Echidna Chasm
The Bungle Bungle, southeast side
Piccaninny Creek
The Bungle Bungle from the Helicopter Ride
Showing posts with label Bungle Bungle. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Bungle Bungle. Show all posts
Saturday, July 3, 2010
A Few Pix
Blogspot is being annoying wrt posting pictures, so here are a few images of places and things to date.
Sunday, June 27, 2010
The First Place: Purnululu Part 1
6/24: Woke up feeling strangely normal in Kununurra. Maybe it was my meal of barramundi the previous night, plus just enough travel to be on some semblance of a normal sleep cycle. A wait at the airport produced our 4WD: a Mitsubishi Pajero. Downtown Kununurra provided food, ice, drinks, and other random supplies, and we were off south on Rt. 95 towards Purnululu National Park.
This is the first time I’ve driven a Pajero. It’s not a field vehicle like the Land Cruisers that I idolize, but a good, practical SUV with a big diesel, a gear ratio decent for highway and unsealed roads, and carpet. Not sure about the carpet, but we’re making do: glad I don’t have to clean it.
As I wrote earlier, Purnululu is the official name for the Bungle Bungle Range, or the Bungle Bungle. This is broad plateau of Paleozoic sandstone, shaped like a very fat “U”. It’s a national park, and a World Heritage site, for its remarkable erosional patterns. More on that later. No one seems to know where the name “Bungle Bungle” came from. There are several competing whimsical hypotheses, involving ranchers, aboriginals, and a variety of miscommunications. None of them are that compelling. I just like being someplace called the Bungle Bungle.
My guidebook stated a five hour drive from Kununurra: east on Rt. 1, the Victoria Highway, and south on Rt 95. The Pajero seemed happy, stable and safe at 120 kph. I enjoyed this initial run through new territory. The landscape of the East Kimberley seemed is a series of fault controlled linear hills and mountains, separated by valleys of various widths and lengths. A lot of the bedrock looked like highly deformed sediments, with occasional interruptions of granite or other crystalline rock. This terrain was covered by a variety of bush grasses, sprinkled with low density of somewhat familiar acacias and other trees that I don’t know. A startling addition to this biota were frequent boab trees. These are the same as the baobabs of Africa; my plant books states that the first boabs arrived from shipwrecks on the Kimberley coast. Boabs have fat grey elephantine trunks, all out of proportion to “normal trees”. This barrel is topped by an often symmetrical fan of branches. Some of the boabs we passed were leafy, some just bare branches, while a few had what looked like fruit. I haven’t a clue what this variety was about. The boabs made me smile; they were a sure sign of being in a new place.
As we drove along, I kept thinking, something looks different here. After enough gazing, I think this is due to the absence of bush-sized plants. A wide variety of bushes are a part of my Australian desert biota model from my time in the Pilbara and the Red Centre. Here, it’s the trees and grasses. This gives the landscape a park-like feel, especially in areas of recent burn.
After 245 kilometers, we reached the eastward turn-off to the Bungle Bungles. Bitumen ended; the washboard dirt road began. This fifty-three kilometers was supposed to take us two hours. It was 3:45 pm; ninety minutes to sunset. The track wound across hills and through many watercourses. The Pajero was no longer white. I drove rapidly well within safe limits; I was glad the sunset was behind us. We reached the park visitor center in eighty five minutes. It was closed. We went to the nearest campground, and groped around in the dark for enough space to camp. I was asleep by 8:15.
6/25: I was awake before dawn, at 5 am. The Bungle Bungle is at about 17oS; definitely subtropical. In spite of this, I’d read that since it was winter, it should be cold a night. I guess cold is a relative thing; according to the Pajero’s digital thermometer, the low was 15oC – around 60oF. No worries, I was happy to be up before the sun wearing only shorts and a shirt. I wandered away from camp, eventually climbing a nearby limestone ridge: smeared and discontinuous beds; clearly a fault zone. The Bungle Bungle massif was beginning to glow red in the morning light. On this, its west side, the Range is a steep north-south trending cliff, pierced by a number of narrow gorges or chasms, as they call them up here. I stood and watched this brighten in the increasing light. The Bungle Bungles is largely flat-laying sedimentary rocks; the coarsest scale of this bedding gave the range a striped appearance. I knew we’d be heading there to hike soon.
I wandered back to the campground. It’s appeal was limited to being the only legal place to stay on the west side of the park. Other than that, it was dusty and crowded with 4WDs and campers. A little too promiscuous, not the kind of camping that Paul and I prefer. As I walked back into camp, Paul stuck his head out of this tent, and shared his first brainwave of the day – let’s get out of here and eat breakfast at the trailhead. We were on the road by 6:15.
Fourteen kilometers of dirt road was followed by a quiet breakfast at Mini Palm Gorge and a pair of hikes: Mini Palm Gorge and Echidna Chasm. These walks, maybe a total of eight kilometers, wandered into a couple of the narrow canyons that knife into the west side of the range. These chasms follow major structural joints – vertical planes of weakness – in the bedrock.
As we headed out on the first hike, I felt strangely disoriented; how did I suddenly come to be walking along this hot sandy track in Western Australia? It was a particularly fast evolution this time; maybe being tired in advance contributed to this.
Well, I was here, healthy and awake, so I walked to see what the Bungle Bungle was really like. The hike into Mini Palm Gorge gently ascended into a blind canyon full of Livionsia palm trees; a species endemic to this area. It wasn’t clear which palms were dwarfs; there was enough evidence of flash floods that I wondered if the smaller ones weren’t just younger. Although it was 8 am, it was already hot and I was sweating. We turned a corner into the gorge per se; deep shadows and a breeze greeted us. The hike immediately seemed more tolerable. The trail climbed over and under large boulders of conglomerate, eventually ending above a grove of the maybe mini palms, in a blind canyon. It was totally quiet, except for the sound of birds and my heartbeat. The vertical walls of the gorge glowed red a the top. I thought, this is a good start.
Echidna Chasm proved this to be the case. This canyon, while an easy walk, pinched down until it was little more than hip wide, albeit 600 feet high. We passed under several large chockstones; boulders that had been trapped in their fall by the narrowing chasm. I hoped they were stable, at least for the rest of our hike. Like Mini Palm, the trail ended in a blind canyon; in this case defined by a waterfall chute fifty feet above the trail’s end. This would not be a good place to be in the wet. The chasm widened out a bit here, and many of our fellow hikers gathered here for a rest in the relatively cool shade. Most of the people were encountered were pensioners who were exploring the remoter parts of AustraliaThey were inevitably fun to talk to; for some reason most of them thought we were Canadian. . However, I was particularly struck by one family on holiday from Perth. They had three young boys, under ten at the oldest. Not only had they got them this far and up Echidna Chasm, but the eldest son was clearly mentally challenged. The father carried him the whole way, while patiently answering the middle son’s questions about spiders.
A quick stroll down the trail, and time for lunch. Geez, it was hotter. Riding in the truck with the AC on full seemed a good idea, so we went to the visitors centre for, in order: cold drinks, an excellent guide to Bungle Bungle geology, and reservations for a helicopter ride on Sunday. After sunset (talking to more pensioners, seeing the family again) it was time for dinner and sleep.
This is the first time I’ve driven a Pajero. It’s not a field vehicle like the Land Cruisers that I idolize, but a good, practical SUV with a big diesel, a gear ratio decent for highway and unsealed roads, and carpet. Not sure about the carpet, but we’re making do: glad I don’t have to clean it.
As I wrote earlier, Purnululu is the official name for the Bungle Bungle Range, or the Bungle Bungle. This is broad plateau of Paleozoic sandstone, shaped like a very fat “U”. It’s a national park, and a World Heritage site, for its remarkable erosional patterns. More on that later. No one seems to know where the name “Bungle Bungle” came from. There are several competing whimsical hypotheses, involving ranchers, aboriginals, and a variety of miscommunications. None of them are that compelling. I just like being someplace called the Bungle Bungle.
My guidebook stated a five hour drive from Kununurra: east on Rt. 1, the Victoria Highway, and south on Rt 95. The Pajero seemed happy, stable and safe at 120 kph. I enjoyed this initial run through new territory. The landscape of the East Kimberley seemed is a series of fault controlled linear hills and mountains, separated by valleys of various widths and lengths. A lot of the bedrock looked like highly deformed sediments, with occasional interruptions of granite or other crystalline rock. This terrain was covered by a variety of bush grasses, sprinkled with low density of somewhat familiar acacias and other trees that I don’t know. A startling addition to this biota were frequent boab trees. These are the same as the baobabs of Africa; my plant books states that the first boabs arrived from shipwrecks on the Kimberley coast. Boabs have fat grey elephantine trunks, all out of proportion to “normal trees”. This barrel is topped by an often symmetrical fan of branches. Some of the boabs we passed were leafy, some just bare branches, while a few had what looked like fruit. I haven’t a clue what this variety was about. The boabs made me smile; they were a sure sign of being in a new place.
As we drove along, I kept thinking, something looks different here. After enough gazing, I think this is due to the absence of bush-sized plants. A wide variety of bushes are a part of my Australian desert biota model from my time in the Pilbara and the Red Centre. Here, it’s the trees and grasses. This gives the landscape a park-like feel, especially in areas of recent burn.
After 245 kilometers, we reached the eastward turn-off to the Bungle Bungles. Bitumen ended; the washboard dirt road began. This fifty-three kilometers was supposed to take us two hours. It was 3:45 pm; ninety minutes to sunset. The track wound across hills and through many watercourses. The Pajero was no longer white. I drove rapidly well within safe limits; I was glad the sunset was behind us. We reached the park visitor center in eighty five minutes. It was closed. We went to the nearest campground, and groped around in the dark for enough space to camp. I was asleep by 8:15.
6/25: I was awake before dawn, at 5 am. The Bungle Bungle is at about 17oS; definitely subtropical. In spite of this, I’d read that since it was winter, it should be cold a night. I guess cold is a relative thing; according to the Pajero’s digital thermometer, the low was 15oC – around 60oF. No worries, I was happy to be up before the sun wearing only shorts and a shirt. I wandered away from camp, eventually climbing a nearby limestone ridge: smeared and discontinuous beds; clearly a fault zone. The Bungle Bungle massif was beginning to glow red in the morning light. On this, its west side, the Range is a steep north-south trending cliff, pierced by a number of narrow gorges or chasms, as they call them up here. I stood and watched this brighten in the increasing light. The Bungle Bungles is largely flat-laying sedimentary rocks; the coarsest scale of this bedding gave the range a striped appearance. I knew we’d be heading there to hike soon.
I wandered back to the campground. It’s appeal was limited to being the only legal place to stay on the west side of the park. Other than that, it was dusty and crowded with 4WDs and campers. A little too promiscuous, not the kind of camping that Paul and I prefer. As I walked back into camp, Paul stuck his head out of this tent, and shared his first brainwave of the day – let’s get out of here and eat breakfast at the trailhead. We were on the road by 6:15.
Fourteen kilometers of dirt road was followed by a quiet breakfast at Mini Palm Gorge and a pair of hikes: Mini Palm Gorge and Echidna Chasm. These walks, maybe a total of eight kilometers, wandered into a couple of the narrow canyons that knife into the west side of the range. These chasms follow major structural joints – vertical planes of weakness – in the bedrock.
As we headed out on the first hike, I felt strangely disoriented; how did I suddenly come to be walking along this hot sandy track in Western Australia? It was a particularly fast evolution this time; maybe being tired in advance contributed to this.
Well, I was here, healthy and awake, so I walked to see what the Bungle Bungle was really like. The hike into Mini Palm Gorge gently ascended into a blind canyon full of Livionsia palm trees; a species endemic to this area. It wasn’t clear which palms were dwarfs; there was enough evidence of flash floods that I wondered if the smaller ones weren’t just younger. Although it was 8 am, it was already hot and I was sweating. We turned a corner into the gorge per se; deep shadows and a breeze greeted us. The hike immediately seemed more tolerable. The trail climbed over and under large boulders of conglomerate, eventually ending above a grove of the maybe mini palms, in a blind canyon. It was totally quiet, except for the sound of birds and my heartbeat. The vertical walls of the gorge glowed red a the top. I thought, this is a good start.
Echidna Chasm proved this to be the case. This canyon, while an easy walk, pinched down until it was little more than hip wide, albeit 600 feet high. We passed under several large chockstones; boulders that had been trapped in their fall by the narrowing chasm. I hoped they were stable, at least for the rest of our hike. Like Mini Palm, the trail ended in a blind canyon; in this case defined by a waterfall chute fifty feet above the trail’s end. This would not be a good place to be in the wet. The chasm widened out a bit here, and many of our fellow hikers gathered here for a rest in the relatively cool shade. Most of the people were encountered were pensioners who were exploring the remoter parts of AustraliaThey were inevitably fun to talk to; for some reason most of them thought we were Canadian. . However, I was particularly struck by one family on holiday from Perth. They had three young boys, under ten at the oldest. Not only had they got them this far and up Echidna Chasm, but the eldest son was clearly mentally challenged. The father carried him the whole way, while patiently answering the middle son’s questions about spiders.
A quick stroll down the trail, and time for lunch. Geez, it was hotter. Riding in the truck with the AC on full seemed a good idea, so we went to the visitors centre for, in order: cold drinks, an excellent guide to Bungle Bungle geology, and reservations for a helicopter ride on Sunday. After sunset (talking to more pensioners, seeing the family again) it was time for dinner and sleep.
Thursday, June 17, 2010
Aus 15: The New Places
My last entry talked about the work of Australia Fifteen: the part that the grant covers. What about the fun? On Fifteen, a week of new places exploration happens first. I’m being joined for this leg by my frequent travel buddy Paul. He’s in the throes of getting a job in Perth (if I weren’t happy for him, strangulation would be in order). Last summer’s pleasure excursion, with both Paul and Louis, was in the central deserts of Australia: Uluru, Kata Tjuta, Kings Canyon, and Alice Springs. This year, we’ll be further north, in the subtropics. After a lot of investigation, we’ve settled on a bipartite itinerary: splitting our time between the Kimberley Region of Western Australia and Kakadu National Park in the Northern Territory. My initial urge was to just visit the Kimberley. Lots of desert and rocks – my kind of place. Then I realized that more than half of our waking time would be driving in order to glimpse the area’s highlights. This is normal in Outback Australia, but since this year’s field season will have a lot of driving, we’ve decided to focus on one spot: the Bungle Bungles Range, more recently named Purnululu National Park. The Bungle Bungles are my desert fix. It is one of those places that is strikingly and uniquely scenic, hard to get to, and largely unheard of outside of Australia. A rough analogy would be Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in the US. I’ve wanted to go there since first hearing its name in 1985. It features lots of exposed sedimentary rock, which has weathered into a variety of gorges and “beehive” structures. It just looks like a fun place to hike, poke around, and photography.
Getting the Bungle Bungles will be the usual multi-tube adventure. After flying from San Francisco to Sydney, we take a domestic jet to Darwin, the capital of the Northern Territory. After a couple hours to feel jet lag, we fly on a puddle jumper to Kununurra, in the East Kimberley. With a night of recovery, we rent a 4WD vehicle and make the five hour drive to the Bungle Bungles, and start camping.
Eventually we’ll fly back to Darwin, rent another vehicle, and head east to Kakadu National Park. Kakadu was Paul’s idea. It’s not arid, so it was off my radar screens. Like the Bungle Bungles, Kakadu is another gem largely unknown outside of Aus. It’s a huge expanse combining river plains that drain north to the Gulf of Carpentaria (lots of birds and crocodiles) and a southern sandstone escarpment that’s cut into dramatic canyons. It looks beautiful and lush – even in the dry season, when we’ll be there. In addition to these natural charms, Kakadu has been home to Aboriginal groups for at least 40,000 years. The park has several significant rock art sites. These are stylistically more elaborate and complex than the petroglyphs I’ve see in WA and the NT. As I wrote last summer, I’ve gradually become more attuned to Aboriginal Australia; the art, the places, and the people. Kakadu is an opportunity to further this osmotic process. When I read the park literature, I sense that visiting Kakadu is not going to a park; it’s visiting part of cultural homeland. The Aboriginal culture persistent has persisted enough that I sense it through the overprint of colonization. Or so it feels from pictures and words. We will see what ground truth is like.
Getting the Bungle Bungles will be the usual multi-tube adventure. After flying from San Francisco to Sydney, we take a domestic jet to Darwin, the capital of the Northern Territory. After a couple hours to feel jet lag, we fly on a puddle jumper to Kununurra, in the East Kimberley. With a night of recovery, we rent a 4WD vehicle and make the five hour drive to the Bungle Bungles, and start camping.
Eventually we’ll fly back to Darwin, rent another vehicle, and head east to Kakadu National Park. Kakadu was Paul’s idea. It’s not arid, so it was off my radar screens. Like the Bungle Bungles, Kakadu is another gem largely unknown outside of Aus. It’s a huge expanse combining river plains that drain north to the Gulf of Carpentaria (lots of birds and crocodiles) and a southern sandstone escarpment that’s cut into dramatic canyons. It looks beautiful and lush – even in the dry season, when we’ll be there. In addition to these natural charms, Kakadu has been home to Aboriginal groups for at least 40,000 years. The park has several significant rock art sites. These are stylistically more elaborate and complex than the petroglyphs I’ve see in WA and the NT. As I wrote last summer, I’ve gradually become more attuned to Aboriginal Australia; the art, the places, and the people. Kakadu is an opportunity to further this osmotic process. When I read the park literature, I sense that visiting Kakadu is not going to a park; it’s visiting part of cultural homeland. The Aboriginal culture persistent has persisted enough that I sense it through the overprint of colonization. Or so it feels from pictures and words. We will see what ground truth is like.
Saturday, June 12, 2010
Australia Fifteen: Preamble
A year proceeds quickly. My last entry was a series of reflections on Australia Fourteen. Suddenly it’s time for my fifteenth trip to what Bill Bryson calls “A Sunburned Land”. The upcoming trip follows a similar arc to last year. First, a week of poking around in new areas, i.e., vacation. “New areas” on this trip means the Kimberley Region of Western Australia, particularly the Bungle Bungles, and Kakadu National Park in the Northern Territory. Assuming I survive crocodile assaults in the Kakadu, this holiday will be followed by a few weeks of field research in the Pilbara.
Recap and Plans
In case you did not read my blog last year, check out this entry for explanation of how I’ve come to be a recidivist geologist/visitor in Australia. The short version is that I’m currently on a grant through my work with Oberlin College to study meteorite impact deposits. These strata are really old; the four layers we’ve recognized so far accumulated on the sea floor around 2.5 billion years or go, plus or minus 70 million years. The rocks we look at have been uplifted and very well preserved; they comprise the rocks of the Hamersley Basin. They outcrop in the Pilbara Region of Western Australia: the Outback with lots of iron mines. We’ve done a lot of work demonstrating that these layers formed after very large extraterrestrial impacts, and sorting out their environmental effects – massive tsunami and underwater landslides. On a personal level, in the twenty-five years I’ve been going down under, I’ve become extremely fond of the continent and its rocks, plants, animals and people. I always look forward to return and further exploration. I also relish the time away from the normal for reflection and restoration.
Australia Fifteen has two major scientific goals. The first is to finish up the main work of the grant project, which is to make detailed lateral measurements of the best exposed and preserved impact layer in the Hamersley Basin: the Bee Gorge Spherule Layer. I have a couple final sites to visit, including the mine property we were thwarted from reaching last year. We call the impact layers “spherule layers” because their most distinctive component is lots and lots of BB-sized spherical particles. These spherules formed from the cloud of vaporized rock blown out of the impact crater. They subsequently settled to the surface, forming a fairly unique sedimentary layer.
The second goal is more exploratory. The 2009 field season ended dramatically with discovery of a new Hamersley Basin spherule layer. We named this the Paraburdoo Spherule Layer, which I’ll call the PSL to save you all from trying to pronounce Par-a-bur-doo in your heads. By the way, Paraburdoo is one of the local mining towns, and its name comes from a presumably local Aboriginal dialect; “paraburdoo” means “meat feathers”. I can only hope this refers to emus or bustards, and not corellas or galahs, the local, nasty cockatoos. I’d describe them as gaudy crows, but that would be insulting crows. As I wrote last year, I literally stumbled upon the PSL, a 2 centimeter thick layer of impact debris, at my personal nadir point for Australia Fourteen. I was tired, cranky, sore and possibly flatulent (Louis – my field assistant - had cooked the night before). I climbed a rubbly hill, looked down, and there was the PSL.
This was particularly exciting because it was new. It’s the fourth spherule layer we’ve found in the Hamersley Basin. Based on looking at similar rocks in South Africa, I knew very roughly where it should be in the Hamersley rock sequence, but it was dead awesome to find it. However, since the PSL revealed itself almost at the end of last year’s field season, it remains a single point on a map. This is very unsatisfactory; we have no sense of the PSL’s distribution, or how its internal characteristics change from place to place. So I have put together a list of about a dozen exploratory sites that might have PSL outcrops. This will mean driving to the far reaches of the Hamersley Basin; seeing new areas and places I have not been for upwards of seventeen years. I expect this to be frustrating; the PSL interval is generally poorly exposed, the layer is damn thin, and it outcrops amidst nasty rubbly limestone. As some compensation for this, we’ll also spend a couple of days looking at drill core that might contain the PSL in the Geological Survey of Western Australia Core Library in Perth. Looking a core has its own challenges; rocks can look completely different when they are extracted from the ground than they do “normally” in a weathered outcrop.
Louis will again be my assistant and companion on this part of the journey. He’s an Oberlin student, a double major in geology and jazz trumpet. His help was outstanding last year. Not only is he bright and observant, but he can cook and put up with how inner-directed I get in the field. He’s one of the best student assistants we’ve had. I’m looking forward to more time with him. He’s going walkabout prior to meeting me in Perth, spending a couple weeks in New Zealand. I’m trusting that he’ll appear in Perth on the right day.
Recap and Plans
In case you did not read my blog last year, check out this entry for explanation of how I’ve come to be a recidivist geologist/visitor in Australia. The short version is that I’m currently on a grant through my work with Oberlin College to study meteorite impact deposits. These strata are really old; the four layers we’ve recognized so far accumulated on the sea floor around 2.5 billion years or go, plus or minus 70 million years. The rocks we look at have been uplifted and very well preserved; they comprise the rocks of the Hamersley Basin. They outcrop in the Pilbara Region of Western Australia: the Outback with lots of iron mines. We’ve done a lot of work demonstrating that these layers formed after very large extraterrestrial impacts, and sorting out their environmental effects – massive tsunami and underwater landslides. On a personal level, in the twenty-five years I’ve been going down under, I’ve become extremely fond of the continent and its rocks, plants, animals and people. I always look forward to return and further exploration. I also relish the time away from the normal for reflection and restoration.
Australia Fifteen has two major scientific goals. The first is to finish up the main work of the grant project, which is to make detailed lateral measurements of the best exposed and preserved impact layer in the Hamersley Basin: the Bee Gorge Spherule Layer. I have a couple final sites to visit, including the mine property we were thwarted from reaching last year. We call the impact layers “spherule layers” because their most distinctive component is lots and lots of BB-sized spherical particles. These spherules formed from the cloud of vaporized rock blown out of the impact crater. They subsequently settled to the surface, forming a fairly unique sedimentary layer.
The second goal is more exploratory. The 2009 field season ended dramatically with discovery of a new Hamersley Basin spherule layer. We named this the Paraburdoo Spherule Layer, which I’ll call the PSL to save you all from trying to pronounce Par-a-bur-doo in your heads. By the way, Paraburdoo is one of the local mining towns, and its name comes from a presumably local Aboriginal dialect; “paraburdoo” means “meat feathers”. I can only hope this refers to emus or bustards, and not corellas or galahs, the local, nasty cockatoos. I’d describe them as gaudy crows, but that would be insulting crows. As I wrote last year, I literally stumbled upon the PSL, a 2 centimeter thick layer of impact debris, at my personal nadir point for Australia Fourteen. I was tired, cranky, sore and possibly flatulent (Louis – my field assistant - had cooked the night before). I climbed a rubbly hill, looked down, and there was the PSL.
This was particularly exciting because it was new. It’s the fourth spherule layer we’ve found in the Hamersley Basin. Based on looking at similar rocks in South Africa, I knew very roughly where it should be in the Hamersley rock sequence, but it was dead awesome to find it. However, since the PSL revealed itself almost at the end of last year’s field season, it remains a single point on a map. This is very unsatisfactory; we have no sense of the PSL’s distribution, or how its internal characteristics change from place to place. So I have put together a list of about a dozen exploratory sites that might have PSL outcrops. This will mean driving to the far reaches of the Hamersley Basin; seeing new areas and places I have not been for upwards of seventeen years. I expect this to be frustrating; the PSL interval is generally poorly exposed, the layer is damn thin, and it outcrops amidst nasty rubbly limestone. As some compensation for this, we’ll also spend a couple of days looking at drill core that might contain the PSL in the Geological Survey of Western Australia Core Library in Perth. Looking a core has its own challenges; rocks can look completely different when they are extracted from the ground than they do “normally” in a weathered outcrop.
Louis will again be my assistant and companion on this part of the journey. He’s an Oberlin student, a double major in geology and jazz trumpet. His help was outstanding last year. Not only is he bright and observant, but he can cook and put up with how inner-directed I get in the field. He’s one of the best student assistants we’ve had. I’m looking forward to more time with him. He’s going walkabout prior to meeting me in Perth, spending a couple weeks in New Zealand. I’m trusting that he’ll appear in Perth on the right day.
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