HOW TO BECOME A GEOLOGIST AND WHAT TO DO WITH THOSE PESKY JOURNALS
Thursday 3rd April 2025 at 7:00pm

Mawson Lecture Theatre, 
Department of Earth Sciences,
University of Adelaide
 
David Grybowski

     I feel I've always been a geologist. Down the street from my childhood house in western Toronto was a creek that cut into a massive cliff, and there were lots of rocks with fossils and sedimentary structures lying in the creek bed.  When I was old enough to take the subway, I began visiting the Royal Ontario Museum and started my own collection of minerals. I was enchanted and hooked, and we must pass on this enthusiasm to our kids and grandkids, or civilisation as we know it will end. 
     Do you have a collection of old journals that nobody wants, including you?  In this talk, I'll give you a few ideas of what to do with them, all of which are quite amusing. 

     David Grybowski obtained a double PhD in Geology and Political Science, thinking they were both sciences. Graduating from the university of Toronto in 1979, he wrote two PhD theses: “My plan for the obsolescence of oil by the year 2000”, and “Why did the genus Neoconservatus stop evolving in the Ediacaran”. After graduating, David worked for oil companies and mainly for Santos. For decades he was a hero helping people fill their petrol tanks and supplying the feedstock for plastics. However, later in his career, he was a pariah, even though he told as many people as he could to stop using oil, but nobody did. In the protest outside of Santos in February 2023, David famously super-glued his hand to the glass on the third floor of Santos House. The ladder is now gone and David is still hanging there at the time of writing. He is still asking people not to use oil.
 
University policy is to close doors at 7.00 pm, so be sure to arrive punctually! If you are late you may call the number affixed to the door. However this will only be available until the main lecture starts (around 7.10 to 7.15 pm). 
Refreshments will be served in the tea room following the meeting.
The meeting will be zoomed. The link will be distributed to members by email a day or two before the meeting,

Identifying minerals - by Kym Dixon


You walk up to a rock and you see the different minerals in it. Your eyes glaze over and you don’t have much of a clue as to what the actual minerals are. In most cases the mineral will be embedded in amongst other minerals which can make it difficult to give a full and accurate assessment.

This tutorial will give the amateur geologist an introductory guide as to how to quickly identify the more common minerals. It will be the first of the tutorials on this topic. The second one will be in July.

Background to tutorials:

The tutorial series that is being presented this year by Peter Biggs and Kym Dixon is an attempt to take a geological concept and explain it in a simplified way that will benefit the understanding of those members who have not have not undertaken any formal course in geology. Also, more informed geologists will benefit from a brush up of these concepts.

The format is that the tutorial will be in the Mawson Lecture Theatre and start at 6:40 and run for 10 minutes. This will allow time before 7:00 to set up for the formal start to the meeting. For those who would like to attend the tutorial, try to arrive before 6:40 and sit more towards the left-hand side of the theatre (as viewed from an audience perspective).

                                                         Peter Briggs