The Paper Trail

Na een jarenlange loopbaan in het onderwijs besloot Jan Verhagen het roer om te gooien en archeologie te gaan bedrijven. Dit mondde al snel uit in een promotieonderzoek bij de VU naar de kanalen die de Romein Drusus volgens historische teksten in Nederland zou hebben gegraven. Er zijn enkele locaties waar deze waterstaatkundige werken zich zouden kunnen bevinden, en in deze podcast vertelt Jan hoe hij uiteindelijk bij de Utrechtse Vecht belandde als de belangrijkste kandidaat. Tevens legt hij uit wat voor technieken hij heeft gebruikt om zijn aannames beter te kunnen onderbouwen. Een zeer interessant verhaal! 

Induced seismicity is a much-discussed phenomenon in the Netherlands, especially with regards to gas production from the Groningen field. However, induced seismic events are not restricted to the north of the Netherlands only, and can have a variety of causes. In this episode, we talk to Annemarie Muntendam-Bos about various aspects of induced seismicity in the Netherlands and what we know and don't know about it. Annemarie works for the State Supervision of the Mines (SODM) and also holds a position at Delft Technical University. Through these roles, she is heavily involved in both the regulatory as well as the scientific aspects of induced seismicity.

In this episode we talk to Phil Gibbard about the Pleistocene glacial history of eastern England and how to date the multiple glacial advances that took place over time. Phil has spent a long career working on glaciations across England and further afield and is known for collaborating with researchers on the continent in an attempt to come up with a holistic view on the Pleistocene geological history of the North Sea region. Phil also touches on the history of the Fenland in eastern England, how the current landscape was formed and deformed and the influence of bedrock geology onto glacial advance.

In this episode we talk to Stephan Spiekman about a recent fossil find in the famous Winterswijk quarry in the Netherlands. Stephan is a paleontologist at the Natural History Museum in London and together with Nicole Klein from the University of Bonn in Germany he managed to pin down what type of species part of a jaw they found must belong to. Stephan also explains how the landscape looked like in Triassic times (almost 250 million years ago), when the area now characterised by agricultural land was a shallow subtropical sea. 

The Quaternary geological history of the Wadden Sea is fascinating, as landscapes changed from warm shallow seas to glacial environments scoured by ice. Robin Schaumann, master student earth sciences at the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms Universität in Bonn, Germany, wrote a paper in the Netherlands Journal of Geosciences about the Pleistocene and Holocene history of the island of Norderney in the German Wadden Sea. He used shallow seismic and a series of boreholes to reconstruct how environments changed over time and how the shape of the current tidal channels is influenced by what happened during the Saalian ice-age! 

Sander Houben and co-author Geert-Jan Vis recently published a paper in which they discuss the age and depositional environment of the oldest sedimentary strata recovered from a couple of wells drilled in the Dutch sector of the North Sea. Learn how the Netherlands looked like more than 400 million years ago and how it is possible to assign an age to rocks that old! For a read through, here is the link to the paper in the Netherlands Journal of Geosciences.

Harm Jan Pierik vertelt over zijn onderzoek naar landschapsveranderingen in Nederland gedurende de eerste duizend jaar van onze huidige jaartelling. In deze periode krijgt de mens steeds meer invloed op het landschap door toenemende ontwatering en ontginning van veengebieden, wat uiteindelijk drastische gevolgen heeft voor de kustontwikkeling in Zeeland en het noorden van het land. Maar ook in het rivierengebied en op de hogere zandgronden is de invloed van het in cultuur brengen van het landschap duidelijk aanwijsbaar.

Loes Buijze and co-authors recently won the Netherlands Journal of Geosciences publication prize 2019-2020 for a review paper they wrote about induced seismicity related to geothermal energy production. In this podcast, Loes explains the background to the research and how their findings translate to the geothermal energy production in the Netherlands.