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MikePole

Travelling to understand time and place

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March 18, 2023
comments 4

ChatGPT Makes Shit Up

An academic asks ChatGPT about New Zealand’s Miocene Manuherikia Group Your narrator dips his toes into this ChatGPT thing With a nod to Edie Brickell and the New Bohemians – ‘I know what I know, if you know what I mean’. One subject where I’m… Read more

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Filed under: Uncategorized
March 20, 2022
comment 0

Tuataras in Central Otago

Bleached moa bones projected out from the steep bank of the nearly dry gully. This was exciting, as there were clearly several bones, and perhaps an entire skeleton waited to be uncovered. However, the layer of bones was under more than a meter of schist… Read more

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Filed under: New Zealand Geology
May 8, 2020
comments 2

1066 and the Dead Parrot (The weird things going on in the margins of the Bayeux Tapestry)

I like to see things for myself. It can give me a sense of place or scale that one doesn’t get from books or the internet. It also gives a chance to spot something new, that whoever might have photographed the original, wasn’t thinking about.… Read more

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Filed under: History/Archaeology
April 13, 2020
comments 4

Time-Travel in a Time of COVID-19

What’s a guy to do during lock-down? I’ve chosen to time-travel back to around the first and second centuries AD. At that time the Roman Empire stretched over much of Europe, and along the southern Mediterranean as well. In two of its provinces, Noricum and… Read more

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Filed under: History/Archaeology
February 6, 2020
comments 5

Bob Carter, Greenhouse Warming, and One Alarmed Palaeontologist

I met Bob Carter after one of my fossil-collecting mates, Duncan McLeod, came across some shell fossils in a ‘marl pit’ on his parents farm property near Winton, southern New Zealand. This was about 1974-1975 when I was at primary school. I traveled from my… Read more

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Filed under: Climate, New Zealand Geology
January 29, 2020
comments 2

How to Thoroughly Confuse Everyone about Prescribed Burning in Australia

In the last couple of days, something of a ‘blue’ has developed among some Western Australian fire experts over ‘Prescribed Burning’ – the deliberate lighting of fires as part of fire management policy. On Jan 22, Byron Lamont and Tianhua He published a short opinion… Read more

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Filed under: Australian Ecology, Climate, Fire, Forests
January 18, 2020
comment 0

Did Queensland Rainforest Spread when Cultural Burning Stopped?

“This is the Giant Stinger tree – avoid it”. Work place health and safety now out of the way, I could then get on with introducing my students to Australia’s forests. *** In Queensland’s O’Reilly’s/Lamington Park I began my student classes with a walk down… Read more

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Filed under: Australian Ecology, Climate, Fire, Forests
January 16, 2020
comments 4

When New Zealand was a Burning Land

Broken River is a Hell of a place to get to. From Christchurch you need to head inland, driving along the road to Arthur’s Pass, the gateway to the West Coast. But then turn off and dog-leg back south along a narrow road beside, and… Read more

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Filed under: Climate, Fire, Forests, New Zealand plant fossils
January 11, 2020
comments 2

Australia’s Black Thursday Fires 1851 – how big and why?

Have you noticed? Despite Australia’s on-going fire disaster, there are no shortage of reports telling us to … relax – it’s nothing new, and that it’s the fault of not enough hazard-reduction burning. And certainly, it’s nothing to do with global warming, which by increasing… Read more

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Filed under: Australian Ecology, Climate, Fire
Limestone at Dwejra Point Malta
January 3, 2020
comment 0

Limestones, Climate Change and Scepticism

What happens when a seal swallows a lump of limestone? *** The broad theme of my back-packing trip last year was to move around the northern rim of the Mediterranean (and visit a few of its islands along the way). During much of that trip,… Read more

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Filed under: Climate
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