How to see 170 million years in two kilometres
I am a petroleum geologist for my day time job. Petroleum geologists study sedimentary rocks, because they are the ones that contain oil (sand and limestones) or are the source […]
Author Archives: Karsten Eig
Karsten makes a mistake on karst
Sorry, I cannot resist a good pun :) In the first blog post in the series on Svalbard, I wrote that the holes in the limestone, up in the mountainside […]
Fjordblock island: The Upper Permian of Svalbard
I promised you the Permian on Svalbard, after the Carboniferous. Well, the lower Permian on Svalbard was basically the same as the Upper Carboniferous, and 300 million years ago is […]
Cold seams: The Carboniferous of Svalbard
Svalbard. What comes to mind? Polar bears that eat kids alive if they don’t carry guns in the settlement. Which they do. At least the parents. Dark as a coal […]
Geology forensics: That’s my fault, Sherlock!
Geologists love to play detectives. Often, we find rocks that just do not look right, that should’t be just that way, even may seem self contradicting. Enter our inner Sherlocks, […]
Insta petroleum system: Wick’ed oil in Scotland
Usually, petroleum geologists think of source rock and reservoir as different things: The source is the tight, shitty shale that has to be be boiled to expulse oil. The reservoir […]
Desert city in the woods
Our journey to the far east of Europe soon comes to an end. But first, a look at something completely different, in age and type of rock. Let’s leave the […]
On salt and old timber buildings
In the last post, we took a walk in a cave that water has carved out in the easily solvable mineral anhydrite, a calcium sulphate. Anhydrite is among the minerals […]
Boooo! Halloween in the Kungurian – literally
A few days ago, I took you to Perm to look at the Permian, and a crash-course in the mysterious ways of carbonate rock porosity. Today, we home into the […]
Perm and the Permian: Carbonate porosity for muggles
Some places have a special place in the hearts of geologists. Iceland with its volcanoes. The Dorset coast because it is the cradle of modern geology. The Oslo Graben because […]