At our beach camp of the last couple of days two things are very obvious. First, Gösta always makes us park in “direction of escape” and second, if you wish to avoid the toilet-tent and instead use the beach – better do it early, otherwise you risk to become amusement to the many fisherman that pass you by on their speedboats.
This fieldtrip is a highly interdisciplinary fieldtrip. In theory, this means that we can all broaden our knowledge about the neighbouring fields of geology, geography, archaeology and ecology. In reality, this means that it is a little different than the fieldtrips our participants are used to. And what happens when you take people out of their known environment and expose them to changed conditions? Nagging! Usually it takes about a week before the geologists start to complain. This year`s geologists seem to be particularly petty, because it took only one day for them to notice ‘we didn`t look at any outcrops yesterday’. (If you read that last bit in a whiny voice, you are correct.)
As I write these lines, only few days are left until this year`s ABC/J fieldtrip to Oman. The vacuum between the last blog post and the beginning of our journey clearly wants to be filled, so if you don`t mind I will write about Oman a little more and about our team and about myself. And maybe, if you`ll let me, I will tease our participants a little – since they are in for a real treat and I couldn`t live with the possibility that some of them might not fully realise that.
What was initially intended as an „advertising measure“ to make the Geoverbund better known among students has since developed into a real flagship for the joint geoscientific network of RWTH Aachen University, Bonn University, Cologne University and Forschungszentrum Jülich. There is hardly any other place on Earth where, thanks to the arid climate and the lack of soil coverage, such first class outcrops (this is what the geologist calls places where the rock is visibly exposed) can be observed. Where else can you go for a walk on the so-called „Moho„? A boundary layer that marks the transition from the Earth’s crust to the Earth’s mantle and that usually lies several kilometres deep inside the Earth?