NEW! Introducing the Society’s new President for 2020 - 2022 - Dr Nick Riley MBE CGeol FGS
I am delighted and honoured to be nominated by Council to take over from Paul Hildreth at your President at the 2020 AGM. I first joined the YGS as a student and have been a continuous member since then. The Society has influenced me greatly over my lifetime, via its Proceedings, field meetings and its unique focus on the geology and geomorphology of the North of England and adjacent areas.
I was very fortunate to have been born in the North of England (Blackburn – famous for its 4,000 holes in the ground) at an exciting time when the extractive industries were very obvious compared to today. It was a time of great freedom for children and we spent most of our free time playing outside. My earliest memory about exploring the natural world was when I was three years old. I had a wooden hammer. It was supplied with a toy, that can still be bought today, consisting of a hammer and wooden dowels, which you can hammer through holes in a wooden frame. I distinctly remember hammering a rotting log and finding numerous fascinating creepy crawlies, especially segmented ones (wood lice and pill millepedes). The field behind our house had a brook. We used to play in and around it most of the time, and I became fascinated by the aquatic life that lived in it. My mum got worried that I spent so much time near water that I had better learn to swim. She took to me Darwen baths, where the infamous Mrs Scholey taught me to swim. I remember her shouting at me “swim like a frog!”, which of course, was a great way to communicate to me!
My grandparents had a stall on Darwen Market. My mum would help there. There was a bookstall and my mum bought me The World in the Past – what it was like and what it contained by B. Webster Smith FGS. I still have it. I doubt our Editor would tolerate the prosaic style it was written in if submitted to the Proceedings (nor did I at the age of 6). It was full of lovely illustrations (111 plates), some in colour. Of course, as a child, the dinosaur ones caught my imagination straight away, but so did the plates of trilobites in Chapter Three “The Age of King Crabs”. At last I had found a book with the creepy crawlies I had found in that rotting log! This was my first experience of questioning whether the science was correct – as I believed I had the evidence that trilobites were very much alive and crawling about in deepest Lancashire, and not extinct! A trip to Blackburn Museum soon proved me wrong!
Chapter Six “The Coal Age” with its illustrations of ferns, swamps, dragonflies and amphibians also caught my eye. There were many active collieries and coal tips around, where I could find at the least the ferns quite easily. In the local ponds the prehistoric looking great crested newt, was common, so were dragonflies and water scorpions. May be not everything from the coal swamps had disappeared? Those same coal tips had beautiful marine fossils too, with paper pectens (Dunbarella), and nodules, which if you hammered open had beautiful goniatites (Gastrioceras), some oozing pale green oil from their crystal walled chambers. My mum bought me another book a few years later, Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring”. This book resonated with me, as I remembered all the dead birds lying around during the terrible 1962-3 winter, the awful air pollution (from high sulphur content coal burning), and how the snow turned to grey, as speckles of soot covered its surface, while the soot coated buildings and tree bark. Then there was the horrific Aberfan disaster, the Torrey Canyon oil spill with images of oiled birds and the pristine Cornish coast defiled. I was awakening to the negative impact we humans were having on our environment and on the natural world.
My early teenage years meant I could cycle longer distances and pursue my interest in natural history, especially the rocks and fossils, over the wider NW England region. By now I had Geological Survey maps and memoirs (by mail order), and I could get on the train to Manchester Central Library – to access periodicals, including the YGS Proceedings! I was building up a large collection (now registered with the BGS) of goniatites, trilobites and echinoderms in particular. The library opened up a whole new world, as I thumbed through American and Russian books and journals there. To my astonishment, I noticed new material in Палеонтологический журнал (Palaentological Journal), with ammonoids (goniatites) from the Russian Arctic, very similar to what I was finding, and so I started corresponding with the late Dr. Lydia Kusina at the Russian Academy of Sciences. This was the Cold War, yet all my air mail letters got through, and all the mail from her, including reprints, got through to me. This was my first lesson in how science can overcome political/cultural barriers, and how geology ignores them completely. I was never allowed to do geology at school, the only geology we were exposed to was in physical geography and in biology – the latter in the context of the theory of evolution.
I left school and was very fortunate to be accepted to a do a joint Degree in Zoology and Geology at Bristol University. For me this was a perfect combination. Understanding life on Earth today is informed by the past and vice-versa. Doing a joint science subject meant the need to have lectures six days a week, and “holiday” periods were largely filled with project work. However, I was really happy being completely immersed in the sciences and learning so many new things. My cohort of geology students has not lost touch with each other and we still meet up and hold field trips together, comparing what we knew in the 70’s to what we know now. After graduating I stayed on at Bristol and did a PhD on the Dinantian Worston Shales of the Craven Basin.
During that time I learned to dive. I also was invited onto a marine survey ship, the RRS Challenger. This was part of the Sabrina Project – a survey dedicated to try and understand the sedimentary systems in the Western Approaches and Bristol Channel, in the context of how they may be affected by the construction of a Severn Barrage. I was able to identify fauna brought up in the “shipek grab” samples, as well organisms photographed on the sea bed and in the upper parts of marine canyons at the continental shelf edge. It was amazing to see crinoids and brachiopods alive. From the sediments themselves I could identify bioclasts, that indicated their provenance, such as rocky shore, estuarine, or sea grass community. Some were remarkably fresh, showing that the system was very active from shore to shelf edge.
I left Bristol in 1980 & started the next phase of my life. I was successful in being recruited into the Geological Survey (then the IGS) in Leeds. This was to support the NCB/BC coal exploration (Plan 2000) programme, and the Survey’s own mapping activities. I also married a fabulous nurse, Gill (brought up in the West Riding!). Our first home was a former agricultural cottage made of Magnesian Limestone in Micklefield: behind us was a working quarry and mine (Peckfield No. 1 Colliery). Our first-born arrived in 1983, little did we know that 4 more would appear over the years! In 1984, I was transferred to Keyworth, as the Leeds office was to close. During my time in Leeds I had become increasingly involved in onshore oil exploration. This was a useful switch, as the coal industry was now in steep decline, and lacked political support. Despite this, I still used to visit mines and always got through picket lines without the need for police escort etc. I often wonder if the mine geologist (much prettier than me!) who drove a VW Beetle in the film “Brassed Off”, may have been inspired by my visits? Disasters started to happen (not caused by me!), the Abbeystead tunnel explosion, and the Carsington Dam failure, allowed me not only use my geological skills to find out what went wrong, but also learn more about civil engineering and its interaction with geology.
By the early 1990’s the Soviet Union collapsed. I was able to secure European funding, to work with my former Soviet contacts, including Dr. Lydia Kusina and many others. It was the first time we had met face to face! Quite an emotional event. Our goal was to try and unify a sequence stratigraphic approach to the Carboniferous of the former USSR. My visits to Russia and Ukraine deserve a dedicated book in themselves. That same decade I was in receipt of a Royal Society Grant to visit China and Vietnam. It was a bit like being Michael Palin. I immediately fell in love with China and was able to make many subsequent visits, culminating in us now having a Chinese daughter-in-law and grandchild! Back home things were changing, and I got involved in the Sellafield underground repository project, and in the discovery of new gas fields in the Southern Gas Basin of the North Sea. I made my first of many visits to the USA, all Carboniferous related, yet another story! At the end of the decade I took the opportunity to move into BGS senior management.
The 2000’s coincided with a largescale restructuring of the BGS. The new programme “Sustainable Energy and Geophysical Surveys”, was my area of responsibility. The emphasis was in what we now call the “Energy Transition”. European funding was increasingly targeted at the low carbon economy, and this provided a real boost to the pioneering and leading work that the BGS had already been involved in on Carbon Capture and Storage during the 1990’s. I got more involved with the European Commission and with our own government. Informing evidenced-based science policy and advocating the need for Carbon Capture and Storage. It was not only about the threat of human induced climate change and sea level rise, but also the threat of ocean acidification, from ever rising atmospheric CO 2 concentrations, that urged me on. This was a time of learning to answer those who were sceptical in an appropriate way, but most of all, put your main energy into working alongside those with the same aims and values. I am glad to say that more and more people are beginning to realise this; I am just waiting for the tipping point!
In 2013, I decided to leave the BGS. It was the right thing to do for many reasons, both personal and professional. I am very grateful to still be involved with the BGS in an honorary research capacity, working voluntarily with post-docs. We are learning from each other and hopefully I am encouraging the next generation of geoscientists. Which brings me to my final point.
You may have wondered why I told you my story in the way I have? I hope you picked up on the theme of how important our early life experiences are. If we fail to inspire, particularly the young, about our science, then it will diminish. I hope we can explore this further together during my tenure as President. Thank you for reading this and please get back to me with your thoughts.