Report by Roshaan Bukhari

Monthly meeting for April 2019 was titled ‘Astrogeology: Geology of Luna and Terrestrial Planets’. It was a talk given by Mr. Saif Ur Rehman, who is a graduate in Geological Engineering from UET, Lahore.

This was Saif’s first presentation in LAST. The talk was immensely informative, had hands-on demonstration where the speaker shared with the audience rocks of different compositions, demonstrated the use of a geological hammer and showed a couple of rock core samples as well.

Saif’s presentation was full of humor, information, awe inspiring facts and details of technical processed which enable us to understand how we know what we know about the Earth’s deep interior structure and how rock formations on the surface tell us about Earth’s past.

One of the most amazing things that the speaker was able to do was connect what we know about Earth to other places in the solar system. He frequently compared Earth’s geological findings with the Moon, Mercury, Venus and Mars. We learned how the interior of planets (and the Moon) affect volcanism, plate tectonics and surface features observed today.

Saif was able to merge humor with information in the most unique way we’ve ever had at any LAST lecture. He showed clips from the movie ‘Ice Age’ where solar system’s and Earth’s history are shown in the most ridiculous and funny way. Saif was quick to switch over to graphics that show how the system was actually made and the similarities between the movie clips and how things really look like today. Inspired from the multi-cultural setting of Pakistan, Saif made us get familiar with geological terms in Urdu, Punjabi and to the surprise of us all; Hindi. This was extremely entertaining and everyone enjoyed this rare combination of languages the most!

We congratulate Saif Ur Rehman for giving his first talk at LAST and on being so wonderfully successful at keeping the talk super interesting even after the 2-hour mark.