Indo-Pacific Ancient Ecosystems Group

With more than 2000 scientist from all over the world coming together to share and discuss their latest research the ICRS was probably the scientific event of the year for the sunshine state and an absolute ‘must go’ for every scientist working on coral reefs . . . and we were part of it: Nadia Santodomingo, Viola Warter, Juan-Carlos Braga, and Ken Johnson, who acted as chair of our Mini-Symposium ’Pantropical palaeontology of Cenozoic coral reefs’.

The 2nd international Southeast Asian Gateway Evolution meeting, SAGE 2013, which will take place 11-15 March 2013 in Berlin, Germany.
 
The meeting focuses on the origin, diversification, and conservation of Southeast Asia’s megadiverse fauna and flora against the background of the region’s complex geology and climate history. We aim to attract climatologists, biogeographers, palaeontologists & geologists to this multidisciplinary meeting and look forward to welcoming you to Berlin in March 2013.
 

Our Midterm Review meeting is scheduled for January 23, 2012 at NCB Naturalis in Leiden.  Representatives from the Research Executive Agency (REA) in Brussels will join us for this one day meeting to discuss progress in achieving the training and research objectives of the project.  A lead scientist from each host institutions and all ESRs must attend, and ESRs will have the opportunity to present reports on their experiences within the project.   For more information, see the agenda for the meeting or the

The dates for our remaing NTAs have been set. NTA-5 Palaeoceanographic proxies and biogeochemical modelling will be held during the week of June 24-29, 2012 in Kiel, Germany.

Pending confirmation from the Research Executive Agency in Brussels, the Throughflow ITN midterm meeting will be held on January 23, 2012 at NCB Naturalis in Leiden.  Check back in the next few weeks for more information about logistics and the meeting agenda.  See the attached document for more information about the midterm review process.

These thick coal beds lie within Middle Miocene (? according to Witts et all 2011, IPA Proceedings) Warukin Formation in the Barito Basin. Not all coals are this thick . . . today we logged a section that included a 1 m thick coal overlain by a marine transgressive mud with abundant small aragonitic molluscs. The fauna was dominated by protobranch bivalves typical of very fine grained organic-rich marine muds.

Greetings from the Barito Basin! Aries, Ken and Jon followed Verbeek’s original (1875) geological map overlain onto Google Earth to find the Pengaron locality, from which a great fauna of corals and poorer molluscs was originally described.  Just at the right point on the map – a river bank section - we found a thin series (4m) of massive, hard, bioclastic limestones and sands with corals,  molluscs, algal balls, a shark tooth and vertebrate material abruptly and concordantly overlying thin-bedded silty mudstones.

The container load of samples from NTA-2 arrived in Southampton on board this ship on April 2 (thanks to Jeremy Young and Nadia Santodomingo for following its progress).  The shipment is currently clearing customs and should be delivered to the NHM by the end of the week.

Thanks to everyone for joining in our Third Network Training Activity from February 28 to March 4, 2011 at the Natural History Museum. The week was very interesting and I think we all benefited from the excellent training on the scratchpad content management systems provided by our friends from the ViBRANT Project.