In Northern Ireland, the Tellus Project’s integrated geochemical and geophysical survey carried out by the GSNI (Geological Survey of Northern Ireland) and BGS under the auspices of the Northern Ireland government’s department of Enterprise, Trade and Investment (DETI) was completed and has already stimulated much MinEx interest in the province, especially for gold. Recently, it was announced that for 2011-13 - a new survey, Tellus Border, funded under the INTERREG IVA inter-regional cooperation programme of the European Regional Development Fund, will make soil and stream surveys of the six northern counties of the Republic of Ireland. The survey will follow G-BASE standard protocols but at a
sampling density of only one site per 4 km2. Project partners include: GSNI, GSI, Queens University of Belfast and the Dundalk Institute of Technology.
Elsewhere, and more generally, the recent rise in the price of some major commodities, despite the recession, has led to renewed interest in metal deposits in the UK, notably for tungsten and other rare elements such as uranium, niobium-tantalum and Rare Earth Elements in SW England. It remains to be seen whether this interest is transient or more sustained.
References:
Johnson, C. C . , Demetriades, A., Locutura, J. and Ottesen, R.T. (Eds.). 2011
Mapping the Chemical Environment of Urban Areas.
Wiley-Blackwell, 2011.
ISBN: 978-0-470-74724-7