Thursday, June 2, 2011

The start of the action...

Well, in the previous post we told you something about the excursion. We started our visit with the youngest Cretaceous deposits, which were deposited when dinosaurs roamed the Earth, and then went back in time to the oldest Cretaceous deposits in our area.

At the C5 clays we did some geophysics, just to get the hang of it, and because the weather was nice, and to know the resistivity of the clays for later use.

After the group picture we went on to these older whitish sands, and we have been staring at these sands for over an hour (see below), which you can only do if you are an earth scientist. So just to baffle all of you non-earth scientists, here are a few professional words that were used many times: crossbedding, muscovite layer, well-rounded poorly sorted, contact spring, aeolian and fluvial deposits, marine clays, pyrite oxidation, conglomerate, discordance and fault. Of course we also found 200 million year old fossils.



The next day we had a day of "learning to know your area" where we pick the right places for installation of rain gauges and discharge measurement stations. With this done, today we went for the real action, which is the installation of stuff and the formal start of our measurement campaign. The staff gauge of the "boy group" was removed by someone very interested in old metal and they had to install a new one. For this activity Sjef had put his yellow underpants and his special boots on, which filled up with water soon after he entered the Sao Romao creek, Julian put on his teletubby suit and Ruben got bitten in his toe by a very aggressive shrimp.


These things make my days... Tchau!

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