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Cinema Centre
I picked up the phone and was told that there had been an explosion at the Cinema Centre in Canberra and that a man had been killed. We were asked to investigate. The picture below shows the Old Cinema Centre in the centre of the picture and the Dendy Cinema Centre of today in the…
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Lake Burley Griffin
My first job in Canberra with the Bureau of Mineral Resources was logging drill core during the investigations for a dam that would turn the Canberra floodplain into a lake as envisaged by Walter Burley Griffin. The Canberra floodplain was about half a kilometre wide and the low level bridges were frequently flooded. In 1911,…
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Googong Dam – Construction
Googong Dam lies to the south of Queanbeyan, NSW, and is a water supply dam for Canberra. Googong Dam is a minor ungated earth and rock fill dam with a clay core and a concrete chute spillway plus a nearby 13 metres (43 ft) high earth fill saddle embankment. It dams the Queanbeyan River upstream…
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The Grand Canyon
The first lecture I attended on Geology at Queensland University was delivered by Professor Bryan on the Grand Canyon. The landscape is geologically young, being carved within just the last 6 m.y. when the East Pacific Rise intercepted the coast of California and uplifted the Basin and Range blocks to form the Rockies. Three “Granite…
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Kangaroo Point
Rock climbers find the cliffs at Kangaroo Point ideal for developing their skills. The rock is irregularly jointed with overhanging blocks and is called the Brisbane Tuff. In Brisbane’s early days rock was quarried from the cliffs and trimmed to make kerbstones. The Tuff is an excellent building stone as it resists wear, is slip…
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Plate Tectonics: The Problem
I could understand the expansion aspects of Plate Tectonics with the widening of the Atlantic Ocean about a central fault where basalt was extruded on to the ocean floor and thickened to form the mid-Atlantic Ridge. However, I could not understand “subduction” where the oceanic crust was supposed to disappear beneath the adjacent continents in…
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The Earth is Expanding
The assumption that the Earths radius has not changed is based on the Equivalence Principle derived from General Relativity. The Equivalence Principle has been challenged by satellite experiments. GPS is based on Lorentzian Relativity and not General or Special Relativity, and experiments measuring the velocity of Light have found that it changes as the direction…
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The East Pacific Rise
Pacific Ocean expansion on each side of the East Pacific Rise commenced near Antarctica and moved north to intercept the Gulf of California. To the East of the Rise, expansion moved blocks in the Basin and Range terrain in the Rockies to accommodate expansion. To the West the Pacific Ocean expanded. The Rise backfilled the…
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The Expanding Earth
Bucher investigated the pattern of deformation of a spherical crust in tension. A thin spherical glass shell was filled with water and cooled slowly until it expanded on freezing and cracked the glass producing two fractures from a point that we call the North Pole (the “FOCAL BAR” in Figure 1) to the Equator. Two…