Profile

I live and work in Oxford, and have a cat called Mr Richmond who currently lives with a friend in London (it’s easier to keep an eye on his business dealings). I’ve been obsessed with collecting rocks and fossils since I was a wee boy. The beach and hills near where I grew up, in Cleveland in the North East of England, has lots of lovely Jurassic rocks and fossils. I always wanted to know why I couldn’t see dinosaurs and ammonites in the zoo, or how the rocks were made. Now I get to do that as my job and travel all over the world, both in space and time.

I want to know what the environment was like when the first single celled creatures like algae and amoebas appeared over a billion years ago.

To do this I collect samples of sedimentary rock, rocks made from mud and sand, that were deposited in an inland sea that used to cover northern Australia. The rocks have been buried and protected from weathering for over a billion years which means they still hold a record of what the sea was like all that time ago.

To do this we go to Australia, out into the desert and use a huge drill to dig down a thousand meters. We then pulled out a tube of rock called a core, some of our cores are over a thousand meters long! Then we lay the core out on the ground and I walk along it drawing all the features, collecting chunks to analyse and making notes of things like colour and texture.

We store the cores in a huge warehouse near Darwin, Australia and take our samples back to the lab in Oxford. Some of the samples get turned into powder and dissolved so they can be analysed in very sensitive machines. Other samples get cut in to slices that are as thin as a human hair and we look at these under the microscope. We use special microscopes that can bend light through crystals in rock, and electron microscopes so that we can see things too small to see with light.

Once I have collected all of the data from the machines and microscopes, I put it together like a detective with clues and try and work out what the ancient environment was like and how it changed through time.

After I wake up, I go rowing on the river in a long boat, this is a lot of fun and helps get me ready for the day. I start work at 09:00 and answer any urgent emails or messages, then I do some writing because like school students, I have to make reports for other scientists called journal papers. At 11:00 we have a tea break and I go and talk to my friends about their work, we have lots of different Earth Scientists who study all kinds of things like dinosaurs, or volcanoes or how the oceans work, so our tea breaks are always fun.

I do some more writing until lunch time, then after my lunch break I read any new research papers that other scientists have made. There is always too much to read because everything is so interesting to me. When I have read enough for the day, I do fun work like making drawings and diagrams, looking at rocks under the microscope, or cutting up rocks and getting them ready for analysis.

I also do a lot of teaching in term time. Sometimes this is helping a professor in a practical class where students look at rocks and fossils, some times it is teaching a small group of students and some times we take the students to exciting places like Scotland or Greece to look at rocks.

I finish work at 17:00 and then do some filming or work for my youtube channel (geology johnson) which is about rocks. I some times go rowing in the evening too. Other wise I then go home, have something to eat, hang out with my friends or do other fun things like playing guitar and then go to bed!