Twenty-three hours of traveling. We're finally here!
You can't learn to be a geologist until you go out in the field
and learn this stuff.
The Azores Islands are in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.
I would say off the coast of Portugal, but they're about
a thousand miles away from Portugal.
They're a group of nine islands.
We went to the Azores for two reasons...
to see the material that we studied
about the volcanic processes that formed
those islands in the classroom... also to
get a chance to learn field geology...
what it's like to be out there studying,
measuring, learning about geology outside the classroom.
You might come up with
a hypothesis of trying to understand how
is everything I'm seeing here in the field connected...
what's the story...
what's the process that led to the deposition of these rocks.
We just spent two hours taking some
measurements of some fumaroles in a volcanic field.
Now we're going to turn
them into a really awesome map
that we're going to combine with data of the gases
that came out of those volcanic vents
to see if we can find any interesting correlations.
The field notebook was something that we had with
us every second of every day,
and I wasn't expecting to have put so much information in it as I did.
I didn't really come in knowing how to draw
but I learned a lot about how to draw,
so that I would be able to interpret what I saw.
Doing a careful drawing forces you to
make really detailed observations.
Very quickly you get to an outcrop,
you might connect the dots
and think you understand what you're seeing,
but when you're forced to draw it and do it very carefully and accurately,
you may realize that actually what's there
is not quite what you thought at first.
In a volcanic setting such as the Azores,
there's a lot going on underground,
and some of that includes gases that instead of
coming out of a big cone, like you might think,
they simply seep out of the soil.
At the University of the Azores,
they have a volcanic monitoring center,
and they are keeping constant tabs on a number of different measurements.
They measure seismology, so earthquakes in the
entire vicinity of the Azores.
The other thing that they talked
quite a bit about was monitoring
volcanic gas emissions. It's important to
measure that for both safety of the
residents and also it tells a story
about what's going on underneath the
ground. Geology is a historical
science in many respects, and so
we're presented with this evidence of
events that have occurred in the past,
and our job is to piece those events
together and try to understand what is
the story... what is the history of
the various events that have occurred
and can we use that to understand the
earth better, understand earth history
better, and understand what will happen
in the future.
