Here is an Amazing summary of this year's field school, a MUST READ:
By: Leslee Salzmann
A ROUND TRIP OF THE COUNTRY
Few people can attest to having circumnavigated South Africa. Whilst this opportunity is usually restricted to mad-hatter-adventurists biking their way around the country and decrepit retirees with a caravan and a few years of free time to kill, this year’s field school saw a bunch of Council for Geoscience interns doing just that! (Okay we missed out Limpopo and the Free State if you must know).
Field mapping school is a Council initiative intended at metamorphosing young and inexperienced additions to the company into gung-ho, GI Joe geologists. It affords new interns the opportunity to witness first-hand the country’s main stratigraphic units (Supergroups) and geography, but more importantly, to gain practical experience in mapping and field work. To this end we spent a week driving to various points of geological fascination, received tuition in imperative skillsets such as remote sensing and GIS, spent ten days in the Richtersveld (Northern Cape) learning the hard way how mapping is done, after which we headed home. But not without passing a number of the country’s largest mines (iron and base metals, limestone, dimension stone, ‘granite’, brick clay and pegmatites included) and being harassed by two emus in Upington. Innumerable drool-worthy geological sites were seen along the way and all of us have been left with memories, stories for the grandkids and perhaps the need for a little psychological counselling and a pedicure.
BREAK IT DOWN
To kick off field mapping school thirteen interns and five
soon-to-be-tortured supervisors (Taufeeq, Nick, Neo, Tshimane (aka Doc) and
Conrad) met up in Pretoria and made our way slowly and steadily in a clockwise
manner around the country. We drove through from Gauteng to the Barberton
Greentsone Belt and GeoTrail in Mpumalanga, witnessing some of the oldest rocks
in the country.
We passed by coal-bearing deltaic deposits of the Ecca Group
as we traversed KwaZulu-Natal – which I’ll have you know were the only
redeeming quality of the Karoo Supergroup exposures along the entire eastern
coastline! Stopping at Hole in the Wall in the Eastern Cape was a guilty
indulgence which we could not pass up. Jennifer –a member of our clan– had
never before seen the ocean and this was a milestone experience for her, enough
so that she had nightmares of the sea that night (Lets call them dreams rather.
Vivid dreams). Shin-high dunking was the most we were going to get out of her
despite best efforts.
Thereafter we stopped in East London and Knysna, having
entered into the disfigured Cape Fold Belt lithologies. Onwards we drove into the Western Cape
passing through the quaint and idyllic dorpies of Oudtshoorn, Montagu and
Worcester. Luckily for us it was still light as we traversed through Bain’s
Kloof Pass, one of the ‘most picturesque passes in the Cape’, constructed by
the labour of convicts in 1853 and home to insane folding nog al!. In good old
Cape Town we received a regal Peninsula tour (geologically oriented I swear).
The fish and chips from Kalk Bay were nothing more than a necessary pit stop)
and thereafter we made our way up to the north-western limits of the Northern
Cape (or as we like to say: the back-ass
end of nowhere), where we were to carry out the bulk of our fieldtrip
season doing what we all came for: mapping
and perhaps a little dollop of trial
and tribulation.
RICHTERSVELD IMMERSION
The
field mapping school this year felt like a passage of fire to the majority of
those who attended. This is despite the fact that we were never subjected to
the harsh realities of camping in the near-desertlike Richtersveld for a fortnight
as previous years have been known to do. Instead we found ourselves rather
comfortably accommodated in the house of one of a local “Tannie” and immersed
in a cultural experience. We stayed amongst the very isolated and quaint Nama settlement of Eksteenfontein, at the very northern reaches of the Northern Cape,
and by the end of the trip were venturing forth with all manner of basterdised
Afrikaans in an attempt to communicate with our hosts (most likely to request
more vetkoek for breakfast).
Our task for the two weeks was to map and collect structural
data for a portion of the Port Nolloth Zone within the Pan-African aged Gariep
Belt. This elongate, north-south and coast-parallel striking zone was deposited/intruded
during the rifting and separation of the Kalahari Craton of southern Africa from
the Rio Del Plata Craton of South America beginning around 771±6 Ma. This
rifting led to the formation and infilling of the Adamastor Ocean, but was
overprinted with a distinct compressive thrusting regime when these cratons
later reunited to form Gondwana (~575 to 545 Ma). It is precisely this later
tectonic and metamorphic overprint which confounds and stymies any but the most
fervent of structural mappers, and certainly challenged and humbled us as
interns as we attempted to conquer our designated map sheets. Rather than
allowing us an easy ride, our field school leaders decided to challenge us with
an area subjected to extension, transpression, thrusting, back-thrusting,
distortion due to intrusions, overturning, metamorphic overprinting and the
like. We like to think that we rose
to the challenge. They humoured us and allowed us to think that.
Surprisingly, the Richtersveld had other hurdles to throw at
us apart from unbearable heat. One day was so miserably windy that it saw me catching
my precious notebook by the corner of a single page as it flapped madly in the
wind at a 90° angle and threatened to fly away faster than ever I could run to
catch it. Losing your notebook in the field would be akin to losing your 3-year
old toddler at the beach on New Years. Generally frowned upon and, depending on
how much work was in that notebook (or how much you wanted to keep said toddler),
unforgiveable.
One choice day saw us heading out in 14°C, rainy and (yes,
you guessed it) windy conditions. Some of us hoped for a split second that we
would be allowed to stay cuddled up in bed with our fluffy socks, but alas this
was not the case. Our slave drivers had us out traipsing through the elements,
as per every other day, regardless. Thus there dawned on us the harsh realities
of a career spent outdoors, and thus we developed a new level of respect for
those in our company who do this on a near-continuous basis- oftentimes in
conditions worse than this. A case in point is the ‘Namibian team’ who have
been known to work without even a permanent nightly camp but rather by moving
camp each night and carrying all provisions (including up to 12L of water) on
their backs. Work is carried out across deathly-cold winter nights and fiery
summer days alike.
Other hitches encountered in the field were snakes, thorns,
ticks and perhaps most hazardous of all: squishy succulents. Beware these
unassuming specimens: one false step will have you sliding downhill and falling
on your butt in the most painful fashion. Another lethal adversary: dolomite
which can shred the most hardened of boots and will most certainly leave you
with a bum-flap if you are unwise enough to sit down in a moment of weakness.
It had me feeling rather unprofessional as I walked around each day with my
panties exposed. The dolomite, together with the searing heat of midday, had a
way of eating away at one’s boots and I can boast at having used three tubes of
superglue on my shoes in order to see them through the entire fieldtrip. Now
that’s hardcore!
Some last highlights for the trip were:
1) Passing through the UNESCO World Heritage Site
in the Richtersveld Ai Ais National Park where we saw a field of literally hundreds of cairns, which had been
stacked by passers-by since who knows when as well as some SAN etchings
reportedly “1000s of years old”!
2) The incident with the tick which found a
household of girls squealing and ended with the tick’s prolonged and agonised
death on the hotplate of the stove.
3) Trying to get a good look at a snake the size of
a ruler which had slithered under a bush, which elicited the fearful warning
from one of the girls (who shall remain anonymous. We’ve got you covered):
“You’re making it angry! You’re going to make it angry!”
4) Swimming in the Orange River- a stone’s throw
away from the Namibian border
5) The slaughtering of a sheep. Yes we actually
entered into an auction for a sheep to braai. What can we say, the
Eksteenfontein lifestyle was charming.
