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 30 years as an independent company - this is our 30th anniversary year! 

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. A major paper on Cenomanian planispiral Larger Benthic Foraminifera has recently been published (August 2023) in Acta Palaeontologica Romaniae, following our review of Cenomanian planktonic foraminifera published in Newsletters on Stratigraphy in 2022. A wider review of Cenomanian biostratigraphy and an evaluation of the "Mid Turonian Unconformity" across the Arabian plate is planned for publication this year. Go to our Research page for details and to download PDFs of our latest published research..

An additional research programme is the evaluation of Triassic sequences of the Arabian Plate and a review of the foraminiferal identity and biostratigraphy.

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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