On returning to England in 1851 he was induced to enter the newly established Royal School of Mines (now part of Imperial College London), which his younger brother Henry F. Blanford (1834–1893), afterwards head of the Indian Meteorological Department, had already joined.

[4] He studied under Henry De la Beche, Lyon Playfair, Edward Forbes, Ramsay, and Warington Smyth.

[5] He then spent a year in the mining school (Bergakademie) at Freiberg, Saxony, and towards the close of 1854 both he and his brother obtained posts on the Geological Survey of India.

[3] After his retirement he took up editorship of The Fauna of British India, Including Ceylon and Burma series.He was engaged in various parts of India, in the Raniganj coalfield, in Bombay, and in the coalfield near Talcher, where boulders considered to have been ice-borne were found in the Talcher strata (Talchir tillite)—a remarkable discovery confirmed by subsequent observations of other geologists in equivalent strata (Permian) elsewhere across Gondwanaland.

He marched to Shiraz with St. John's party and then travelled alone through Ispahan to Teheran to join Sir Richard Pollock.

He visited the Elbruz Mountains and returned to England from the Caspian via Astrakhan, Moscow, St. Petersburg and Berlin to reach home in September 1872.

[4] He died at his home at the age of 72 in Bedford Gardens, Campden Hill, in London on 23 June 1905[2][3] and is buried in a family vault at Highgate Cemetery.