12 September 2010

Scenes from a drill campaign

Posted by Callan Bentley

The past couple of days, I’ve been in the field, collecting samples with Dr. Fatim Hankard, a post-doctoral researcher from the University of Michigan, and Matt Domeier, a PhD candidate from that same fine school. We’re interested in using Virginia’s wealth of Catoctin formation feeder dikes to do paleomagnetism measurements that might help us constrain the latitude of Virginia during the emplacement of these dikes during the Neoproterozoic.

More later on the drilling technique and goals, but here’s a small batch of funny photos from Robin R., one of three Honors students who joined the researchers yesterday for drilling of Catoctin dikes along Skyline Drive in Shenandoah National Park*. The other two students were Elysia H. and Aaron Barth, former NOVA Honors student and now a George Mason University geology major. Thanks for the photos, Robin!

satansdriller

So here I am as a bad-ass driller. The reason I was feeling so aggressive was I was drilling out a beautiful core, when suddenly the rock face I was drilling in detached and the chunk of rock stuck to the drill, spinning around in the air. We all had a good laugh at that. It’s testament to what a nice core this would have been that you can see water burbling through the sample and dribbling down into the air behind it. Here, I’ll outline the sample (hard to see the dark rock against the dark background) and the water for you:

satansdriller_anno

Another funny moment occurred when we fired up the drill while the bit was still lying in the tall grass. Instantly, it would up a nice mantle of grass into a tube, like a fork twirled in spaghetti:

spaghetti

Lastly, I’d like to demonstrate how far I have advanced in my own arachnophobia by showing how close I got my finger to this fat orb weaver spider that was crawling over the basement complex adjacent to one of the dikes:

spider

…Okay, I’ll admit it: at one point, the spider changed direction, and brushed up against my finger, and I shrieked like a little girl. This prompted another round of laughs at my expense.

Great times, hopefully to yield great data… Stay tuned.

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* Yes, we had a permit to collect in the park. It is illegal to remove rocks or other natural resources from national parks without explicit written permission from the National Park Service.