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Welcome to GSS Geoscience Ltd.
GSS Geoscience Ltd. and its forerunner GSS International, formed in October 1993, has been serving the international energy industry for 32 years as an independent company!
The main image shows "Hutton's Unconformity" at Siccar Point, eastern Scotland - one of the fundamental pillars on which modern Geoscience is based. Slightly tilted reddish Devonian rocks (left) lie above almost vertical grey older Silurian sediments (lower right). The surface between them represents a time-gap of 65 million years and James Hutton (a Scottish "natural philosopher" of the 18th century) instantly changed our perceptions about the age of the Earth - until then though to be around 6,000 years old - and the role time plays in geology. Hutton realised that the Silurian rocks had to have been deposited, buried, lithified, uplifted and strongly tilted (by mountain-building events similar to those that built today's Himalayan Mountains), then eroded and re-submerged before the Devonian sediments could even begin to be laid down across their eroded surface. This sequence of events couldn't possibly have occurred over such a short a time period as 6,000 years. John Playfair, a colleague who accompanied Hutton to the locality in 1788, said "The mind seemed to grow giddy by looking so far into the abyss of time." (Photo credit: John Van Hoesen)
View a short BBC film about James Hutton and his unconformity here.
Current GSS projects include continuing our active research programme on the Cenomanian and Turonian stages of the Cretaceous period. Papers on Cenomanian Larger Benthic Foraminifera have recently been published (2023-24) in Acta Palaeontologica Romaniae, following our review of Cenomanian planktonic foraminifera published in Newsletters on Stratigraphy in 2022. An expanded series of paper on Cenomanian LBF, and and even wider review of Cenomanian biostratigraphy are in progress Go to our Research page for details and to download PDFs of our latest published research.
Another Dinosaur Killer? Not exactly, but...
What would a geology website be without the obligatory article on dinosaurs?! There can be few people on the planet who are unaware of the sad fate of the dinosaurs who "ruled the world", brought to sudden extinction by the impact of a large asteroidal body 66 million years ago and marked the end of Cretaceous times. We now know this asteroid fell to Earth near the Yucatan Penninsula in Mexico, but for a while there was another candidate for the impact - a smaller one - having occurred in Northwest Europe. This impact crater - known as the "Silverpit" Crater - was only discovered in the early 2000s, not only because it is located beneath the waters of the North Sea, but also that it occurs almost a kilometer below the sea-bed and was detected by seismic imaging. Its basic position suggested it occurred very close to the junction between two rock series whose boundary is coincident with the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event. Was this the "dinosaur-killer", or at least perhaps related to it? A research paper to be published soon which involves GSS Geoscience's Mike Bidgood tells the story in full, but click here for an informal article...
A new Masters-level course in Applied Micropaleontology is being set up in Athens beginning in the Fall Semester 2025. Mike Bidgood and research associates Mike Simmons (Halliburton & the NHM), Emma Sheldon (GEUS) and Matt Wakefield (Lealt Stratigraphy Ltd.) are pleased to be associated as Advisors to the course. Applications will open in January 2025. Click the image to go to the website.
NEW PAPERS 2025!
As the year begins, the second in a new series of papers on Cenomanian LBF has been submitted for review. This part concerns the "Loftusiids" and their identities and biostratigraphies are reviewed. This follows on from last year's published paper on the "Nezzazatoid" group. The work is a collaborative effort between Mike Simmons & Mike Bidgood, together with Lorenzo Consorti of ISMAR-CNR, Trieste, and Felix Schlagintweit of Munich (and GSS associate) and is the second of a total of 7 anticipated future papers on this subject. A PDF of the review manuscript will be placed on our Research page shortly.
We are also involved in a re-evaluation of current UK Applied Biostratigraphic training at postgraduate level, involving the GeoNetZero Centre for Doctoral Training, The Micropaleontological Society and the Geological Society of London.
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