Getting behind-the-scenes at the Lapworth Museum

The aspect of geology that first drew me in was the sense of perspective. Learning about deep time has fundamentally changed the way I see the world, and understanding our place in the context of Earth history is an essential step in moving towards a brighter future. As someone more interested in solid geology, it can be hard to find ways to apply my skills directly to climate solutions, but my interest in museums offers a way in. I applied for the Lapworth Scholarship hoping to contribute to sharing this geological scale with the wider public, and was given the incredible opportunity to do so.

The main task of the month was to catalogue over 650 samples from the Masirah Ophiolite, which were collected from Oman as part of a PhD project in the 1970s. It was interesting to see an ophiolite in this way, through a series of samples rather than the schematic diagrams I was familiar with. The task itself involved assigning a unique number to each specimen to make information about these easy to find if it were to be used in an exhibit or event. Following this, we entered information about the sample into a spreadsheet, such as any previous labels, where it was collected from, and a short description of the specimen.

During the process, we found a newspaper from 1976 that one of the samples had originally been wrapped in. This reminded me of another reason I find museums to be such fascinating places - having a huge concept like geological time or the scale of the Earth grounded in reality by a fossil or a bit of rock from deep in the lithosphere (or a newspaper from 50 years ago).

Another task we were able to undertake was producing social media posts for the Museum. This involved choosing a specimen from the stores and photographing it to accentuate the most interesting features, followed by a bit of research and writing a short caption to accompany the photo. As I have a particular interest in petrology, I also took the opportunity to take some thin section photos using GXCapture-T, a software I’d never used before. This was quite a particular process as it mostly involved getting the images in focus and adjusting the colours to be as true to life as possible, but it was very gratifying to see the final image. It was exciting to be a part of sharing this, as not many people get to look at rocks under a microscope and it’s one of my favourite parts of geology.

The Museum also held a number of Family Fun days during the month. One of these centered around the Ice Age, and the other students and I ran an interactive table where attendees could handle specimens, including a mammoth tooth, sabre-toothed cat skull replica, and cave bear teeth. The cave hyaena coprolite was a favourite of the day! It was amazing to see how much knowledge many of the children already had about geology, and to see them piece together all the new things they had learned by handling real fossils.

The final task of the internship was to 3D scan some objects for the Virtual Museum. It took some time to choose an appropriate specimen from the stores, as it had to reflect light well for the scanner to get all the information needed to produce the scan. Once we had chosen, the digitisation process entailed rotating it on a stage while pointing the light scanner at it. This was repeated multiple times with the sample in different positions, producing multiple scans which were then aligned to produce a complete copy. The final steps were to smooth out any imperfections and colour correct, leaving us with a digital replica of the specimen.

Overall, I got so much more out of the experience than I could have expected. It allowed me to gain valuable insight into how museums are run, try out some different tasks to see what I enjoyed the most, and most profoundly, reignited my passion for geology. Being with this collection of items from all over the world without the demands of academia brought me back to why I decided to pursue geoscience in the first place – the sense of awe I get from being immersed in such vast and ancient things.