Day 2 - Pablo the Explorer

Emmanuel and Benny D

After trekking for 20 minutes across the jagged landscape, as we walked over the final stretch of greenery, the landscape suddenly transitioned into dunes and deserts. From our higher vantage point, we looked out and we saw a scene like in Mad Max (or like the beginning of Star Wars) with sand dunes stretching out over the horizon. The contrast was so dramatic, the ocean and the ponds looked like mere mirages in the distance.

A gust of sand hit our faces when we started entering the desert to reach the outcrop we saw yesterday: an outcrop that we examined from afar the day before. Using the yo-yo method, we looked at the bigger picture and saw a weird brown staircase. Today, we were going to zoom in.

We all gathered around the funny staircase and learned about dikes, faults, joints, and contact metamorphism. We used our newly gained knowledge to identify the dikes that we saw on our way back and how they formed. Which came first? The rock or the dike?

Most of the time, we concluded that the dike formed after the pink rock (granite) that surrounded it.  We arrived at this conclusion because the rock that the dike was made of had color differences in the contact zone with the granite (we knew this was a granite because of our mineral classification class earlier in the morning) while the granite was uniform throughout.  This observation was highly supportive of our hypothesis, as the “stairway” was intruding on the preexisting granite foundations. We traveled back in time to understand the history behind the rocks.

We then took our conclusions and deduced that the magma content that these two distinct rocks came from were different – cooling at different rates. We also learned about inclusions where one magma composition would wrap around another.

Then we picked up on our journey and traveled on the coastline and began to identify the different kinds of faults and examined how they formed. We could see with our eyes the horizontal movement that the rocks displayed. As we wrapped up, we continued our journey across the coastline climbing rocks up and down. We saw our friends almost fall down deep holes that were as deep as some of us are high. I mean, we did learn about the dangers of joints.

After we got back, we jumped into the water and took some waves and played soccer with the locals in a pickup game. While we were fine with the temperature, they thought we were crazy to run in such  “cold” weather. Though we thought we were pretty sane. Lets see how much longer that lasts…

Stay tuned for day three and what tomorrow may hold. That is all folks!