Shallow core drilling of the Upper Cretaceous Chalk at Stevns Klint, Denmark

The Upper Cretaceous – Danian succession in Denmark and most of NW Europe is composed mainly of chalk and associated shallower water carbonates deposited in a wide epeiric sea during an overall global sea-level highstand (e.g. Surlyk 1997). The Maastrichtian–Danian chalk has been intensely studied over the last 20 years, since it forms the most important reservoir rock for hydrocarbons in the North Sea Central Graben (e.g. Surlyk et al. 2003; Klinkby et al. 2005). In Denmark, thousands of water wells have been drilled through the succession as about 35% of the water consumption is from Maastrichtian chalk and Danian bryozoan limestone. During 2005 the new Cretaceous Research Centre (CRC) was established jointly at Geocenter Copenhagen by the Geological Institute, University of Copenhagen and the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland (GEUS) with financial support from the Danish Natural Science Research Council (FNU). CRC aims at studying the Earth System in a Greenhouse World, with special emphasis on the Upper Cretaceous – Danian chalk of NW Europe. The stable, long lasting marine macro-environment represented by the chalk sea provides a unique opportunity to analyse and link the depositional, geochemical and biological responses to external forcing at time scales ranging from the sub-Milankovitch to the million year range. The studies will be based on a wide range of methods, including seismic stratigraphy, palaeoecology, sequence-, cyclo- and biostratigraphy, isotope geochemistry, sedimentology and time series analysis. This paper presents the first preliminary results of a CRC drilling campaign at Stevns Klint, eastern Denmark (Fig. 1), where two shallow boreholes were drilled and logged from near the base of the Danian bryozoan limestone and down through the upper 350–450 m of the very thick Upper Cretaceous chalk section (Vejbæk et al. 2003). The cores represent the first complete sections through the Maastrichtian chalk of eastern Denmark

Exploring and Expanding the Category of ‘Young Workers’ According to Situated Ways of Doing Risk and Safety—a Case Study in the Retail Industry

Young adult workers aged 18–24 years have the highest risk of accidents at work. Following the work of Bourdieu and Tannock, we demonstrate that young adult workers are a highly differentiated group. Accordingly, safety prevention among young adult workers needs to be nuanced in ways that take into consideration the different positions and conditions under which young adult workers are employed. Based on single and group interviews with 26 young adult workers from six various sized supermarkets, we categorize young adult retail workers into the following five distinct groups: ‘Skilled workers,’ ‘Apprentices,’ ‘Sabbatical year workers,’ ‘Student workers,’ and ‘School dropouts.’ We argue that exposure to accidental risk is not equally distributed among them and offer an insight into the narratives of young adult workers on the subject of risk situations at work. The categorizations are explored and expanded according to the situated ways of ‘doing’ risk and safety in the working practices of the adult workers. We suggest that the understanding of ‘young’ as an age-related biological category might explain why approaches to prevent accidents among young employees first and foremost include individual factors like advice, information, and supervision and to a lesser degree the structural and cultural environment wherein they are embedded. We conclude that age cannot stand alone as the only factor in safety prevention directed at workers aged 18–24 years; if we do so, there is a risk of overemphasizing age-related individual characteristics such as awareness and cognitive limitations before structural, relational, and hierarchical dimensions at the workplace

Shale gas investigations in Denmark:Lower Palaeozoic shales on Bornholm

The Cambrian to Lower Silurian succession in Denmark is mostly composed of organic-rich black shales that were deposited in an epicontinental sea during a period of high global sea level (Haq & Schutter 2008). The mid-Cambrian to early Ordovician Alum Shale was intensively studied in the 1980s for its source-rock properties (e.g. Buchardt et al. 1986). Recent attention has focused on its potential as an unconventional shale gas source (Energistyrelsen 2010). On southern Bornholm, many wells have been drilled through the Lower Palaeozoic succession because of its importance for groundwater exploitation. In western Denmark, only the deep exploration wells Slagelse-1 and Terne-1 have penetrated the Alum Shale, and knowledge of the unit west of Bornholm is thus very limited (Fig. 1)