Geoscientist Online

Sir, At the risk of being banished to pedant's corner (oops! wrong magazine), I was just wondering how the London Clay Formation can be described as "...stiff, homogeneous and highly impermeable..." without any kind of caveat or qualifying comment?  While much of the sequence can indeed be described as stiff, blue grey clay to some significant thickness at many locations across the London Basin, this is by no means the end of the story. In my experience it may not be unusual to encounter sandy beds and laminations, silt partings, claystones, glauconitic zones, calcareous zones with gypsum, pyritic zones, shelly layers etc. Accompanied by water ingress. Not quite homogeneous then. Just saying. It's all a case of location location location.

Kudos to the Mr Black and Mr Whyte's efforts on the Rubislaw Quarry Project. An admirable effort.

Sir, I was very pleased to read your editorial singing the praises of 'holes in the ground' (Geoscientist, May 2013) and their value to the geoscience community and to educating and informing the public. 

However, it was sad to see that you don't mention the ongoing work, carried out over many years, to conserve and enhance these important, valuable and often historic places by local geoconservation groups, Geology Trusts and RIGS Groups.

As one of your distinguished Fellows, Dr Joe McCall, realised many years ago, geoconservation - that is, the conservation, management and interpretation of sites of geological interest an importance - is a worthwhile cause. I had the honour and privilege to work with Joe during my time with Gloucestershire Geology Trust, on geoconservation projects and assisting with the production of the Cirencester In Stone book. When I joined the Trust in 2001, Joe was already a long serving, indeed one of the founding, members of what was then Gloucestershire RIGS (Regionally Important Geological and Geomrphological Sites) Group.

In Gloucestershire, GGT has had a programme of geoconservation work for over 15 years, has developed close links with quarries in the county and has even bought a disused quarry of its own, Huntley Quarry, in which the East Malvern Fault can be demonstrated. Based around this site, the Trust has just set up a community group known as the Geowardens, who are taking on the management and conservation of the Quarry as a community project.

Other important sites where GGT has carried out conservation work include Cleeve Hill and Leckhampton Hill in the Cotswolds - where the most complete and thickest inland sections of Inferior Oolite are available for study, Puddlebrook Quarry in the Forest of Dean where the worlds oldest known moss fossil was discovered, Foss Cross Quarry - one of the most important sections in the Great Oolite, and location of a very rare 'beetroot stone' exposure. The list goes on.

I spent 10 years working for GGT, and over that time was involved with numerous projects concentrating on both conservation and awareness raising/education. It wouldn't have been possible to undertake the education and awareness raising projects without first having done the groundwork to conserve the sites and make them safe and available. I have always considered myself to be a geologist, as opposed to a conservationist, but I don't feel that I was regarded in this way by the Geological Society. Despite the GSL supporting the running of the Geoconservation Commission, I have never felt that it was any type of priority (I have just checked the Geoconservation Commission website, and it does not appear to have been updated since September 2011!). 

One thing I would like to see is a form of CPD for Geoconservation, as those working in this field have to have a well-rounded knowledge of geology - technical enough to know what is important, how to spot it and whether it is worth conserving, but general enough to be able to explain to the general public on a field trip how the rocks were formed, the environment at the time and what has happened to form the landscape they see today.  Coupled with this geological knowledge must be the skill and experience to be able to communicate clearly and enthusiastically to a wide variety of people.

I realise that the Geol Soc has to concentrate for the most part on industry and academia, as this is where the majority of practising geoscients reside (I myself am now an Engineering Geologist, not being able to support a constant living wage from Geoconservation). However, we must not lose sight of the fact that these quarries, pits mines and cuttings diligently looked after by the geoconservationists is where all of these people learnt their trade, and if we lose them, we won't be able to get them back.  More support for Geoconservation please, Geol Soc!

Sir, Adding to Nina Morgan’s account of geological partnerships (Distant Thunder, Geoscientist March 2013 p27) could I mention that most poignant geological relationship between Edward Greenly and his wife Annie. In 1875 Edward had become a friend of Annie when he was 14; she was 11 years his senior, but with their parents’ blessing they accompanied each other on geological walks in the Bristol district over four years. However, when Edward was 18 his mother decided they should be officially engaged; Edward resisted, at which Annie was deeply hurt and the couple parted for 11 years.

Edward joined the Geological Survey in 1889 and met Annie again in 1890, both admitting to thoughts of the other through the intervening years. Married in 1891, he returned with Annie to his work in the remotest part of Scotland. Aware of her feeling of isolation he reluctantly left the Survey in 1894, but was determined to continue with geological mapping at his own (and Annie’s) expense. He settled on Anglesey as it was a self-contained area that had never been mapped and contained a large area of schists, with which he was familiar.

He attributes much of his “outcrop” style of mapping – now universally adopted - to Annie’s advice. Annie was a frequent spectator, often sitting on hilltops while he mapped and was his look-out for express trains in railway cuttings. She visited him at weekends bringing home-made food, often walking five miles from the nearest station. She made him send her ‘quarterly returns’, as he would have in the Survey, giving the linear miles of boundaries and the square miles mapped. Annie, aged 75, died at home in his arms; Greenly was devastated but spent the next 10 years writing a two-volume memoir that is essentially a tribute to Annie.

Read response to Colin Summerhayes' previous contribution

In the published debate on the GWPF web site we agree that the palaeoclimate record is important and overlooked, so we have got that point across quite well to the public. In my view to go further at this point would be to raise the discussion to a level of detail beyond that of interest to the public in a forum like that offered by the GWPF; instead these matters of fine detail need taking up in a science meeting. The GSL is already organising a science meeting on Holocene climate change, on April 4-5, to explore the science of fairly recent climate change from the geological perspective.

Personally, I consider Barry Saltzman's efforts to examine the workings of the climate system to be highly illuminating, and his models suggest that what are commonly regarded as Milankovitch forcings of temperature at 100,000 year intervals during the ice age may rather be forced by CO₂ (see his book 'Dynamical Paleoclimatology' 2002). Models, of course, are not  reality - they are aids to thinking. But along the  same lines we now have the March 2013 paper in Science by Parrenin et al. showing that the changes in CO₂ and temperature seen in ice cores in the last deglaciation were synchronous, which suggests more control by CO₂ than has been agreed previously. These new models and data are compelling; no doubt the role of CO₂ will be clarified further as yet more data come in."

Regards

Colin

Sir, I was disappointed by Bruce Misstear's Soapbox article, although I agree with him almost entirely. The disappointment arises because we seem to be faced once again with unthinking and fundamentally illogical bureaucracy. Whether it comes from politicians or administrators isn't clear, but, sadly, there is no element of surprise there. Perhaps it comes from both. This is at least the third such occurrence with respect to hydrogeology in the last thirty years. It might have been reasonable to hope that current administrators, bureaucrats, politicians - call them what you will - would have learnt from the second round of such behaviour, if not from the first.

My only issue with the article is in the statement that "... the implications for the profession will be serious". While that is certainly true, I do not believe that it is strong enough or its scope wide enough. The implications will be serious for the country and its environment as a whole; the profession is only one part of that, important though it is in itself.

It seems reasonable to assume that the Hydrogeology Group of the society will make strong representations on the subject in all relevant places. It is very important that it does so. It might be that, in this case and because we face the same issues about this fundamental subject yet again, some higher level of representation should also be considered. I wonder whether the society's council and president might approach government directly, both independently - ie, on behalf of geology - and in association with The Royal Society, The Institute of Environmental Management and Assessment, and any other bodies likely to share our concerns.

Sir, I think the reality that the Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius, one of the earliest to recognise that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would lead to global warming, presented the idea in a spirit of optimism because he thought that it would be 'a good thing' ("ameliorate") [Letters, Dec 2012] will have passed an awful lot of readers by. I hate to think what will happen if climate change 'sceptics' get hold of this!  One thing seems certain: they will not conclude that, as a Swede from the frozen north he was just being foolishly parochial. This being the case, however, Arrhenius cannot be said to be among those who first 'warned of the danger' (since he did not see it as one).

Furthermore, as many commenters have pointed out on my blog 'Lack of Environment', Arrhenius was also not the first to investigate a link between atmospheric CO₂ concentration and the Earth's global average temperature: At least three other scientist preceded him: Joseph Fourier (1824), George Perkins Marsh (1847) and John Tyndall (1859).

Finally, I should wish to point out that, far from being a wake-up call, since he managed to over estimate the doubling time for CO₂ by a factor of eight (i.e. allowing for all greenhouse gases), Banham's article in 1910 would appear to have been more like a bedtime story.

This letter, to Dr Benny Peiser of GWPF, has been reproduced here by agreement.  It was revised after initial submission on March 4.  Editor

Dear Dr Peiser, Thank you for the opportunity to respond to the critique by Drs Carter and Courtillot of my note of 14/2/13 on “The Geological Perspective of Global Warming”. I initially wrote to you to draw attention to Geological Society of London’s statement on this topic, because the geological perspective is usually overlooked in discussions about climate change, and it should not be. But, because Drs Carter and Courtillot moved the debate out of just the geological arena, I am responding in my own capacity, not as a representative of the GSL.

Drs Carter and Courtillot took exception to my use of the phrase “The cooling [of the past 50 million years] was directly associated with a decline in the amount of CO₂ in the atmosphere”, saying that correlation was not causation. True. What I should have said was “The cooling of the past 50 million years was driven by a decline in CO₂ in the atmosphere.” Prior to the Ice Age of the last 2.6 million years the amount of CO₂ in the atmosphere resulted from the interplay between the emission of CO₂ by volcanoes and its absorption by the weathering of rocks, especially in mountainous areas, as well as by sequestration in sediments. Methods to determine the likely concentration of CO₂ in the atmosphere in the geological past have improved in recent years. They include the numbers of pores (stomata) on leaves, the abundance of the mineral nahcolite (stable above concentrations of 1000 ppm CO₂), and the carbon isotopic composition of alkenones from marine plankton. Methods for determining global temperature through time have also improved. We now know that the Eocene was a time of greater volcanic output of CO₂, and that the rise of major mountain chains after that time pulled CO₂ out of the atmosphere. Geochemical models of the carbon cycle simulate the decline in CO₂ after the middle Eocene. Convergence between the CO₂ data and the output from those models provide confidence that we understand the process. There is no geologically plausible alternative. We are not talking about a loose association where there is uncertainty about cause as Drs Carter and Courtillot imply. Indeed, even Drs Carter and Courtillot accept that CO₂ is a greenhouse gas, and that accumulation of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere warms it. Likewise, its loss will cool the atmosphere.

Besides that, the GSL statement regards the massive injection of carbon into the atmosphere that took place over a short period 55 million years ago, raising temperature, raising sea level, and causing ocean acidity, as a case history that we can draw upon to tell us what may happen in the future if we continue to pump CO₂ into the atmosphere at rapid rates. It was not alone; there was another such event in the Toarcian, for example, some 180 million years ago.

Moving on to the Ice Age of the past 2.6 million years, by this time the levels of CO₂ in the atmosphere were so low that other drivers of the climate system had more effect. The primary drivers of change in the Ice Age were the tiny changes in solar radiation received at the Earth’s surface due to regular and predictable changes in the Earth-Sun distance and in the tilt of the Earth’s axis. These made the climate of the Ice Age fluctuate between cold periods – glacials- and warm ones – interglacials – in one of which we now live. The role of CO₂ in this system was to provide positive feedback to the rises in temperature that took us from glacials into interglacials. In this narrow context, Drs Carter and Courtillot are correct – CO₂ increased during the interglacials mainly by outgassing from the ocean. But that was not the main source of CO₂ during the Cenozoic era.

We should all reflect on the fact that the past 4 interglacials were warmer than today, and sea levels then were higher than today. Drs Carter and Courtillot wonder if we know enough about the behaviour of the climate system during the Ice Age to be confident in our analysis. Yes we do. The uncertainties are minor. Given what we know from the link between CO₂ and temperature with time from the geological record, it would be foolish to imagine that if we warm our planet to the same extent as it warmed in previous interglacials, we will not also see similar rises in sea level to those that occurred in them.  In any case, waiting until all small uncertainties are resolved is not a reasonable option.

Our geological knowledge of past climate change is independent of the numerical models used by climatologists to tell us what may happen if we add more CO₂ to the atmosphere. The geological data, recalibrated in 2012 by the PALAEOSENS team led by Eelco Rohling (Nature 491, 683-691, 29 November 2012), tell us that the sensitivity of the climate in the past to a doubling of CO₂ was 2.2-4.8°C, about the same as calculated for the modern climate by the climate modellers who feed data to the IPCC. This match is unlikely to be a coincidence. Indeed, it suggests that the climate modellers may well be on the right track, and that Dr Lindzen and others may be wrong in suggesting that the sensitivity is 1°C or less. However, Drs Carter and Courtillot are right to point out that some recent studies suggest that the climate sensitivity to a doubling of CO₂ may be closer to the low than to the high end of the IPCC range. While that may appear comforting, it only postpones the inevitable.

Drs Carter and Courtillot took me to task over the relationship between CO₂, temperature and sea level. However, their sea level calculations are simplistic. The 20 cm rise that we have seen since 1900 is not an equilibrium response – it is instead a transient response to a rise in temperature of 0.8°C occasioned by a rise in CO₂ of 40%, or 100 ppm. The sea level will go on rising even if we stop putting CO₂ into the atmosphere, as the ocean equilibrates with the atmosphere over decades to centuries, and as ice sheets slowly decay. Models suggest that the equilibrium position may be 0.5m/1°C due to thermal expansion alone. Currently thermal expansion accounts for around 1/3 of sea level rise, and glaciers and ice sheets for another 1/3 each. It is not difficult to see how a further rise in CO₂ could by 2100 lead to a rise in sea level of perhaps as much as 1.4 m as estimated by Stefan Rahmstorf and colleagues.

Drs Carter and Courtillot took exception to my statement that the Earth should have been cooling over the past 10,000 years. Indeed it should because that’s what we calculate from known phenomena like changes in the Earth-Sun distance and tilt of the Earth’s axis. Other shorter-term changes will of course be superimposed upon that trend. Drs Carter and Courtillot emphasize them by providing a graph of Greenland temperatures, but as they point out those were regional. Even so, that graph too shows underlying cooling for the past 5000 years. The small divergences from the mean on the Greenland graph were caused by short term climate changes like those of the Medieval Warm Period and the cooling of the Little Ice Age, which coincided with the Maunder Minimum in sunspot activity between around 1645 and 1715. Both events seem to have been most intense in the North Atlantic and European region, not globally. There is no evidence that the Medieval Warm Period was warmer than today globally. Nor is there any evidence to suggest that we are now living through a similar event.

Drs Carter and Courtillot would like us to believe that the current rapid global warming event is purely natural. This seems odd given that they also accept that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas that warms the lower atmosphere and that a portion of human emissions of CO₂ is now accumulating in the atmosphere. Moreover one of their key references (Ring et al 2012) makes it clear that human activity has caused the warming since 1900. All our attempts to relate the post 1970 warming to natural sources of heat have failed. Our burning of fossil fuels is detectable in the atmosphere from a reduction in oxygen as well as from an increase in CO₂ and from the carbon isotopic signature typical of the burning source materials. Since the 1970s, warming has been taking place while the suns output has not been increasing. Nobody has yet come up with a better explanation of this recent warming than that it is caused by the known increases in CO₂ and related greenhouse gases, much as we might expect from what we know of the effect of CO₂ in the climates of the past, and from the basic physics of radiation.

The warming of the recent past up to and including 2012 is shown in the attached graph by Hansen, J., Sato M., and Ruedy, R., 2013 “Global Temperature Update Through 2012” (available from www.columbia.edu/~jeh1). The reader will notice that the rise has not proceeded smoothly, but in a series of steps like the one that started in 2002. It was inaccurate of Drs Carter and Courtillot to suggest that this flat spot started in 1998, which was a prominent El Niño year. During El Niño years, shown in the lower graph, the emission of heat from the Pacific Ocean warms the world. Temperatures drop during the subsequent cool La Niña events. They also drop during volcanic eruptions large enough to eject fine particulates and acid gases into the stratosphere. Thus the 1998 El Niño effect visible in the graph was not the start of a flat step; it was followed by a cooling due to a large La Niña. Other large-scale oscillations within the climate system will also have had an effect, one such being the Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation, which shifted to a positive phase in the 1970s and led to a warmer Pacific. In the 2000s that Oscillation reversed, cooling the Pacific and likely thereby contributing to masking the rise in global temperature (EOS, v.94, No.6, 5 February 2013).





Fig. 1. From Hansen, Sato and Ruedy, 2013. Global surface temperature anomalies relative to 1951-1980. The Nino index is based on the detrended temperature in the Nino 3.4 area in the eastern tropical Pacific. Green triangles mark volcanic eruptions that produced an extensive stratospheric aerosol layer. Blue vertical bars are estimates of the 95% confidence interval for comparisons of nearby years.

In conclusion, I consider that the data from the geological record are consistent with the data from the modern environment, and with projections made on the basis of those modern data as to how our climate may change in the future. Anyone who accepts that CO₂ is a greenhouse gas, as Drs Carter and Courtillot do, must expect that a large increase in its concentration is bound to have a warming effect, and observations show a warming that is consistent with this effect. Remarkably few climate scientists dispute that fact. The world is indeed exposed to real short-term climate related events, as Drs Carter and Courtillot point out, but what we face in human-made global warming is an insidious underlying upward trend that will exacerbate those short term events unless action is taken to deal now with the causes of that trend.

C.P.Summerhayes, Scott Polar Research Institute, Cambridge

 

Sir, I suspect that most Fellows who have put themselves through the procedure to become validated as Chartered Geologists would agree that the process is (quite rightly) an onerous one, intended to confirm that holders of the qualification possess a certain degree of experience, commitment and professionalism.

I note from the published minutes of recent Council Meetings that there is concern at the top of the Society about both the low rate of uptake of the qualification and the current high non-renewal rate among Chartered Fellows.

As a recently qualified Chartered Geologist and European Geologist, my active participation in the Society's on-line CPD scheme is mandatory, I am therefore disappointed that this facility was removed without warning in October 2012 when the Society's Website was updated. At the time of writing (16 February 2013) it remains unavailable with a notice stating that ‘online CPD reporting will be relaunched on the new website towards the end of January 2013’. For the last four months, I have effectively been unable to fulfil the one of the obligations necessary for me to maintain my professional qualifications.

I am very grateful for the tireless efforts of all the people who strive to make the chartership validation process successful and I really don't wish to criticise anyone, but if we are not seen to take the qualification's requirements seriously, especially in such a visible place as on the Society's Website, how can we expect others to aspire to become Chartered, to value the qualification appropriately and to maintain it long term?

Editor writes: The Web Team send their apologies and tell me that the first version of the CPD reporting system has been tested and is currently back with the web developers for fixing. They intend to have it up and running by the end of February or early March 2013.

Sir, you encourage Fellows to increase the level of voter turnout in Council elections. Similar exhortations have been made in recent years. However, if the participation level compares well with other learned societies and financial institutions, perhaps we should only be concerned if the levels are on a downward trend?

The day to day running of a learned society is conducted by professional staff who by all accounts perform a sterling service. The Council’s role is to oversee those staff, set strategy and budget, and in some cases appoint the senior employees. However, with short duration terms of office it is difficult to see how the average Council member can achieve fundamental change to the Society’s activities.

We should applaud the candidates who put themselves forward for election to any learned society or professional institution. It must be assumed that they have no self-interest at heart, merely a desire to serve the wider membership. However, unlike a political election the candidates don’t usually represent (or state if they do) fundamentally different strands of opinion. Nor do they set out radical agendas for strategy or change. Indeed any personal profiles provided generally contain blandishments which are variations on a theme. As result the potential voter assumes that the Society will carry on functioning regardless of who is elected, and therefore sees no need to choose between what to them is a fairly set of random set of interchangeable individuals.

I assume that those who have participated generally vote for either the candidates they know (usually zero in my case) or to express a preference for a particular age group, gender or professional background etc. We can also compare the situation with any sporting or leisure organisations we belong to. The majority of the membership will be generally be happy to take a back seat and show little appetite to serve on committees.

Therefore I acknowledge your editorial urgings, but perhaps he should be satisfied that the low turnout reflects satisfaction with the status quo?

Sir, In the interest of contributing to the evidence-based debate on climate change I thought it would be constructive to draw to your attention the geological evidence regarding climate change, and what it means for the future. This evidence was published in November 2010 by the Geological Society of London in a document entitled “Climate Change: Evidence from the Geological Record”, which can be found on the Society’s web page at www.geolsoc.org.uk/climatechange

A variety of techniques is now available to document past levels of CO₂ in the atmosphere, past global temperatures, past sea levels, and past levels of acidity in the ocean. What the record shows is this. The Earth’s climate has been cooling for the past 50 million years from 6-7°C above today’s global average temperatures to what we see now. That cooling led to the formation of ice caps on Antarctica 34 million years ago and in the northern hemisphere around 2.6 million years ago. The cooling was directly associated with a decline in the amount of CO₂ in the atmosphere. In effect we moved from a warm “greenhouse climate” when CO₂, temperature and sea level were high, and there were no ice caps, to an “icehouse climate” in which CO₂, temperature and sea level are low, and there are ice caps. The driver of that change is the balance between the emission of CO₂ into the atmosphere from volcanoes, and the mopping up of CO₂ from the atmosphere by the weathering of rocks, especially in mountains. There was more volcanic activity in the past and there are more mountains now.

Superimposed on this broad decline in CO₂ and temperature are certain events. Around 55 million years ago there was a massive additional input of carbon into the atmosphere – about four times what humans have put there. It caused temperatures to rise by a further 6°C globally and 10°C at the poles. Sea level rose by some 15 metres. Deep ocean bottom waters became acid enough to dissolve carbonate sediments and kill off calcareous bottom dwelling organisms. It took over 100,000 years for the Earth to recover from this event. More recently, during the Pliocene, around 3 million years ago, CO₂ rose to levels a little higher than today’s, global temperature rose to 2-3°C above today’s level, Antarctica’s Ross Ice Shelf melted, and sea level rose by 10-25 metres.

The icehouse climate that characterised the past 2.6 million years averaged 9°C colder in the polar regions and 5°C colder globally. It was punctuated by short warm interglacial periods. We are living in one of these warm periods now – the Holocene – which started around 11,000 years ago. The glacial to interglacial variations are responses to slight changes in solar energy meeting the Earth’s surface with changes in: our planet’s orbit from circular to elliptical and back; the position of the Earth relative to the sun around the Earth’s orbit; and the tilt of the Earth’s axis. These changes recur on time scales of tens to hundreds of thousands of years. CO₂ plays a key role in these changes. As the Earth begins to warm after a cold period, sea ice melts allowing CO₂ to emerge from the ocean into the atmosphere. There it acts to further warm the planet through a process known as positive feedback. The same goes for another greenhouse gas, methane, which is given off from wetlands that grow as the world warms. As a result the Earth moves much more rapidly from cold to warm than it does from warm to cold. We are currently in a cooling phase of this cycle, so the Earth should be cooling slightly. Evidently it is not.

The Geological Society deduced that by adding CO₂ to the atmosphere as we are now doing, we would be likely to replicate the conditions of those past times when natural emissions of CO₂ warmed the world, melted ice in the polar regions, and caused sea level to rise and the oceans to become more acid. The numerical models of the climate system that are used by the meteorological community to predict the future give much the same result by considering modern climate variation alone. Thus we arrive at the same solution by two entirely independent methods. Under the circumstances the Society concluded that “emitting further large amounts of CO₂ into the atmosphere over time is likely to be unwise, uncomfortable though that fact may be.”

* Vice-President Geological Society of London and Emeritus Associate Scott Polar Research Institute, Cambridge.

• This letter was addressed to the Global Warming Policy Foundation (Benny Peiser, Director, benny.peiser@thegwpf.org) and copied to the media.
• To read responses to this letter, please go to the GPWF website.

Sir, Fifteen years ago I was part of a Women's Committee of this Society, brought together to look at whether the GS was sufficiently welcoming to women geologists, or whether it still retained some aspects of a London gentlemen's club. As I recall, we disbanded reasonably satisfied.

It was with dismay and disbelief, that I read the 4 October email advertising the Founders Day Lecture and Dinner 2012. It's good to see an interesting lecture by a leading woman geologist. But you then advertise the dinner as "Dress, black tie", "ticket price £80" and "[midnight] carriages".

Why does the Geological Society choose to celebrate its inauguration with an elitist, snobbish old-fashioned function, or to tell its members what to wear? And what on earth are women expected to wear: ball gown, suit and tie, or just a strategically arranged black tie? It reinforces all the old prejudices that this Society is a club for well-to-do London gentlemen.

Sue Treagus

PUMPKIN TIME

Sir, I find it regrettable that in the name of gender equality and modernity Sue Treagus (Geoscientist 22.11 - see above) takes umbrage at the dress code guidelines and timing that accompanied the invitation to the Founders’ Day Lecture and Dinner.

If, as many Society members do, you live outside ‘night bus’ range, it is nice to know when events end so that travel or hotel arrangements can be made. The simple if somewhat archaic term “Carriages” provides all one needs to know clearly and succinctly. In addition, it lets guests know what time to leave, so that our hosts do not have to spend even more time easing stragglers out of the door long after their welcome has run out!

The same applies to the guidance as to what should be worn at the event. “Dress: Black Tie” again is a very clear instruction - to both genders - as to the formality of the evening, preventing embarrassment for both guest and host when attending wrongly attired.

“Dress: Black Tie” and “Carriages” are merely good etiquette.

Nigel Davis

TIES THAT BIND

Sir, I think Sue Treagus misses the point of dinner jackets. A dress code simply ensures that the men attend in uniform - the same uniform - leaving the ladies to provide the sartorial sparkle and glamour.

Without a dress code I, as a member of the working class, might turn up in a costermonger's apron and find myself sitting next to a duke in ermine and coronet. Which might make both of us feel uncomfortable. A dress code actually removes any sense of elitism or snobbery.

Of course, one can always walk out early, but I feel that on one point Sue is right; there is no need to drag the event out to midnight. A well organised evening can finish at 22.30 - as do Livery Company dinners. This enables those of us living south of the river to get back to darkest Dulwich at a reasonable hour!

Robert Freer

HELL ON HEELS

Sir, As a female geologist who moved to London several years ago, I have never attended one of the 'Black Tie/Dress' events for exactly the reason raised by Ms Treagus. As much as I would like to network & meet other geologists it sounds like I would feel completely out of place.

For men it’s simple; 'black tie' equates to popping down to the nearest rental place & hire a standard issue suit & maybe have a shave. As a woman, the expectation is posh dress chosen from a vast array in a multitude of shops; tights, stockings, sunbeds/fake tan, shoes, heels of correct colour, matching handbag, necklace/other jewellery, not to mention the hair and makeup. All great if you love all that. I don't.

If I was interested in dressing up I would have studied fashion or read Cosmo instead of Geoscientist. As a geologist I'm not too fussed if I break a nail. I tried a black tie event once. I even got myself a personal shopper to assist with the attire. In the end I gave up. The trauma and the stress I can happily live without. Must be nice to just hire a suit & turn up for a few drinks with the guys. Black tie event says to me "well-to-do London gentlemen" and their wives who can catch up on the latest goss & skin care tips, while the guys talk shop.

When the next 'jeans & t-shirts (preferably sporting extracts from "Sticks and Stones" for a laugh & ice breaker) down to earth day' is on I'll pop along for sure.

[Name and Fellowship Number supplied]