The earth beneath our feet

Professor Stuart Burley
 The rocks around Leamington Spa and much of Warwickshire are Triassic in age and include a 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 30oC (compared with 12oC today) but we know from fluid inclusions that day-time temperatures reached 60oC. 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, having lived and worked in the USA, Switzerland, Egypt, India, Trinidad, Malaysia and Pakistan. He has published almost 150 academic papers and 2 books, retains an Emeritus Chair at the University of Keele and is the Chairman of the Warwickshire Geological Conservation Group https://www.wgcg.co.uk/ as well as running his own consultancy, Discovery Geoscience. He promises to make the talk interesting to a local audience and introduce some more general concepts which may be provocative but not rude. Hopefully we can have a stimulating debate. 

For more background on this session please click this link https://www.leamingtoncafesci.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/The-Earth-beneath-your-feet.pdf

Here’s a much more complete paper for those who want to know more about the subject

Click to access Burley-et-al-2023-A-hard-rains-a-gonna-fall-Lake-Arden.pdf