Rocks, weathering, the rock cycle, plate tectonics.  Yawn.  Yes, perhaps you are right.  In fact, in can be worse than that – it can be downright boring.  And this is a geologist talking.  For the record, I love rocks.  Everywhere I go I look at road cuttings, the rocks at my feet, the landscape, the topography, and the clues that make it so.

They are mashed and mangled in a tectonic mill

So when I go through the geography syllabus, knowing what I know about how rocks form and how they build and underlie the landscape, I grow a little sad.  Sometimes I grow even despondent.  How can something so exciting, so wonderful, so amazing, be turned into something so dismal?  Rocks are made in fire, in the crucible of creation.  They are mashed and mangled in the tectonic mills that are otherwise known as fold mountains – found at constructive plate margins. Or otherwise they are made in the lakes, seas and oceans where sediment and organisms slowly rain down from the waters above, to accumulate over millenia to become sandstones and mudstones.

The festoons of prayer flags which whip in the stiff Himalayan breezes

Tectonic uplift thrusts those rocks into the teeth of winter gales, snow and ice, where frost action and glaciers grind them inexorably down.  Rivers carry those sediments in gushing torrents down from the highlands, and then deposit then in lakes and seas. All sorts of creatures turn those sediments into their homes, burrowing, excavating, sieving and modifying, leaving their traces that in a million years may provide some clue as to their existence.  Future tectonic events may take those self-same sediments and thrust them back up into a new mountain range, ready for the process to begin anew.  This cannot be anything but exciting – it is about the creation of new crust, and how we as humans fit into those landscapes that have been formed due to tectonic processes.  The festoons of prayer flags which whip in the stiff Himalayan breezes, or the goats that scramble along an Alpine meadow, or the church bells ring in the deep valleys below, tell us about our humanity and how so much of our culture works is underlain by the bedrock that makes up the precarious, unstable surface of our planet.

It would be rude not to share all of these adventures with you

Getting down to the nuts and bolts.  As I said before, geology is my thing.  I have been doing this for a long time, and have been on adventures both work and travel orientated.  I have been trekking in the high Himalayas, have dug vehicles out of the salt pans of ​Botswana, clambered over the greasy brownish grey rocks and cut my boots to ribbons on ancient coral reefs that also lay under Arabian skies.  With all this lovely experience, it would be rude not to share it with you – and it would also be rude not to invite you along on these grand adventures.

​A course on rocks, weathering and the rock cycle

So with that aim in mind, I am building a course on rocks, weathering and the rock cycle.  But it is an integration, a synthesis, of all those things which I have already alluded to.  We cannot look at plate tectonics without taking into account the rock cycle, the weathering and the exquisitely beautiful processes that drive the mechanisms of our planet.  The planet we call home.

​The most significant thing you can do today

It is hard work building courses, and I am going as fast as I can.  Don’t miss out on this though, because it is going to revolutionise your teaching and your learning.  Perhaps the most significant thing you do today is click on the link and sign up for updates on progress on the building of this course.  If you leave, you really are going to miss out – and that would be such a shame.  You can go back to those boring text books and read about rock weathering and fold belts if you want, or you could come with me to the high Himalayas and see those prayer flags snapping in the wind, or join me as we visit the ancient fissures along which Gondwana disintegrated, or see folded and tectonised rocks that are the hallmarks of new creation. 

So, don’t miss out – you are just one click away from grand adventures.  Can't wait to have you along on this journey.