All things must come to an end

December 14th, 2014

Well the traveling is coming to an end in New Zealand.  A little over a week ago we reached a depth at which the head scientific investigators for the project decided to stop drilling and prepare for coring.  This is a huge step for earthquake investigating.  To be able to install equipment that will measure temperature changes, pressure, and seismicity at a depth of 1000+ meters is pretty amazing and the fact I had the privilege to be part of it makes it that much more special for me.  When they reached the depth at which they stopped drilling they sent me to Dunedin to finish my additional project for my classes.  Even though Dunedin is very much a university town it is still quite vibrant, I guess for the holidays.  Its very strange to imagine having Christmas in the summer.  They typically have a BBQ or go hiking and stay outdoors for their Christmas which is much different than what I have grown up knowing Christmas as.  Back home they have already received their first snow of the year and here in New Zealand you start seeing the first surfers and kayakers out on the ocean with their boards. I have enjoyed New Zealand quite a bit.  I have met many people and made some new friends as well and probably some life long colleagues but I am ready go home.  This year has treated me well in so many ways.  I completed my BS, I spent the  summer traveling through Louisiana, Colorado, and my favorite place in the world so far, Wyoming.  I was able to spend a few weeks in Bogota, Colombia taking a class, was accepted into graduate school and then sent to New Zealand for 6 weeks.  More has happened for me in the past 6 months than I could have ever imagines and I bet next year will hold even more surprises.  I hope everyone has enjoyed reading about my time here as much as I have enjoyed writing about it.  Maybe I have found a new hobby with this blogging thing, who knows!  Until next time

Cheers!

Drilling resumes......again

November 29, 2014

We have resumed drilling!!!! After a week hiatus, the BHA and new "hard rock" drill bit have arrived and drilling began on Wednesday evening.  We are averaging between 1 and 2 meters an hour which is not ideal but it is progress.  By the end of tomorrow we should be reaching 700 meters in depth.  The drilling has definitely cut into my field work a lot but I believe I have most of it done anyway.  The large exodus of people from New Zealand has begun as well.  People are beginning to leave for preparation for AGU (American Geophysical Union) conference in San Francisco and others are leaving just to be back in time for the holidays.  It is definitely bitter sweet.  I have met many great people ands scientist over the past month and believe I have made a few new friends over my time.  Mike Allen from the University of Liverpool and his secondary advisor Dan Faulkner are two that I really enjoy speaking to.  Dan Faulkner is as close to a rock star in the geology world as I believe someone can get.  We spent many nights discussing the Rotary Shear machine that I plan to work on for my masters thesis and he showed me plans for one he has designed and is on his way back home to build.  It is amazing how people studying similar rock mechanics can come up with so many ways of testing similar processes and ways of recording their findings.  To be around so many people that devote their lives to studying geology and have so many interests in common inspires you to get back and begin writing so that you can be part of this community.  The geologist here are a very tight knit group that have been colleagues for years and friends as well.  It is a young generation of scientist that have high hopes (and very possible ones too) of making major findings in earthquake mechanisms.  It is a very fun thing to be part of.  I apologize for not having more beautiful pictures of New Zealand but there are only so many pictures of the drill site and the surrounding mountains that I can post before it begins to repeat.   Happy Thanksgiving

Sometimes it rains, sometimes it rains more....

November 21, 2014

I have now been on New Zealand soil for 21 days and a total of 4 days has been spent drilling.  You would think the morale of the group would be down but it hasn't been at all.  People are taking the down time to explore the westcoast, do needed field work, and write.  The group had the chance to go up to the nearest medium sized town, Hokitika, and watch The Hunger Games before it was out in the States.
  I had the chance to meet with Simon Cox.  He is also a structural Geologist in Wellington that is best known for his work in mapping a large portion of the Southern Alps.  This is an unbelievable feat.  It requires hiking up and down very steep and dangerous terrain.  My field camp this past summer gives me great appreciation for what Simon did in these mountains.  He is also the one aiding me in my sedimentary project for one of my classes back at OU.  My plan is to construct an outcrop log of an eroded bed along the Whataroa River, not to far from the drill site.  By doing this I'll describe how the grain size, shape, roundness, and composition changes vertically and horizontally.  What Simon Cox has asked me to do is to take a large sample of material from different areas of the outcrop about every half meter.  With these samples I will then pick out approximately 300 individual grains at random and sort them by rock types such as highly metamorphosed schist, medium metamorphosed schist, low metamorphosed schist, and greywacke.  This will provide us information on where the grains originated in proximity to the fault.  For example the Greywacke will have originated far up the Southern Alps close to the great divide whereas the highly metamorphosed schist would have originated relatively close to the Alpine Fault.  What can be tricky is the fact glaciers play a large part in sediment movements here and can mislead the untrained eye. It is very interesting geology and something very different than the geology I am used to looking at back in the states. 

On a side note, I have never seen as much rain as I have seen in the past 21 days.  This place is incredible.  It averages 6-8 meters a year!!!  To put that in perspective here are a few places that you can relate to on there average rainfall:

OKC = 3.6 inches/yr
Houston = 49 inches/yr
Seattle = 37 inches/yr
Amazon Rainforest = 100 inches/yr
Franz Josef, New Zealand (15 south of me) = 314 inches/yr

That is an incredible amount of rain!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Geology Geology Geology

Sunday, November 16 2014

We are back drilling finally.  Come to find out that only one cone of the tri-cone drilling bit had been working for the past few hundred meters which means the borehole is smaller than what it originally was thought to be.  So the drillers have spent all night reaming out the borehole so that the rest of the drill string with the new collar could actually fit down the hole.  It seems that anything that could possibly go wrong has gone wrong.  The program is now over a month behind which means they are asking people to stay over the holiday.  They will not be drilling but all the equipment will still be on-site so they will need people working security.  I will not remain over the holiday but it makes me feel bad for the people that end up staying here while everyone else goes home to their family.  The one good thing that came out of the last miss-step is a large chunk of rock was caught in the drill bit, so instead of analyzing cuttings from the mud we were able to actually see solid rock from the bottom of the hole.   It is amazing how much information you can get from a rock 2 inches long and 1 in wide rather than looking at cuttings that are less than 1 cm in length.  Tim Little, our local alpine rock expert, looked at the composition of the rock as a whole specimen and then looked at the thin section that was made from the rock and was very surprised at what was seen.  He thinks we are much closer to the zone we plan to core than previously thought.  So the drilling goes on.  We had a large group of people leave this week that had been here since October and we are going to loose another 5 or so people later this week.  This means I will remain in a set position on the 3-11 pm shift doing the curation of samples and labels for the remaining time.  I would rather try to get my hands on different tasks just so I get a better feel of the types of data the team is gathering but I guess there will be a time for that later.  My field work is moving along very well.  I have gathered a few very nice samples of fault gouge that I will be sending to Dr. Reches at OU that I hope to get to run in our Rotary Shear machine next semester and I have also been spending time in the field looking at fluvial deposits along the Whataroa River.  Being near a major fault like the Alpine Fault makes interpreting depositional systems a little different.  In most places you can look at a cross section of a fluvial deposit and work out the depositional environment fairly easy by structures, grain size, grain sorting, and roundness.  But in the fluvial system I am working on, major earthquakes create large landslides along the valleys.  This deposits sediments directly on top of fluvial deposits and it is quite difficult to interpret if there was an earthquake when you see a sequence boundary or if the river had just changed directions and you are looking at a flood plain deposit.  Simon Cox, another Kiwi geologist, will be arriving tomorrow and I hope to spend some time with him in the field to help me sort this problem out.  Either way it is nice to see geology in a different part of the world with different systems at work. 

And it happened again.......

November 13, 2014

This week has consisted of a lot of ups and downs for the crew working on the Deep Fault Drilling Program.  Drilling commenced on Sunday and was progressing slowly at about 1-3 meters per hour.  My training continued throughout the drill site and they seem to be preparing for the mass exodus of most of the crew that has been here since October.  So training me on as many jobs as possible is beneficial because it widens my availability in the roles I can fill in the next coming days.  The thin section training was completed and I moved on to DIS training.  Drilling Information Systems (DIS) is a computer software that helps organize and keep up with numerous aspects of the drilling process.  My training is focused on the Curation and Labeling of rock and cutting samples that are generated from the borehole.  In other words, I am mud logging again!  It is actually quite similar to oil and gas industry mudlogging.  A two man team is collecting rock cuttings from the mud circulating through the borehole.  The cuttings are then brought to the science team trailers a few meters away from the drill rig, a sample is bagged and sealed then.  The rest of the cuttings are washed thoroughly and all metal flakes are removed with a magnet.  The washed cuttings are also bagged and sealed.  A small portion of the washed cuttings are then put on a hot plate to dry so that they can be described by one of the lead geologist.  A photo is taken of the dried sample and uploaded to DIS and a very small amount of the sample is given to the thin section team, which is Mike Allen from Liverpool on my shift.  Once the photo is taken I upload the photo on DIS and print a description report for Tim Little to do the description.  Norio Shigimatsu from Japan does a weight percentage calculation based on 100 grains from the dried sample.  Under a microscope, the grains are divided into Quartz, biotite and quartz, biotite, and other.  The individual groups are then weighed and the data is uploaded onto a spread sheet.  All of the individual parts are very important for the drilling process.  The goal for this program is to take core of the main fault slip zone but the exact depth is not known.  So in order to know when coring needs to begin, the geologist have to look at the micro structures within the cuttings, and the mineralogy of the cutting to see the alteration due to the metamorphism of the rocks.  If this isn’t geology, I don’t know what is!  Once all of the information is gathered and processed into DIS or other programs the remaining sample is bagged and sealed.  Each bag is labeled with the depth at which the drill bit was at when the cuttings were collected.  The true depth will be calculated at a later time.  This is all done every 2 meters except the thin section.  The thin section is made every 6 meters and it all continues for 24 hours a day by three different shifts.  Drilling and data collecting was progressing throughout the week and keeping every one quite busy until Tuesday around 11:30 p.m.  The drillers noticed that progress had slowed down dramatically and thought maybe the drill bit needed to be replaced.  They began tripping out of the hole and soon noticed that they had broken off the BHA again and lost it downhole!  We had just spent two weeks fishing the BHA out and only drilled for 2.5 days before it was lost again.  Luckily the drill crew is experienced in fishing now and jumped into action.  The head driller jumped in their airplane, flew to the North Island, picked up a new section of the drill string, flew back and had the BHA out of the hole within 24 hours.  Rupert Sutherland is a bit stressed because of the strict time restraints with the drill rig and the science crew but drilling should commence by November 14^th. 

On a different note, Virginia Toy learned of my past history of being a chef and requested I make gumbo so on Wednesday morning I began attempting to make a very southern US dish on the west coast of New Zealand.  The cooks were very pleased about this because it provided a well-deserved day off for them.  It took most of the day but I was able to produce a Shrimp-Elephant Fish-Chorizo Gumbo and I was taken aback by how much everyone loved it!  I was worried for a bit because of how spicy it was but everyone seemed to really enjoy it and managed to eat most of the 5 gallons I had made.  The cooks gave me a bottle of wine as a thank you and Virginia gave me a glass of her favorite wine as a thank you as well.  The night ended by everyone going to the local pub for a beer.  What seemed to be a bad few days ended very nicely and gave a large boost to the morale of the crew.

Drilling commences with a little music from home.

November 9th, 2014

Sunday drilling finally started!  It has been early two weeks since they lost the BHA downhole and have been fishing for scrap metal since.  At 4 a.m. Sunday morning they were able to pick up the last piece of the counterweight at the bottom of the borehole and tripped in the new tri-cone bit.  At approximately 7 p.m. drilling began.  They are taking it very slow to make sure little bits of metal won't mess up the new bit and trying to circulate mud to remove these bits of metal.  I have been assigned a 3 p.m. to 11 p.m. shift making thin sections from the cuttings gathered from the mud.  The collection process is very different than the oil and gas industry.  Mud logging in industry consist of keeping track of the drillers depth which is the depth at which the bit is currently at, and the lag depth which is the depth at which the collected cuttings originated at.  Due to the depth of the borehole and the rate at which the  mud is pumped into the borehole, these depths are different.  While mud logging, we used a software created by Pason that calculated the lag depth based on these parameters.  It tracked the rate of penetration, the driller's depth, and the lag depth.  All of which is very useful in determining where you are subsurface.  In scientific drilling, these are not calculated or tracked except for the drillers depth.  A sieve collects cuttings continuously over 4 meters which is about 12-13 feet.  The cuttings are described as a group over that depth interval and every 6 meters a thin section is made based on the drillers depth.  Currently, the rock has been mostly the same composition,  the problem I see with this is when a change in the lithology does  occur we will not be able to pinpoint that depth.  I asked Tim Little, our team lead, and he said I had a valid point but they hope to see a gradual change in the lithology before that change occurs and another reason they collect continuously is they do not want to loose any cuttings at all.  The differences are interesting and understandable but there seems to be more precise way of knowing and keeping track of these changes.  Maybe they are doing this and I just have not been introduced to the technique. 

    In studying geology, a major part of the undergraduate program is looking at and identifying minerals in thin-section.  Thin-sections are a thin piece of class with an extremely thin piece of rock glued on to it so that you can look through a microscope and see the mineral composition, structures and deformation of the grains on a micro-scale.  I definitely took for granted the hundreds of thin sections I looked at as an undergrad and the work put into creating those.  My assignment here is to make thin sections out of the cuttings collected.  Let me say, this is not an easy task.  The cuttings are collected, washed and dried.  We then take a random sample that represents the overall composition of the sample and create a small "puck" of cuttings in epoxy.  The puck is then glued to the thin-section glass plate and allowed to set for 30 minutes.  After the puck is glued it is taken to a diamond carbide saw and cut relatively thin, but to be useful in thin-section the minerals have to be ground down to a few microns thick so that light can pass through them.  After the thin section is cut we take it to a grinding block similar to a pottery wheel.  This is where it gets quite difficult.  The fly wheel  is basically sandpaper grinding down the thin section a small amount at a time.  The tricky part is putting the thin section on the spinning wheel and holding onto it so it doesn't fly off.   I practiced with scrap thin sections for awhile and only managed to break one.  It isn't natural to put your fingers down on something spinning that fast and you can't even feel the wheel wearing down your finger tips until after the damage is done.  After about an hour of practive with scrap thin sections, I moved on to my first real section.  I had gotten the hang of it for the most part but lost my grip once and the thin section flew off and chipped the corner.  It was bound to happen.  The next step is to move to a finer grained polishing block.  This one is stationary so no where near as difficult.  I polished it off and found that getting an even polish is more difficult than I thought.  Typically when you look at a mineral such as quartz under cross-polarized light in a microscope, the quartz appears black and white as you rotate the disk.  If the mineral is too thick it will have very bright colors as you rotate such as  bright pinks, purples and blues.  This tells you if the thin section has been polished enough.  Well, half of my thin section was perfect and the other half was not.  But if I continued with polishing I risked taking the perfect part completely off of the glass plate.  It is not an easy process, and like I said earlier, for all the undergrad geology students do not take for granted all of the perfectly prepared thin-sections you have to look at for hours in those petrology classes.  Someone had to make each one of those and there is definitely an art to that! 
    After my shift we arrived back at the logistics house for a nice surprise, Ray had arranged for a few musicians to have a house concert for the crew.  Bill Morris and Hyram Twang were sitting in the living room playing acoustic folk music.  They were very talented and something I have been surprised about New Zealand.  They love country music.  This was right up my ally and they played many songs that I knew.  Townes Van Zandt, Guy Clark, Steve Earle and many of their originals.  After they finished playing around 1:30 in the morning we began chatting about their background.  Hyram Twang was originally from California but moved to New Zealand in the 80's to get his PhD in geology from Otago.  Bill Morris is currently attending Otago studying geology and just got back from the states filming a friend on tour there.  He had made a stop in Oklahoma at the Blue Door!  Very cool music venue that I've had the pleasure watching Hayes Carll play  It was a great way to end the night and it took me back home for a few hours.

Out and About

November 8th, 2014


Saturday started with quite a bit of optimism from the crew.  The drilling team thinks they have removed all debris from the borehole and are hoping to start drilling in the next 24 hours.  The mood in Whataroa is very good.  I began my morning with some field work collecting samples of the Alpine Fault gouge.  My research for my master's thesis is focused on fault gouge and this sums up the reason for the trip to New Zealand in a way.  Fault gouge is the very fine particles of rock that are formed when the two rocks along a fault plane rub against each other creating a fine powder. Over millions of years of earthquakes, this gouge accumulates to a few centimeters thick layer along the primary slip zone. In our rock mechanics lab at OU, we use a rotary shear machine to test the mechanics of the gouge by putting it in a confined cell and rotating the cell at a specific velocity and normal force.  We then collect frictional characteristics, temperature, water, CO2, and many other mechanical attributes of the specific gouges or clays.  This helps geologist understand what affect the gouge has on the fault rupturing into an earthquake.  There are many other characteristics of a specific fault that plays a role in determining if and when a fault will rupture, this is why the team here is so diversified.  There are geochemist looking at the chemistry of the changing rocks as they get closer to the fault or the fluids found in the rocks near the fault.  There are petrologist looking at the mineralogy of the rocks as they change near the alteration zone, and there are structural geologist, such as myself, that are looking at structures on a large scale or microscale in the fault.   Many drilling programs similar to this have been done in the past, this project differs in the way that they are drilling and installing monitoring equipment BEFORE the fault ruptures, whereas the previous drilling programs have been drilled after an event has occurred.  Having monitoring equipment in place along the fault at depth could possible provide some very interesting data to  the geologist here leading up to an earthquake and directly after the earthquake.  Some of the equipment that will be in place will measure temperatures, pressures, and seismic activity.  All very valuable information during an earthquake.  One concern we have come across is the thermal gradient, or how fast the temperature increases with depth.  We are currently around 396 meters and the temperature is close to 60 degrees Celsius.  Since the monitoring equipment is electrical, there are some concerns that the equipment will not function correctly near the actual fault plane. If the temperature gets too high, the equipment will be installed at a depth in which it will work properly.  Only time will tell.

    Virginia Toy's birthday is coming up on Sunday so she decided to organize a New Zealand BBQ in the coastal town of Okarito.  Okarito is a small vacation town for New Zealanders a few kilometers south west of Whataroa.  Most of the crew made it out to celebrate and have a glass of wine or two.  It is a very small town but the views are unbeatable.  Soon after we ate a wiffle ball and bat made there appearance.  I wasn't keen on playing at first, I sat back and watched New Zealanders, English, Japanese, Czech, and a few other nationalities swing away at the ball.  I was soon called out for being American and not playing baseball/wiffle ball with them.  I tried to refuse but the chants got louder so I stepped up to bat with the pressure of hearing the chanting of "Chance" or "American". No pressure!  The first pitch was a little close so I did not swing.  I had had a glass of wine or two so I was definitely doubting my hand-eye coordination.  The second pitch was right in my sweet spot so I swung away, and I believe I represented my country well.  The ball was launched off my bat and into the bushes way over everyone's head.  A walk off homerun.  America!  I am not going to lie, I was quite relieved with my performance.   The game ended soon and a campfire on the beach was lit.  There aren't many things better than a large campfire on the beach with the mountains towering behind you.