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. 

Nice Day for a Walk!

Friday, November 7th, 2014

 

 

 

 

Well, another first for me today.  Tim Little joined the group in Whataroa yesterday.  He is a structural geologist from the University of Victoria in Wellington.  The small community of Franz Josef had contacted Tim asking is he could lead a "tramp" up to the town's local glacier.  Tim's experience in the area goes back about 15 years when he was employed to map the Franz Josef valley in which the glacier resides, so he would be the perfect person to lead such a trip.  Last night Tim was telling us about this and asked a few of the other geologist in the drilling program to go along for back up and of course I jumped at the opportunity given I have never seen a glacier up close.  We left Whataroa at approximately 10:15 a.m. and arrived in the glacier parking lot around 11:15 just in time to see about 40 kids pour out of 2 or 3 vans.  The local community had been advertising Tim's walk to the glacier and was very well received.  He began with a quick introduction of himself and the 4 other geologist that had joined him from the drilling project which included myself.  The walk typically takes 1.5 hours, but with a group of 40 or so kids plus numerous adults including tour guides and two businessmen in suit and jackets, we ended up doing the walk in 3 hours.  Tim's knowledge of the area was quite evident right from the beginning.  The walls of the valley were almost vertical and comprised of schist and grey wackestone as we got closer to the glacier.  The vertical foliations and polished walls were signed of the Australian and Pacific continents colliding at the Alpine fault and also of the history of the glaciers progressive and regressive movements over the past 18,000 yrs.  Tim explained the history of the area in great detail but at a level the children from the local school could perfectly understand but at the same time in a way that left the adults scratching their heads.  At one point Tim made the statement of how 6,000 yrs. was quite young for a specific feature which left many adults with their jaws open.  We forget sometimes as geologist that our  timescale differs greatly from the general public.  When we talk about in the near past we are referring to the past couple million years, and when we talk about the past few thousands of years, that just seems like yesterday!  Our walk continued toward the glacier with an occasional stop with an explanation of why a certain rock appeared the way it does or what there are white and dark stripes up and down the faces or why are the rocks so smooth.  I found myself in full tourist mode, awing at the scenery.  There were waterfalls cascading down each side of the valley as we walked along the river bed.  The last part of the walk was quite a bit more inclined as we were climbing relatively recent meringue deposits and once we reached the top the glacier revealed itself.  I stood about 220 m from the edge and could see the water pouring out of the mouth of the ice cave like I had seen so many times on PBS back home.   The children and adults had a whole new appreciation for what they were looking at once we got  to the end of the trail.  This made me think of our own outreach program at OU and how THIS is what it should be, geology in their own back yards.  This was the end of the tramp.  The teachers tried to round up all the kids and take the typical field trip photo and then they were racing off back down the trail we had just come.  Waiting back in the parking lot was a kiwi tradition of  a "sausage sizzle".  We made our way back to the car and headed back to Whataroa were the drilling of the Alpine Fault was about to get back underway.  Tonight the drilling should commence and I will be on a 3p.m. to 11p.m. shift, which I am quite happy about.  It will allow for  me to complete my field work and take samples as needed in the morning. 

As the Kiwis say

Cheers!

My first attempt at blogging

Whataroa River looking west toward drilling site

 

Saturday November 1^st 2014

Flying in to Dunedin

I arrived in Dunedin, Otago, New Zealand at approximately 4 p.m. local time.  This corresponded to 10 p.m. of October 31^st Oklahoma time.  Having boarded my plane in Los Angeles on October 30^th, I realized I completely missed any of October 31^st, 2014.  This will be used as a trivia question for my family and children later in life.  “How is it possible to leave one place on a specific date and arrive two days later but only after traveling for 13 hours?”  This has to be the closest to time travel that I will ever experience.  Getting out of the airport I was met by a University of Otago student, Genevieve Coffey.  She was very friendly but seemed quite nervous to be driving me back.  We hit up a conversation about our studies and continued on to downtown Dunedin.  I arrived at her flat that she shares with 5 other students.  The students have a variety of backgrounds including biology, dentistry, zoology, geochemistry, and of course geology.  Genevieve showed me to my room and had to leave for Uni.  I quickly took a shower and headed out to find dinner and see a bit of Dunedin.  My first stop was to grab a power converter and my second stop was the local pub.  As soon as I had a charge on my phone I began walking around Dunedin.  The people on the street were quite young and friendly.  I walked past a few of the cathedrals that are slightly famous in the area but did not have a chance to enter them.   I found a café with Wi-Fi and soon received an email from another Otago student stating that weather dependent, we would be heading to the west coast early Sunday morning.  I then grabbed a bite to eat and headed back to the flat to try to sleep.

Chapel in Dunedin

Chapel in Dunedin

  

 

Sunday, November 2^nd, 2014

Landslide slowed traffic on the way to Whataroa

Loren Matthewson arrived at Genevieve’s flat around 9:30 a.m. to drive me to the west coast, Whataroa.  This is where the Deep Fault Drilling Program – 2 would be taking place.  The weather was beautiful in Dunedin with a temperature around 80 degrees and blue skies.  I was thinking to myself that I got lucky and get to miss most of the bad winter weather in Oklahoma.  Oh how that changed quickly.  We drove west toward the Southern Alps, Loren was telling me their weather changes quickly and they can always tell if bad weather is coming based on the direction of the wind.  Well, an hour into our drive as we were driving through central Otago where the Lord of the Rings had been filmed, the weather hit hard.  It began raining around 2 p.m. that afternoon and did not stop the entire 9 hour drive.  This is common on the west coast of New Zealand.  Weather fronts from the Southern Sea hit the southwestern edge of New Zealand which is comprised of the tall Southern Alps.  The Alps push the front up the mountains and forces the rain to fall.  Soon the dry central Otago region turned into a lush rainforest.  We could only see a few 100 meters in front of us due to the heavy rainfall.  We arrived in Whataroa, pronounced Fataroa by the New Zealanders, at approximately 7 p.m. on Sunday evening.  My accommodations included a 3 bedroom house 2 blocks from the main logistics house of DFDP-2.  I share a room with two guys from Liverpool England.  Both are PhD students working on the Alpine Fault.

                Every evening at 7:15p.m. Dinner is served at the logistics house, so as soon as I dropped my bags we walked the 2-3 blocks down in the heavy rainfall.  I was introduced quickly to the people that were there and learned that most of the people had left recently to do some site seeing.  I also learned that the Bottom Hole Assembly had snapped the wireline and was stuck at the bottom of the hole.  The drilling crew had never had to fish for tools before and had been using handcrafted tools to try to raise 7 tons of pipe and BHA.  This was obviously not working.  Everyone was telling me how tense things had been on site and how lucky they were no one was killed.  Ray, who manages the logistics of the operation, was telling me that once the cable snapped it did a whip around the entire drilling rig where everyone should have been standing but luckily no one was.  My introduction to everyone was quite nice.

Monday, November 3^rd, 2014

Drill site location

The rain continued Monday but more people began to arrive back after their short vacation away.  Most people on-site have been on site since early October or even late September.  I met Virginia Toy, Rupert Sutherland, John Townend, and Dave Prior all today.   Very friendly people and very excited that I had the opportunity to come and join the operation. Ray then decided to take me to the drill site to get my safety training done so that I could legally be on site.  This consisted of showing me the hazard areas and a basic tour of the drill site.  I was provided safety glasses, a hard hat and told I needed to buy rain pants due to the high amounts of rain the area gets, and yes it is STILL raining. Since the rig is fishing for the BHA, security shifts are being assigned and my first assignment was given to me.  3 a.m. to 7 a.m.  I will be manning the security station with Betty, she is a structural geologist Professor out of Liverpool.  She was born in Italy and did her MS and PhD in Great Britain.  The security shift was not bad at all and went by quickly as she was very interesting to talk to and told me quite a bit about what a typical day consists of in Whataroa but things will change once we start drilling again.

Tuesday, November 4, 2014

Outcrop used for additional project

Point bar in outcrop

Today, Virginia Toy is taking me, Betty, Mike, and another student to see possible outcrops I can study for my project for Dr. Slatt because it has FINALLY STOPPED RAINING.  The first outcrop was across the river from where the drilling is taking place.  We drove along the river through the local farmer’s cow pollocks for about half a kilometer before having to stop.  Then hiked up to a massive fresh outcrop.  It is enormous with text book point bar systems.  Virginia then has the idea of comparing what I find here, composition wise, and comparing it to what was taken by core early in the drilling program.  I am already intrigued with this idea.  The next stop we make is a few kilometers south of Whataroa.  It is on the same property as DFDP-1 on Gaunt Creek.  We had to cross Gaunt Creek which was knee high and moving rather quickly due to the heavy rains from the previous two days.  We all made it across without incident but came upon the WaitaTona River.  I learned quickly that Virginia Toy will do just about anything if someone says it shouldn’t be done.  The river was very high and moving quickly, she talked Mike into testing the waters to see if we could cross to find an appropriate outcrop for my project and of course, Mike could not say no.  They waded in about knee deep before Virginia got too cold and too close to swept away before turning back.  I am not going to lie, I was happy we all didn’t have to cross. 

Gaunt Creek meets the WaiaTona River

 

The Alpine Fault Gouge is the light grey in the above picture

                Everyone is getting very sick with colds or allergies.  Virginia has also come down with something along with about half of the rest of the camp.  I hope this passes me by.

Wednesday, November 5, 2014

Mount Cook

Today was a beautiful day on the west coast of New Zealand.  I woke up a bit late and walked to the logistics house.  As soon as I arrived, the French logging team asked if I would like to join them on a walk near the coast.  I was thrilled to get the chance to see more of the country so I agreed to join them.   The team is comprised of a logging engineer, two geophysicists, and a supervising wireline logger.  They are all from France and tend to stick around each other, so I was thrilled for them to ask me to join.  We drove about 15 minutes to a town called Okarito. This town consisted of about 5 summer homes and a shop.  We parked and began our hike up the trail.  I can only think of a few places in the world where you can be hiking up a mountain trail with the beach behind you.  The views we saw at the top of this trail were absolutely amazing.  To my west we had Mt Cook towering over us at 14,000 ft and to my east was the Tasmanian Sea.  Neither of these two things I thought I would ever see in my lifetime.  We sat at the top for 30 minutes taking in the view before heading down the trail.  I was this close to the ocean so I was not leaving without putting at least my hands in the water.  I convinced the logging team to walk to the beach.  It was a dark grey to black sand with large metamorphic rocks that were very smooth and rounded.  Much like river rocks but right on the beach.  The waves were quite large and the water was extremely cold.  I officially stepped foot into the Tasmanian Sea.  We left for Whataroa soon after due to my security shift beginning at 3 p.m.  Lunch is provided for us every day and word has gotten out that I am handy in the kitchen.  The three cooks approached me as soon as I got back from Okarito telling me Virginia had told them I know how to cook gumbo and they asked if I was willing to cook for everyone next Wednesday so that the cooks can have a day off and go listen to a concert.  I agreed and hope that I can meet everyone’s expectations.

                On a side note, I learned that New Zealand is actually continental land and not a volcanic arch system like previously thought.  Most of the continent is below water, just a little FYI.

Visiting the ocean and mountains

The BHA was removed from the borehole this afternoon.  The drilling team has now began lowering a huge magnet downhole to try to capture any metal scraps that might interfere with the drill bit once drilling commences.  The plan as of now is to make sure the hole is clean and then run logging tools downhole before circulating mud and as they begin to circulate mud.  This is will give them important temperature data and will locate any fractures that might have occurred during the falling of the BHA.  The local seismometers recorded the BHA falling and hitting bottom.  Another interesting thing that was talked about is that the gas chromatographer saw a change in helium directly after a 4.5 earthquake in land from where the drilling is taking place.  They are not sure it’s due to the earthquake because of the distance between the epicenter and our location but they found it very interesting.

Thursday, November 6th, 2014

Today has been a quiet day around Whataroa.  The drilling team has removed most of the debris from the borehole and the wire line team was able to run gamma, magnetic susceptibility, temperature, and BHTV (borehole televiewer) tools.  The new drilling bit should arrive tonight or early in the morning and drilling can resume.  Assignments during drilling are starting to be assigned and I will be split between a few assignments.  Labeling and documenting the cuttings will be my main gig and I also volunteered to be taught how to make thin sections from the cuttings.  Thin section production is something all of the students at the University of Otago have to learn, which I found quite interesting.  I don't believe OU offers such training or if they do I have never heard of it.  We typically send our samples off to a lab for our thin sections to be made.  I hope that this technique they use here will aide me in my masters research and teach me a method that could benefit our research.  It has not been possible before to make thin sections from our samples because of how fragile they are so we will see if it is possible.  My time today has been spent volunteering for little jobs no one else really wants to do.  This led to my first real adventure in New Zealand.  I drove a car! not just drove a car but drove a car on the left side of the road from the right side of the car and it was a stick shift!  It was a short commute but still quite exciting, I guess I can check that off the ol' bucket list.


       The group of scientist here come from places all over the world which is quite amazing.  Most of the students are PhD students which makes me feel quite lucky to be here at all.  There are students from Canada, Japan, England, Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Italy, and the US and New Zealand of course.  It makes for interesting conversation around dinner time.  Last nights topic was whose "English" was correct out of the English, New Zealanders and Americans.  All the students who have been taught English learn the American version, so they tend to agree with the way we speak and I also learned that the American language is a lot more logical than the New Zealand and England versions of the language.  But I will give it to the English come back of the night from Jack, "We created the language so therefore my version is the correct version". Not really an argument there.