After a day of scampering up and down 40 degree hill slopes, knocking chunks of rock off outcrop into baggies our reward was a drive downhill. Silvia, our host and geologist/mining engineer from PUCP, Lima once took a colleague on this drive and he asked her "are you taking me to the center of the earth?". From Eastern Cordilleran mountains, down a two lane road with switch-backs innumerable, cutting our way down a gorge towards the Amazon jungle.
Roadside adobe/brick homes double as shops for fruits and snacks, children chasing dogs chasing dogs, water falls thin and pencil-straight, a major river channel filled with rounded boulders car-sized, and every free wall painted with political advertising. The mountain vegetation gave way to sub tropical growth with every imaginable shade of green in an unimaginable density, covering steep mountain slopes. We get to the turn-off for the Mine, down a dirt road, now darkness masks the lush surroundings and all the headlights see are the streams we ford as we bump along for 15 km, through a jungle town, then more dirt road to the entrance to the Mine site. A hot meal awaits us, served by mining staff in the mining food hall, we settle into guest housing and crash. Our morning meal of eggs on rice is followed by medical checkups, we all pass, and we suit up in mining gear, head to toe.
Entering a mix between a VW mini-bus and a jeep, we and 3 mining geologists/safety officers head into the 'hole'. It's a trick, we are into the earth, surrounded by rock, the claustrophobic gene gets activated, then we see light and we're out of the earth. A tunnel, perhaps to test how squeamish we'd be in the real hole. In we go, surrounded by rock, like a Disney ride, turning at the last second before smashing into rock wall, no light, but water is seen and heard. Driving through a maze for 15 minutes, headed 1000 m underground, it is beyond comprehension. No tunnel support, all rock around us. We are geologists, we now have our life in the hands of the rock we study. But such thoughts are quickly stifled, we leave the vehicle, stepping out into a large pool of water, ankle deep. the air is odd but not sour. Some have placed their respirators over their nose and mouth (like they teach you on airplanes), others taste the odd mine air directly. One tunnel entrance has been walled off by steel plating and we open a door in this plate to enter this passageway. A torrent of wind, near hurricane strength, blows into this new passageway as we walk, holding our hard-hats on, feeling the whipping wind and blowing water with every step. But 10 m into the passageway, the wind ceases, we're into the zone of rock of interest, black shale, and all eyes now scan the wall, ceiling, wall in this 6m x 6m tunnel. I love black shales, perhaps the oceanographer in me, Santa Monica Basin muds appear as rocks through this passageway. We struggle to tell where we are relative to where Kathleen sampled last year. Marking on the wet walls appear in our headlights (attached to our head), Josh coordinates sampling, Dave serves as a walking meter stick as we easily whack chunks of shale off the wall and into plastic bags. The rock is wet, the black comes off the rock leaving your hands black. Eight paces, another sample, eight paces another sample, headlights get taken off our helmets and into our hand to help us see up close, respirators come on and off as the air gets musty, cloudy, then clear. Communication with a respirator, possible but not easy, usually we remove the respirator to talk. The rocks are pretty stressed, but we are exhilarated, I mention to Josh that I'd like to overnight in the mine, some time later he said he would too. It's just that 'cool'. Bedding planes change, the shales are rocks that get stressed easily and these shales have been smushed, the ore deposits lie above and below, sometimes veins of mineralized fluid have shot through these mud rocks.
We finish our sampling, re-measure Dave the meter stick's pace, which is perfectly reproducible (!!) and we drive up and out of the wet dark hole. Into bright jungle light, we shed some gear but still in mining overalls, with shale dirt under fingernails, we enjoy lunch on a thatched-roof porch dining area overlooking immense greenery climbing up steep mountain slopes. Jungle birds speak to us, we listen to this amazing adventure from voices both within and out.
Thursday, August 7, 2014
Friday, August 1, 2014
A collaborative week in Lima
This blog comes to you from from the seminar room in the brand new Department of Geology at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru (PUCP), where we have been visiting since we arrived in Lima on Monday night. It's been a fantastic opportunity to get to know our collaborators here better, to discuss science and plan for the actual trek up to the Andes for fieldwork (starting tomorrow... can't wait!), and get to know Lima a little. Dave Bottjer, our senior paleontologist, reliably informs us that we have pretty well covered the main cultural sites of the city, and it's been great to see the diversity here. And we've been having some great meals, including the excellent photographed lunch at the Larko Museum... where we all sat for hours, as you can see from our attached photo.
Everyone in our group keeps remarking that it's like a Latin American version of Los Angeles, and it's a fairly accurate description - and one that maybe sheds some light on why our collaborative links here seem to be working so well. Speaking of those collaborations, we've had a great chance to interact with the geologists here, through Silvia Rosas, who is actually the founding director of the new PUCP geology program. She set up a couple of great opportunities for us to interact with Peruvian geologists. Our fearless ELT project (that stands for Earth-Life Transitions, if it's not clear) leader, Frank Corsetti, gave a great talk to the weekly meeting of the Peruvian Geological Society on Wednesday night. And today, we are sitting getting ready for the Inaugural Symposium for the PUCP Geology program - which includes talks from our whole group. Photos to follow, I hope, so stay tuned...!
Above, from left: Our amazing PUCP collaborator, Silvia Rosas; Frank Corsetti; Joyce Yager; Josh West; Kathleen Ritterbush; Dave Bottjer
Monday, July 28, 2014
Preparing the expedition: from Chicago to Lima
O’hare Airport, Chicago Illinois, 7:05 am
Kathleen Ritterbush, Paleontologist
“…Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of the Big Sholders…”
-Sandberg
I spent the last few days hustling around Hyde Park and downtown Chicago getting ready for Peru. The last six month’s I’ve lived here as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Chicago. I experienced my first winter, first fireflies, and at Friday’s geology department softball game against the chemists, my first mulberries!
On this expedition I’m planning to show off the work I’ve done the last few years to a gaggle of ambitious professors and collaborators bent on new research directions. As a paleontologist I look for signs of animal life, and indications of how those animals interacted with each other and with their ocean home. Two of our collaborators are chemists who study how erosion on land feeds crucial minerals to the seas, and how this changes the ocean through time. We’re interested in how Pangea volcanically splitting apart influenced ocean chemistry, how the chemistry influenced the animals, and how the animals influenced their coastline homes.
Two hundred million years ago Pangea was splitting and an astronomical number of animals went extinct on land and in the oceans. Afterwards, dinosaurs got a good boost on land by expanding into new ecological opportunities. I spent the last few years looking at what happened in the oceans, and in addition to the usual new clams and new snails, there was a radical reorganization of which animals ruled the roost on the coasts.
Sea sponges spread out over vast areas previously occupied mollusks and crinoids, turning something that might have looked like the Florida coast into something more like the sponge meadows of the Antarctic shelf. I spent the last three years searching for their fossilized parts in the American west and Peru. When I found their tiny needles in microscope slides of rocks, I knew they were close. When I found their bodies preserved as three-dimensional blobs and sacks and vases strewn over fossilized seafloor rock layers, I couldn’t even believe my eyes. With a lot of help from professors and other grad students, I spent a few years analyzing the fossils in the lab and under the microscope, and returning to the field to look for more.
That search led to Peru, and to a remarkable professor who did her dissertation on a pack of rocks that happen to contain one of the best marine records of the Triassic/Jurassic history ever found. Several professors at University of Southern California decided to push for more funding, and now we’re on our way. It’s my job to show the chemists the rocks with the sponge fossils. It’s our job together to decide how to get more out of these rocks, how to take samples that might, after careful work in the lab, reveal what happened in the ocean 200,000,000 years ago.
In some ways I’ve been preparing for this trip since last May, when we learned our grant proposal was funded. I transformed a solo month of Peruvian field work into a scramble for materials the chemists could try out in the lab. A series of taste tests, if you will. Now we go back together, armed with preliminary results.
We’re going to present our research at an international symposium in Lima, then head to the high Andes for two weeks. I prepared field guides for the crew, and I’m still preparing more detailed field notes for myself. Over the past year I’ve been scrutinizing almost 200 microscope slides I had made from the Peruvian samples from six different Andean mines and mountainsides. I’ve drafted schematics to represent the rocks, the fossils, and the microscopic contents. Together we’ve submitted two academic articles on the results, and I used these figures to prepare field guides for the crew.
There’s never enough time. I always want one more hour on the microscope, one more hour with my computer drafting station, one more hour to read over accounts of previous expeditions from the 1980s and 1990s. Then I export myself into the field and have only what’s in my head. This year I’m making a technological leap and using an iPad mini – my first tablet – to keep the photographs and microscope results and chemical test results at my fingertips in the field. I’m hoping the new graduate student on our team – Joyce Yager – can show me some clever ways to use it.
I didn’t brush up on my Spanish enough, and what’s more I’ll be surrounded by the team members speaking English, which challenges my emersion. I didn’t write blog posts over the past month like I planned, and I still need to submit my research symposium abstracts for the big international meeting in October. I figure I have time for that in Houston before our Lima flight.
One last minute priority that paid off was getting physically and mentally into better shape. The cruel “polar vortex” winter, a cross country move, and time away from rocks took a toll on my motivation. After long consideration I took the plunge and joined a Dutch style Muay Thai kickboxing club. Learning to casually kick an opponent in the thigh is actually a combination of about eight sophisticated tricks of balance and rotation. Turns out it’s physically impossible to fret about job applications or impending research deadlines when someone’s about to punch me in the face. Three weeks later I’m feeling more human, and hoping my lungs do a bit better in the Andes. Academia can bring subtle isolation and stress that we each need to navigate cleverly to survive. I’ve been sparing and boxing; I’ve been getting my own big Chicago shoulders.
I’ve been worried about the upcoming trip, and discouraged, and unsure how it will go. I know it’s going to be cold, I know I’m going to wish I’d looked at my slides differently, and I know I’m going to wish I had another week on the rocks. Every time I revisit a field site I see it with new eyes, and bringing a pack of wily senior scientists along is sure to revolutionize my perspective. I find field work so captivating because it is completely transformative. Sure I like the llamas and the food and the people and the travels, but the way a week’s passing brings a whole new outlook on science and deep time is just unbeatable. I don’t know what I’ll find, but I’m expecting the good kind of trouble.
Kathleen Ritterbush, Paleontologist
“…Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of the Big Sholders…”
-Sandberg
 |
| "Cloud Gate" aka "the bean" in Chicago's Millenium Park |
I spent the last few days hustling around Hyde Park and downtown Chicago getting ready for Peru. The last six month’s I’ve lived here as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Chicago. I experienced my first winter, first fireflies, and at Friday’s geology department softball game against the chemists, my first mulberries!
On this expedition I’m planning to show off the work I’ve done the last few years to a gaggle of ambitious professors and collaborators bent on new research directions. As a paleontologist I look for signs of animal life, and indications of how those animals interacted with each other and with their ocean home. Two of our collaborators are chemists who study how erosion on land feeds crucial minerals to the seas, and how this changes the ocean through time. We’re interested in how Pangea volcanically splitting apart influenced ocean chemistry, how the chemistry influenced the animals, and how the animals influenced their coastline homes.
Two hundred million years ago Pangea was splitting and an astronomical number of animals went extinct on land and in the oceans. Afterwards, dinosaurs got a good boost on land by expanding into new ecological opportunities. I spent the last few years looking at what happened in the oceans, and in addition to the usual new clams and new snails, there was a radical reorganization of which animals ruled the roost on the coasts.
 |
| Sponges fossilized on a seafloor preserved from the Early Jurassic, 200,000,000 years ago |
Sea sponges spread out over vast areas previously occupied mollusks and crinoids, turning something that might have looked like the Florida coast into something more like the sponge meadows of the Antarctic shelf. I spent the last three years searching for their fossilized parts in the American west and Peru. When I found their tiny needles in microscope slides of rocks, I knew they were close. When I found their bodies preserved as three-dimensional blobs and sacks and vases strewn over fossilized seafloor rock layers, I couldn’t even believe my eyes. With a lot of help from professors and other grad students, I spent a few years analyzing the fossils in the lab and under the microscope, and returning to the field to look for more.
That search led to Peru, and to a remarkable professor who did her dissertation on a pack of rocks that happen to contain one of the best marine records of the Triassic/Jurassic history ever found. Several professors at University of Southern California decided to push for more funding, and now we’re on our way. It’s my job to show the chemists the rocks with the sponge fossils. It’s our job together to decide how to get more out of these rocks, how to take samples that might, after careful work in the lab, reveal what happened in the ocean 200,000,000 years ago.
In some ways I’ve been preparing for this trip since last May, when we learned our grant proposal was funded. I transformed a solo month of Peruvian field work into a scramble for materials the chemists could try out in the lab. A series of taste tests, if you will. Now we go back together, armed with preliminary results.
We’re going to present our research at an international symposium in Lima, then head to the high Andes for two weeks. I prepared field guides for the crew, and I’m still preparing more detailed field notes for myself. Over the past year I’ve been scrutinizing almost 200 microscope slides I had made from the Peruvian samples from six different Andean mines and mountainsides. I’ve drafted schematics to represent the rocks, the fossils, and the microscopic contents. Together we’ve submitted two academic articles on the results, and I used these figures to prepare field guides for the crew.
There’s never enough time. I always want one more hour on the microscope, one more hour with my computer drafting station, one more hour to read over accounts of previous expeditions from the 1980s and 1990s. Then I export myself into the field and have only what’s in my head. This year I’m making a technological leap and using an iPad mini – my first tablet – to keep the photographs and microscope results and chemical test results at my fingertips in the field. I’m hoping the new graduate student on our team – Joyce Yager – can show me some clever ways to use it.
I didn’t brush up on my Spanish enough, and what’s more I’ll be surrounded by the team members speaking English, which challenges my emersion. I didn’t write blog posts over the past month like I planned, and I still need to submit my research symposium abstracts for the big international meeting in October. I figure I have time for that in Houston before our Lima flight.
One last minute priority that paid off was getting physically and mentally into better shape. The cruel “polar vortex” winter, a cross country move, and time away from rocks took a toll on my motivation. After long consideration I took the plunge and joined a Dutch style Muay Thai kickboxing club. Learning to casually kick an opponent in the thigh is actually a combination of about eight sophisticated tricks of balance and rotation. Turns out it’s physically impossible to fret about job applications or impending research deadlines when someone’s about to punch me in the face. Three weeks later I’m feeling more human, and hoping my lungs do a bit better in the Andes. Academia can bring subtle isolation and stress that we each need to navigate cleverly to survive. I’ve been sparing and boxing; I’ve been getting my own big Chicago shoulders.
 |
| Cycling around Chicago's brief and wonderful summer, at Buckingham Fountain |
I’ve been worried about the upcoming trip, and discouraged, and unsure how it will go. I know it’s going to be cold, I know I’m going to wish I’d looked at my slides differently, and I know I’m going to wish I had another week on the rocks. Every time I revisit a field site I see it with new eyes, and bringing a pack of wily senior scientists along is sure to revolutionize my perspective. I find field work so captivating because it is completely transformative. Sure I like the llamas and the food and the people and the travels, but the way a week’s passing brings a whole new outlook on science and deep time is just unbeatable. I don’t know what I’ll find, but I’m expecting the good kind of trouble.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)