Friday, November 21, 2014

2014 Diary: Day 11 - A lesson learnt, is a lesson remembered

A special post by Nick Baglow and his group:

Today was a day of lessons. Some in the manual, some not:

Lesson 1 is fundamental, oft-repeated but temporarily forgotten in the enthusiasm of the moment: don’t wander into the desert without your water. Okay, not quite wandering, but that 10 minute foray up the little hill to check out the ‘simple’ quartz vein may turn out to be not quite that straightforward. Instead try 3 hours and returning to the vehicle with somewhat parched throats and more questions than answers. But at the same time you’re already planning what to do, where to look or who to speak to to solve the problem. Typical real life fieldwork scenario – great stuff!

Lesson 2 is also elementary in nature. Don’t get fixated on predicting what you are going to find as that’s a sure way of ensuring that some curveball will cross your path. Though today the curveballs were linear in nature with more than our fair share of thrust faults thrown in to repeat and remove stratigraphy almost at will. Fun, but not ideal when trying to learn stratigraphic principles perhaps!

Lesson 3 also fell into the unexpected category. Did you, for example, know that sticking a small square of paper on your forehead will end a bout of hiccups? Well now you do; it works, and much like with water-divining we just have to accept and move on….well, after much discussion that is, which contributed to the previously-mentioned 3 hour extended foray!



Clockwise from top left: Shane, Penester and Eveline clambering up the sheared basement granidiorites, curing hiccups at the mobile field clinic, no going back to camp until you all agree on the younging direction, and entering data into the field toughbooks at the last outcrop of the day


Tomorrow the lessons will be more formal as we head back to primary school; we're visiting the school in Kuboes to discuss stars, planets rocks and other exciting stuff J 

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