Geological wanderings

So for the past two days we have been showing Maurice around the island.  He arrived on Thursday morning from Nassau, with some important glassware in hand kindly lent to us from Mike Swann from the Water and Sewerage Corp (I cannot thank him enough for this!).  Once back at the villa, he unpacked some more important equipment from a heavy suitcase and then we left him in George’s capable hands to be shown around the well field area. I took this time to teach Didi and Mike how to process samples but more on that another time.

After lunch I decided to take everyone to one of my favourite places on the island: the DUMP!  From the first time I was on the island I wanted to go to the dump, but Fiona never had the same enthusiasm as I did for this potential sampling site.  I love a good/bad landfill site after working for a landfill company in Bosnia and Herzegovina for a few months after I finished Uni.  Once I was finally allowed to visit the dump on my second visit (before Fiona arrived I went there in secret with Emma!) I realised that actually it was quite an interesting find!  They cut through a aeolian dune ridge (a sand dune) and this gave a great exposure for Maurice, and the rest of us, to look it.  The words cross bedding, keystone vug and laminated crusts were banded about and I am proud to say I understood each one.  I am being constantly taunted with the fact I am not a geologist but a geoscientist.  I felt suitably at home with such geological terms, so thus far I see no drawbacks with being a geoscientist as I am doing geosciences in the Bahamas after all!

We then visited a road cutting which showed us the beach deposits which underlay the aeolian dunes (sand dunes at the dump).  There were some cracking bivalves just sticking out the rock and some lovely burrow/calcified root features all over the place.  The whole day felt like I was on a very well informed field trip, it was great!

Friday, we headed down south to investigate some of the karstic features I have driven past so many times but never really investigated.  The team started to fracture (pun!) with George and Maurice wandering off to look at interesting features whilst Didi, Mike and I took some water samples.  However, it was a real treat to see Maurice in the field looking at the surface dissolution features and getting excited about them.

I enjoyed my wandering into geology but am now starting to crack the geochemistry whip and get some sampling done.