Landscapes into Rock - Part 1

Landscape into Rock conference, held in London during 21-23 September, was an extremely insightful event, rich in ideas and very inspiring. The title itself is meant to represent many aspects of sedimentary geology: 

• the link between surface geologic processes and the resulting rocks; 
• the source-to-sink continuum of sedimentary processes and depositional systems, and the need to understand and view this continuum with a holistic approach; 
• the insights that can be captured from short term processes, rates and models and how these insights may be applied to the rock record, which represents a much longer time frame and records controlling factors and rates that may have been very different compared to what we observe today; 
• what makes stratigraphy and how do we place stratigraphy in the context of Earth’s dynamic systems.

The organizers were Philip Allen (Imperial College London), Paul Bishop (University of Glasgow), Hugh Sinclair (University of Edinburgh) and Robert Gawthorpe (University of Bergen).  Through careful planning at many levels they made this conference a success.  The event was held at the Burlington House on Picadilly Street.

© RomaniaRocks

The conference was held as one plenary session, which for me was great: more focused and less stressful compared to large conferences with many synchronous sessions, which leads to the desire to clone oneself in order to be able to be in several places at once in order to not miss relevant talks.

The talks and posters were grouped in four themes, which took place in succession over the three days.  I will cover each theme in a separate blog post (to come over the next few days).  Needless to say, I was unable to tweet or blog real time, as internet connection costs an arm and a leg in London.

One side note: during the event, Paul Bierman made everyone aware of the digital archive of Earth surface images that is under development at the University of Vermont. This is a NSF-supported, free archive useful for teaching and learning about geomprphology - enjoy!.