GeoSphere

Update from John Rogers July 2025

I delivered my Darwin as Geologist talk to our Groote Schuur Probus Club on Monday, 14th April, 2025. 

I originally delivered it in 2010 when we first attended the club, which meets at Kelvin Grove for luncheon and talk.  The speaker should have been, in 2010, David Jack, who created The Waterfront, but he excused himself as his wife had just died. 

I later served on the Probus committee for several years and served as president twice, a sort of record for the club.  I also helped organise geological for the club, one as far east as Middelburg to the famous Rubidge farm and its excellent Dinosaur Museum.  This was recently moved to Graaff Reinet, where it has been acclaimed, and rightly so.

ONLINE TALK on 2 NOV 2023 (Thursday) - The Vredefort Catastrophe, still impacting lives today!

Dr. Matthew Huber will talk about:

Join Dr. Matthew S. Huber, Lecturer in Applied Geology at UWC, on a fact-filled exploration of the amazing Vredefort impact basin in the Free State, South Africa.

Matthew will detail how the Vredefort catastrophe is still impacting us today. Also about the relationship of the Vredefort impact to economic deposits, including the gold mines (which led to coal exploration),

the helium mining, dimension stone mining,

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