Geoheritage Community Forum

I intend to report on my 9th annual overnight GeoTrip for Friends of Iziko Museum to Robben Island (26-27 July) after the event.  Weather forecast may cause its fourth postponement, however.   In the meantime, all I wish to report is that I recently received a copy of Professor Richard Dingle’s 2024 memoirs The Sea Floor: Exploring its History.  Hard cover, 386 pages and published through Amazon.  Very readable, but very expensive, as one can see by Googling it on Amazon.  Fortunately, he also sent a copy for me to take to UCT Libraries as a donation, which was accepted and fetched from our Newlands home, before we departed for Pinelands on 1st July.    We visited him and his wife, Lesley in Cambridge (UK) in 2013 and, before Covid, I revisited them in 2019, during Phil's 6-week solo E-W Camino across northern Spain. All for now John

Update from Cam (Cameron.Penn-Clarke@wits.ac.za) To date we have logged 514 individual SACS stratotypes from the SACS Lithostatigraphic Series (complete) and SACS Handbook 8 (Nambian and Phanerozoic erathems), complete with GPS co-ordinates and associated locality information.  Our plan is to link these to images of measured sections at the individual sites (where present).  Ongoing work is to complete georeferencing and locating stratotypes in the SACS Catalogue Series as well as the remainder of units in SACS Handbook 8. The SACS database schema we developed unfortunately does not appear to be working.  Limitations here are that it is being captured using a flat database system in spreadsheets by non-specialist stratigraphers (students).  It will be best in future that these are captured and curated by individual SACS Task Teams for particular units.  For now, I have scaled back these efforts and my intern students are only capturing data from the lexicons. Marcia and I will be planning to meet up again with regards to the assistance of SABLE in building the SACS database. Geodyssey is still looking for a full time developer.  Prospective costs for development are sitting at around R440k just to build the app without additional costs for annual maintenance and adhoc fees. We meet with Prof Jan van Bever Donker and his post doc Dr Charl Cilliers with regards to VFT’s and displaying these on the app.  These meetings will be expanded in the coming months with Wendy and Len regarding our own VFT projects.  Issues identified by Jan and Charl, naturally, are where these data will be hosted and maintained in the long term.  I could store these at Wits on our PANGGEO server, however, there is no plan in place currently for hand over / sutainability should I leave one day, for the data repository as well as IP rights between UWC and WITS. ends

The Umvoto Foundation (TUF) is currently developing a series of self-guided geotrails, with a particular focus on water resources and hydrogeoheritage: - Table Mountain dams geotrail, which was completed in 2021 and available to download for free (https://theumvotofoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/Table-Mountain-Dams-Guidebook-desktop-version.pdf) along with the geotrail route on the Forge app. Guidebook lead author Paul Lee has been taking hikers (including Cape Town tour guides, to improve their general geoheritage knowledge of the Table Mountain dams) on guided tours along the geotrail, and a number of hard copies of the guidebooks have been distributed. - Hermanus Water Walk geotrail (focusing on the geology/hydrogeology of Hermanus, and the importance of groundwater in the development of the town), which is in development and should be completed by the end of 2024, with the guidebook available in early 2025. Both the Table Mountain dams and Hermanus Water Walk geotrails have been presented at various national and international conferences (with the Table Mountain dams geotrail being one of the field trips for the 2022 GSSA Geoheritage Conference and 2023 50th International Association of Hydrogeologists Congress): - GSSA Geoheritage 2022 Conference (Dylan Blake and Paul Lee, starts around 1:16:35) – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--pllRSXxkE - Oxford Geoheritage Virtual Conference 2022 (Dylan Blake presenting, starts around 59:35) – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ynEJnAdVU_E