Hook Head and the Jurassic Coast of Dorset

I have just returned from a 5 day field trip.  First we went to Hook Head, a peninsula in county Wexford.  We got to see some really neat sequences of rocks.  After two days of logging sections we headed to Dorset, which is located on the south coast of England.  We took an overnight ferry and drove for five hours to reach Lyme Regis by sun rise.  After 2 and a half days of intense geologic exploration we headed back home via another overnight ferry.  We arrived drained in Cork around 10 in the morning absolutely drained.  Here are the pictures I took.

Turbidite sequence

Nice little fault

Thick shale bed

Some of the oldest soft bodied fossils known.  

Shrimp burrows

The lighthouse on Hook Head

Bunch of fossils in a limestone sequence we logged

Huge crinoid stems.  The head of the fossil was stolen

several years ago by some German geologists.  They came

by boat with an angle grinder and stole two pieces.  

Bummer that it is gone.

My buddy John Duggan and the lighthouse

Zach

small crinoid head

Large gravelly channel that cuts through some nice red sandstone

Sun rise on the Dorset coast.  The view that we arrived to.

Zach trying to recoup a little.

A town with  fossil industry

Some of the biggest ammonites in the world

Very stunning

Irish and French relations

My friend Neasa

Cast of a tree.  They fossilized trees were found in place. 

They were subsequently removed and now sit around

a hotel.

MX

'The Broken Beds'.  An series of evaporite beds that 

lost all evaporites due to fluid influx and subsequently

collapsed.

My friend Kev

Another tree cast.  The large bulb near it is a stromatolite.

A large algal dome that grew around the tree when

the area was covered by sea water.

Rob

A new bay

The lads

Ed Jarvis, our professor

Zach and some ammonite zones

Sunset

John and Kev aiding in erosion