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Michael Welland

Michael Welland (UK) obtained a BA and a PhD in geology from Cambridge, and an MA from Harvard, and is the author of the award-winning book Sand – A Journey Through Science and the Imagination (2009). Welland worked for the British Geological Survey in Oman, taught at universities across the US, and has over 20 years of experience in technical and management positions in the international energy industry. He has given public lectures and radio broadcasts in the US and the UK. Welland considers sand to be an unsung hero and writes on ‘all things sandy and arid’ on his blog and in the soon to be released The Desert – Lands of Lost Borders (2015). Through the Sandglass blog Watch the trailer of the award-winning documentary Sand Wars, in which Michael Welland participated. Michael Welland on his first book, Sand: A Journey Through Science and the Imagination:

Michael Welland: 'Shape-Shifting Landscapes'

The scale on which mankind has so profoundly changed the Earth’s surface and disrupted the ‘natural’ cycles of erosion and sedimentation is one of the least acknowledged symptoms of the Anthropocene – we are geological agents.

Part of

Session 7: Landscape Transformation

Saturday 28 February

10:30 - 12:30

Paradiso, Main Hall

Humans have built cities, physical infrastructures, roads and railways and electricity grids. Through agriculture humans have changed the face of the Earth dramatically. Humans have also created artificial islands from sand, turned lakes into polders, valleys into lakes, diverted the courses of rivers, and through irrigation made lakes into deserts.