Field trip: coring

On the Tuesday of the field trip, the day after the one that was cancelled because of the weather, I was going to take the students coring. It would be the day with the best weather of the whole field trip. We would do two rounds: the morning and the afternoon shift. Whoever was not coring would be doing geophysics with Dei. 

I figured we would just go to where we had been the year before. We had the coordinates. I would be able to find it unaided, but I wanted the students to practice with GPS. While we were still trying to get the GPSs to give us the coordinates in the right format, Jaco suggested we go somewhere he knew would be good. I was up for that, even though there was a bit of a risk; he took us to where I had been doing a recce with Martin, so I knew how discontinuous the stratigraphy was there. But he accidentally immediately hit a location where indeed you quickly hit recognisably different layers. So we stuck with it.  

We did the talking as usual: I set the scene, and I explain how core logging works, and then Jaco gets up close and personal with the sediments to describe them, and gets the students to do the same. It takes quite a while to do a core description of even a rather short core. But I thought the results were looking good. And I took samples.

When the first group was done we went back to the vehicles, and then to where the geophysics was taking place. They were just done as well, so we had lunch together, on the sunny beach. It was very pleasant! And then we did the switch-over.

I wanted to take the same core twice with the two groups of students, and it pretty much worked out that way. That saves them some time! The students get a lot on their plate for this fieldwork, so I thought one short core is more than enough.

When we were done we brought the materials back to our headquarters, and then we could go home. It had been a fairly long day. Not that long that I in theory couldn't have gone to the track, but I hadn't had dinner yet, and I hadn't brought my running gear. So home it was! Probably for the better. This was going to be a busy and tiring week!