GeologyRocksDo Geologists Have A Death Wish?
by Hypocentre
I’m a little late on posting about the current meme permeating the geoblogosphere, started by Geotripper and Chris Rowan, do geologists have a death wish? A lot of the posts have involved photos of geologists playing with still glowing lava flows but being of the cowardly persuasion I don’t really have many tales to tell. Two incidents though do spring to mind from my younger, more reckless days. The first was doing geology many years ago in the Atacama desert in northern Chile. It was my last day before having to fly home and my co-geologist and I decided to have one last look at a particular area. Instead of the meticulous planning that had gone with the rest of the fieldwork we just went for it. With only a single vehicle, no food and very little water we just turned off the pan-american highway and headed out across the desert, without telling anyone where we were going, aiming for a distant mountain. We had no maps, only a landsat image and compass to navigate by and this is in the days before GPS. The inevitable happened and we got the four-wheel drive irretrievably (for us) bogged down in the soft sand. Nothing for it but to walk out of the Atacama Desert with no real idea of exactly where we were or where nearest settlement was. After about 20km of walking on a compass bearing we picked up a road which fortunately lead to a small village. We found a bar where we did a reasonable attempt of re-enacting the bar scene from ‘Ice Cold in Alex’. We then cadged a lift to the nearest military base and persuaded the army to come and dig the jeep out. The Atacama is a superb place to study geology - it’s so good they signpost it from the side of the road.
The other occasion is from a time working as a field assistant in the Spanish Pyrenees. We decided to climb Monte Perdido but I didn’t have any crampons and had to borrow an ice axe, something I had never used before. Most of the climb was fine but the last 100m was hard ice. Just near the top I slipped and learned to use the ice axe first go - otherwise I would have ended up in France several hundred metres below! The views from the top were spectacular though, as seen here with recumbent fold of El Cylindro in the foreground and the high Pyrenees in the background.
I don’t think it is a death wish, but good geology can be in some risky places. It should be all right though as long as you take the right precautions!
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We just might. I'll share
Fri, 03/07/2008 - 00:09We just might. I'll share two stories from last summer when I was at field camp class in the Rocky Mountains in Colorado. The first was just after a very rainy night (and still raining in the morning) and our professor and teaching assistants decided to go out to the area we were studying to see if the conditions were too bad to be in the field. Our study area was on one of those skinny, sandy mountain roads on the side of a small mountain, about 300 feet down to the stream below. As they were approaching the canyon they slipped off the road and into the drainage ditch which basically tumbled straight down into the canyon about 50' later. They had to use the winch and tie the cable around a tree to get the SUV out. But just think, if that had happened 50' later!
The second was on our final test day when we were sent into a little area on that same stretch of road to map contacts of units independently. For some reason I had it in my head that there was a contact above the road in this one spot above the precambrian gneiss, so I climbed straight up the face with a backpack on and holding a clipboard. It was all I could do to crawl up this thing with those hinderants, especially the clipboard taking up the use of a couple fingers on one hand and the slope right on the brink of being climbable without actually rock climbing. Plus the gneiss was weathered and had little gravel pieces all over. I got up about 100' above the road and I was starting to doubt why the heck I even went up there because at this point falling was starting to look more like a certainty than a possibility. So I climbed back down (really it was more of a scoot on my hind end) and went up at another spot which had actually been made into a trail and all the rest of the students were using. And of course, lo and behold, this trail eventually climbed and meandered around the mountainside to be only about 20' above where I had previously climbed to and was right on the contact point I was looking for! So I wasted about an hour of our 6 hour time limit for nothing except the chance for death! Agh!
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Thinking back over my
Fri, 03/07/2008 - 09:28Thinking back over my fieldwork I think we may do. Even during my A-Level trip to Devon I remember our group nearly getting caught by the rising tide. We'd headed out at low tide along a concrete walkway over the foreshore to examine some rocks on the headland, cleverly working further and further away from safety as the day drew on. Finally someone noticed that the sea was now nearly lapping over the concrete walkway and cue a mass rapid exodus back the way we came as the sea continued to rise and we were looking forward to meeting Michael Burke after an appearance on '999'! We all made it out but not without wet fet as the sea had got up to over ankle level by the time we made the shore!
The other incident was not really our fault but that of the Earth itself. During a uni fieldtrip to Santorini we were inspecting some of the deposits from the most recent large eruption on the inside of the caldera face from a ledge about 10m wide which had a 100m drop to the sea on one side and a 50m vertical cliff on the other. Just then everyone fell slilent, the earth started to shake and some stones fell out of the cliff above us! The quake lasted for about 30 seconds after which we decided to continue geologising - checking later I believe the quake was a magnitude 6-ish just north of the Cretan coast.
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Without doubt Hypo you are
Sat, 03/08/2008 - 09:04Without doubt Hypo you are totally mad! I went on the Cerro Galan Caldera expedition to the Atacama desert on the Argentinian side. That place is so vast and inhospitable its scarey.
Mind you the maps we had were not exactly OS standard, and we had to 'trail blaze' round ridges and gullies from base camp at Antafagasta De La Sierra to camp 1 just outside the crater rim, and mark it with piles of stones. Naturally it became known as the M1. Took two hours to do the 15 miles.
The scariest journey was coming back down one night with no moon and gully edges coming up in the headlights all the time. Fortunately I was with an Argentinian colonel who had been in the mountain corps all his life and was super confident out there.
John
“Civilisation exists by geological consent, subject to change without notice.” Will Durant
John
“Civilisation exists by geological consent, subject to change without notice.” - Will Durant
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Like any geologist I've
Tue, 03/11/2008 - 11:15Like any geologist I've found myself clinging to some pretty precarious outcrops, but the Maghlaq fault in Malta is the worst. It marks the southern extent of a horst, and for 90% of its exposure it defines the position of the ~200m high coastal cliff line. There's a small portion where you can access a discontinuous area of the downthrown side and examine the fault itself. The topography of this area is generally a steep (largely unscalable) limestone escarpment just inland of the fault, and then a broad (ish) flat area that sometimes leads gently down to the sea on the downthrown side. This is eroding away and in one or two places has gone entirely, so to get between them you have to skirt the bottom of the escarpment for a few hundred metres just a couple of feet off the 80-something degree striated slip surface with only a hundred or more metres or more of air between you and the sea/rocks. Not fun at the best of times, but definately not fun on a windy day.
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On the same trip we were
Tue, 03/11/2008 - 16:27On the same trip we were looking at the Dwejra South structure on Gozo- a Miocene(?) collapse doline with its infill excavated out by the sea. Standing on its rim, we actually witnessed cracks propogating through the soil that lay in hollows/cracks in the bare rock pavement. At that point we decided it'd be best to stand a few metres back.
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Soon after I first started
Fri, 03/14/2008 - 11:37Soon after I first started getting interested in minerals (long before I got into geology) I was posted to Cyprus for a UN tour. The squadron of armoured cars I was attached to, as a mechanic, had to patrol the Green Line between the Turks and the Greeks. The base was in Blue Beret Camp in Nicosia, but we had several outstations along the Green Line including one at Scouriatissa (Spelling?) which was an abandonded copper mine. I had taken spares or test kit down for one of my fitters, and for some forgotten reason I had to wait for several hours before returning to Nicosia. I decided to kill time by climbing up these enormous spoil tips.
One of the first rules of soldiering is never to show yourself on the sky line, for obvious reasons, and I was reminded about this when I set off.
Very soon I was tiptoe-ing on carpets of pyrites, and absolutely in wonder and awe at all the colours I was seeing which until then had only been in text books. Remember, I had only been interested for about 6 months.
I had a pack which I was stuffing anything shiney or brightly coloured in, and completely absorbed in what I was doing. So much so that I had arrived on the sky line - nicely silloetted.
Its true that you do hear the bullets before the bang! I had what sounded like angry bees zip each side of me, closely followed by the bangs. I decided not to wave and claim I was 'With the UN!!!'
I came down the scree faster than I went up. When I eventually stopped, I had no skin left on my hands and the seat of my shorts was worn through.
If anyone ever goes up on the top (probably quite safe now since this was 1976) and finds an old canvas bag, probably well rotted since there wasa fair bit of pyrite in it, would you return the specimens in the immediate area to me please.
I am (now in retrospect) fairly sure that these were warning shots, as the Turks were very good soldiers and I think I would have been an easy target, but I certainly wasn't going to wait to find out! Sorry, but I certainly 'lost my bottle' that day!
John
"Civilisation exists by geological consent, subject to change without notice.” Will Durant
John
“Civilisation exists by geological consent, subject to change without notice.” - Will Durant
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wow. getting shot at must
Fri, 03/14/2008 - 12:16wow. getting shot at must be about the most anxious feeling ever, wondering if/when one is going to hit you. I imagine you're a different person after that.
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I think I left the
Fri, 03/14/2008 - 22:54I think I left the 'different person ' at the top of that spoil tip to be honest. No one could have moved from that spot as fast as me.
You're right. I think anyone would change after they had come under fire. It wasn't the first time, but on the other occassion I wasn't playing geologists and I had a weapon as well - not a bag of rocks!!!!!.
John
“Civilisation exists by geological consent, subject to change without notice.” Will Durant
John
“Civilisation exists by geological consent, subject to change without notice.” - Will Durant