Surfing Heat Waves

There’s been a heat wave back at home, 29⁰C and everyone is complaining, here we worked in 41⁰C heat on Tuesday with no escape! David’s heat tolerance in the field surpasses ours but even he felt ‘like a chicken baking in the oven’ (Buchs et. al 2017). But we did find what could be a volcanic vent really well exposed, along with some perfectly formed crystals; perhaps the buckets of sweat were worth it. Back in the air conditioned office, 21⁰C felt cold to us, however we did learn how to digitise a geotechnical log to make a professional style report, it was nice to finally contribute to ACP work.

Conor couldn’t think of a MESci project, but he did run an experiment of his own when it came to walking through the long grass and collecting ticks. Everyone had tucked their trousers into their socks in order to prevent collecting any passengers, Conor went for a one sock tucked one sock not approach; results were inconclusive, a pilot study wearing shorts would be required.

On Tuesday afternoon we visited Sir Richard Cook’s archaeology lab, similar to that of an average geologists, the lab was strewn with samples; his enthusiasm and wealth of knowledge covering many disciplines was inspiring. He told us a lot about paleo-Panamanian culture and spoke for ages about what to us looked like a rounded pebble, David also found this sample exciting as it contained pyroxene crystals that could be used for dating (David <3 pyroxenes), he was unfortunately not allowed to break the sample. Richard’s colleague, Nicole a paleo-pathologist, was piecing together a human skull when we interrupted her. She showed us a cancerous bone which was the topic of her most recent paper (reference) as well as surfer’s ear (bone growth across the ear canal), when inquiring if the surfboards were also recovered at the excavation site we were met with a blank stare.