Valentine underground

I think you are familiar with the routine, reader! Tuesday is often caveday. And how many different blog posts can one write about plodding around underground? At some point there's not much news-worthy about it anymore. And last week was one of those trips. And yes it was a Valentine's trip, but that does not have much influence other than that it's not very well-attended, as some of our men are kept at home on a night like that by their significant others. So we went underground with a select few, we took pictures, we had a good time: hardly revolutionary! But John took some pictures that were so nice I decided to post them anyway. So after all: a posting on last week's trip down a small but pretty adit!

Junction, by John

Crossing a winze, by John

This may look somewhat non-descript, but it is a fault outcropping in the wall of a tunnel. And water just comes streaming out! I found that geologically interesting. The rock doesn't look permeable, but look at how much water makes its way out here...

Fashion show

I know I kept some people waiting. You can hardly boast on both Facebook AND a blog about your new outfits, get more comments than ever before, and hardly show anything. I put two outfits on the blog; I'll here show 5 more! And that's not all. But since when can one have it all.

Margot goes business-like: in the middle something that these days is a normal work outfit, and left the same outfit, but combined with a coat. And yes, a Palestinian scarf. I had a sore throat! I have a smart scarf but that's not warm enough on a day like that... and to the right Margot goes extra executive.

And these are two of the more glamorous outfits: this would be good for dining out, and such things! And no I can't walk on these shoes yet. But as I now have a reason to wear them I think I'll soon learn...

Holes in the ground!

A fieldwork with the fab four usually starts like this: we go to a salt marsh with a nice sleek hand auger, and stick it in the ground here and there. The cores we bring up will guide us to where we had best take our thicker cores for taking home and analysing. But now we're on the new project, in which  our sediments are no longer lying at the surface, and we need bigger equipment. And you don't just carry that around in your hand. So a recconnaisance mission isn't that simple.

But there's advantages; we now look for older sediments in the subsurface, so at the surface there could be anything. Not a salt marsh in all likelyhood, but probably fields, and houses, and copses and roads and railroads and quarries and whatnot. And the unpleasant thing is that you can't just core away without hindering anyone; not everybody will want a percussive corer in their back garden. But houses and roads and railroads need foundations, and one may want to know what the subsurface holds in order to construct these appropriately. Enter the British Geological Survey.

I knew of one core this institute had drilled, which was relevant for our project. So I searched their website for it. No results. Then I made an enquiry. And no time later I had a response.It turned out that they had archived their cores by location only; the name would lead you nowhere. So they pointed me in the right direction. And then a world opened before my eyes. 

Countless many BGS core logs are freely available on their site. Suddenly I had access to the logs of hundreds of cores in our area of interest! That saves us coring. The BGS has already done it for us! With this wealth of information we can have a fairly good idea of where to core before we even get off our scholarly behinds. 

The records themselves are quite interesting themselves; quite many are fairly straightforward and informative, as the two below.

Typical BGS core log

This is a rather specific one: forams in the Nar Valley Clay; that's what we want to hear!

But some are very charming in their antiquity, as the one below, from the 19th Century. At times I get a bit overwhelmed by the sheer plethora of information, but altogether this is one of the best websites I've found in a while!

Blast from the past

Facebook is not just for posting pictures of yourself and your mates being stark drunk! Not everyone will agree with me here, but besides not having any of such pictures on FB (or anywhere, really) I find myself using the social network for tangentially work-related purposes. Drawing people's attention to job vacancies if they have left university and you don't have a private e-mail address, for instance. And today I got a notification a former colleague from Norway had shared a link on my wall. And it turned out it was a link to an article in the Aftenposten, a Norwegian newspaper, that my dear old employer the Norwegian Polar Institute would let its research vessel, the Lance, get frozen into winter sea ice near Svalbard. It would give them a good opportunity to study, for instance, microbiology in action in winter. And to illustrate that they had used a picture that featured me! Good old days. And I don't think I would have noticed without Facebook... Thanks, Per!

From Aftenposten.no

Single sex groups

There's a fieldwork coming up. The good old field team of Roland, Antony, Tasha and me will be valiantly scouring Norfolk for sediments that hold the information we seek for our interglacial sea level project, however encrypted. And some of us are more equal than others; the plan so far is that Tasha and I go in first and start to do the boring work, under frugal circumstances. When the gentlemen arrive the living standards will be instantly raised. So I'm in the process of booking a spacious lodge for all of us, and have a look at campsites where Tasha and I can reside before that. And while looking at the website of the nearest campsite I got somewhat confused. They claim they don't allow single sex groups! I don't suppose Tasha and I, just being 2, count as a group, so it wouldn't have practical implacations for us. But I was puzzled! I can easily envision single sex groups one might not wish to reside too close to in a very sound-permeable tent; an image of ten-ish 15-year-old males comes to mind. But just suppose the local embroidery club, by sheer coincidence all-female, and even all over 60 and not very rowdy at all, wants to have a nice club outing? Hmm. I'm a bit suprised. Is this even legal? If we get to stay there I'll ask why they have this rule...

Caving responsibilities

Newbies with enthusiasm get the jobs nobody wants. It’s one of the laws of physics. When I started caving in 2009, and liked it a lot, and went to committee meetings and such things, I became an easy target for some committee position. So fairly soon I became the Meets secretary; the person who makes sure a message goes out in time to all the club members with information on the next trip: where we meet, what one should expect (it is difficult? Is it wet?), and who the contact person for the trip is.

A contact person has several jobs: he or she knows who should be coming, so knows when we are complete and thus can go underground. This person should also know where the entrance is; not unimportant! Ideally, this person also brings helmets and lights for new members who don’t have their own yet. And at the end of the trip, this same person makes sure the same number of people as has gone underground also comes back to the surface again.

Sending all this information around sounds like an easy job, but it started out hard; what did I know about all these mines. I had to ask Dave many times where the venue was, where there was parking space, and what the venue was like.

I also often had to make sure there was someone willing to be the contact person; sometimes none is mentioned on the website, and then I had to find one. If there was one on the website, it was often a good idea to verify this person knew that, and was indeed willing and able to perform that task. And sometimes when something goes wrong (contact person falls ill, mine gets flooded; such things) an alternative has to be found. Quick.

Given that I am also rather good at producing lots of text (look around you on the blog!) I became an easy target for Newsletter Editor. And at the next AGM I was indeed elected. I inherited all the material from the previous editor; one of the biggest articles was actually written by myself. And soon I indeed produced a newsletter.

But by now I was a veritable veteran, and new eager newbies had appeared on the horizon. And when our secretary quit after having received some frictional emails from another, somewhat less-than-desirably appreciative committee member, things started shifting. Our president took on the role as interim secretary, and one of our fairly new, but most active, members: Bernard, made the mistake of confessing he would soon start working four days a week instead of five. More time for the caving club! So this was my chance to pass the meets secretary potato, and have some more time for making newsletters, for after that one issue I never made one again. Mind you; I only received input from just one person.

The next committee meeting Bernard wasn't there, so my evil scheme didn't work. But a month later we had our AGM, and then, after all, things indeed happened as foreseen. I am no longer the person to clog up everybody’s mailbox every week! But I may try to clog them up with newsletters from now on…

Ophelia

Ophelia, you must remember...


What should Ophelia remember? When I couldn't get 'Ophelia' by Tori Amos out of my head I started wondering such things. And I decided to read Hamlet.

Comparing song lyrics to their literary inspiration is asking for trouble; there are many steps in which unchecked interpretation takes place. But it’s an interesting exercise. So what was it again the song says about Ophelia? The relevant passages are the following:

Ophelia your secret is safe
Ophelia you must break the chain
Some girls will get their way
Some fathers will control from the grave
Ophelia you must remember

"The Eve of St. Agnes",
A poem he can't reach you in
Ophelia you know how to lose
But when will you learn to choose
Those men who choose to stay
Those mothers who won't look the other way
Ophelia you must remember

Some of it I still don’t get. Of course; it’s a Tori Amos song. But in the light of Ophelia being rejected by Hamlet after he has been summoned by his murdered father to revenge him might explain the 3^rd and 4^th line. And would her secret be that she committed suicide? It’s not perceived as very secretive in the play. 

And when I came to what here is the second verse I had to, of course, also read "The Eve of St. Agnes", by Keats. That poem relates to a myth that claims that unmarried maidens who stick to some rules, such as going to bed without dinner, and not looking back, will get a vision of their future love in their dreams on that special night. One besotted young man sees a possibility there: he sneaks into his love’s bedroom’s walk-in cupboard, and he wakes her up to provide her with a waking dream of what he hopes will be her future love. And it works! Alas; no such luck for Ophelia, evidently…

Ophelia lost; she lost her lover, her father and her senses. And her life. The next line reeks of cheesy rhyming, but let’s look past that. What choice did Ophelia have? Could we do better in her shoes?

There wasn’t much she could have done to prevent being ditched by Hamlet. There wasn’t much she could have done to prevent Hamlet from murdering her father. But she could have chosen to break the chain; take these misfortunes on the chin, get on with life, and not add one more to the rapidly growing pile of corpses. It’s fat chance with Shakespeare that would indeed have meant entirely breaking the chain of violence; too many men had too much at stake. But one can try. And Hamlet couldn’t reach her at the Eve of St Agnes, but maybe someone else would have. A more forgiving playwright might have made her dream of Fortinbras, the Prince of Norway, and in a way Hamlet’s successor…