July’s Cafe Sci talk will be presented by Stuart Burley, Emeritus Professor at Keele University. As ever, the talk will start at 7:30 at St Patrick’s Irish Club. There’s no need to sign up – just turn up, and feel free to bring along anyone who you think might be interested.

The rocks around Leamington Spa and much of Warwickshire are Triassic in age and include hundreds of metres of red coloured mudstones, the lower part of which are termed the Sidmouth Mudstone Formation and the upper part the Branscome Mudstone Formation, which are largely barren of life. These mudstones were deposited on expansive desert alluvial plains on the edge of a hot supercontinent, called Pangea, between ~240 and 210 million years ago. At this time average global temperatures exceeded 30°C (compared with 12°C today) but we know from fluid inclusions that day-time temperatures reached 60°C. In the middle of this sequence a thin unit of green coloured sandstones, little more than 10m thick, are the deposits of lakes fed by fast flowing rivers during a period known as the Carnian, 232 million years ago. 

Stuart is a geologist who has worked in academia and industry since the late 1970s and now lives in Lapworth, Warwickshire. He has travelled widely and has published almost 150 academic papers and 2 books, and is the Chairman of the Warwickshire Geological Conservation Group as well as running his own consultancy, Discovery Geoscience.