The Paper Trail

Het is niet ongebruikelijk om op het strand restanten van mammoeten aan te treffen die meer dan tienduizend jaar geleden het gebied waar zich nu de Noordzee bevindt onveilig maakten. Dit gebeurt vooral op plekken waar zandsuppletie heeft plaatsgevonden - de botten worden letterlijk van de zeebodem gezogen en opgespoten op het strand. Vorig jaar vond Anders Schinkel echter iets op Maasvlakte 2 wat hij in eerste instantie niet thuis kon brengen. Jelle Reumer herkende het fossiel wel, en het deed hem denken aan iets wat hij bij de ingang van Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam eerder had gezien... Luister en ontdek! 

In a recently published paper, Loes Buijze and her co-authors meticulously describe the characteristics of onshore hydrocarbon-bearing and geothermal reservoirs in the Netherlands. Here, Loes talks about the main implications of these findings when it comes to better understanding the risk of induced seismicity for both types of reservoirs, the questions that are still unanswered, and the research that is currently being done.    

In this interview, Rick Wentinck talks about a new modelling approach that simulates movement along fault planes in the Groningen gas field. The results are important, because for the first time, it has been shown that fault plane irregularities may have resulted in the arrest of ruptures, preventing them from progressing deeper into the underburden of the Rotliegend reservoir and thereby causing potentially even stronger seismic events. 

Master student Jelle Heere tells the story about the discovery of a mandible from a Late Cretaceous sea turtle in the Maastrichtian of Limburg. By doing so, Jelle demonstrates that the Chalk seas were much more diverse than some people may think, with sea grass growing plentifully and a wide variety of fauna roaming the area. Listen to this podcast to find out more!

Climate change is known to affect the sedimentary response of depositional systems. This has particularly been shown for lacustrine and marine environments where there is generally a lack of internal sediment dynamics that can obscure a paleo climate signal. For that reason, fluvial systems are less straightforward to disentangle because avulsions, crevasse splay formation and channel abandonments form an inherent part of the system regardless of climate forcing. However, by looking at the more distal part of fluvial systems, being the floodplain deposits, Tim Baars from Delft University of Technology managed to demonstrate a cyclic trend in Upper Carboniferous fluvial successions in the Netherlands. In this podcast, Tim explains how he did this.

Scour holes are depressions in the riverbed that can pose a significant risk to bank stability. For that reason, a better understanding of the distribution of scour holes in the biggest rivers of the Dutch lowlands is important. In this podcast, we speak to Bas Knaake from Deltares who has dedicated his PhD research project to mapping the geological factors contributing to scour hole formation. He explains why it is especially in the western part of the Rhine-Meuse delta where scour hole formation is linked to the Holocene architecture of the delta. 

Did you know that the shells you pick up on the beach in the Netherlands are about 5,000 years old? "It is because shells are continuously reworked by waves and transported from one place to the other", says Frank Wesselingh from Naturalis Biodiversity Center in this podcast. It forms the perfect introduction to an interesting discovery done in a borehole drilled in Friesland; a discovery Frank tells a bit more about in this podcast. The moluscs the researchers found in the so-called Luxwoude borehole are also reworked, but they are much older than 5,000 years. Based on various stratigraphic criteria, the team concluded that the age of these moluscs is likely to be around 400,000 years, so Middle Pleistocene. And interestingly, these fossils indicate a warm climate, warmer than today's conditions. Learn more and listen to this podcast!  

In 2018, two doublets producing hot water from Lower Carboniferous limestones in the south of the Netherlands were told to stop operations. Induced seismicity observed in the area was the main driver behind the decision. In this podcast, we talk to Robert Vörös from QCON, the company that carried out seismic risk assessments and also monitored seismicity through an array of seismometers. Robert and his colleague wrote an interesting paper in the journal about this. What is the mechanism to explain why seismicity took place only after operations were stopped? Find out here! 

Until recently, little work was done using biogenic silica or phytoliths for palaeoecological reconstructions in the Netherlands. This is because most studies rely on pollen or macrofossil remains. However, phytoliths are potentially quite powerful because they do not suffer from the same level of organic degradation as pollen or macrofossil do. For that reason, Iris de Wolf sampled a variety of vegetation types in the Netherlands in order to see if the phytolith assemblages found are markedly different from each other. That happens to be the case, as Iris explains in this podcast. 

The Maastricht area in the Netherlands is famous for its Upper Cretaceous Chalk deposits. In this podcast, Iris Vancoppenolle tells the story about her research project during which she tried to find evidence of an extinction event in the fossil record using samples from two Chalk quarries near Maastricht. However, instead of being able to pinpoint the event, which probably wasn't recorded in the shallow Chalk seas at the time, her dataset allowed her to make some interesting inferences on circulation of nutrients and the associated paleogeographic setting.