Day 24:
One of our metamorphic rocks (we are thinking metapellite) with some cute little quartz lenses.
Today involved far too much climbing for my legs to be happy about! We decided to make the most of the good weather forecast and climb up and over one of our hills to smash out a map of the rocks on the far side. Overall, we did achieve this and it was indeed mapped but my legs were not exactly thrilled about it.
The morning involved a steep two hours of climbing that throughly tired us out, but after a quick haribo stop we got on with our maps and made good progress. We even had 20 outcrops done before lunch! There was a bit of an issue with certain rocks popping up where we did not expect them to (the geology of this part of Ireland appears to completely disregard topography and it really throws you off!) but we accepted that what we were seeing is what is there and got over it. we went on to on to finish the day feeling exhausted but very productive and proud of ourselves.
Day 25:
A pink breccia we have now come across a couple different times
Today was a lovely end to our week. We managed to get our aims for the day sorted by 2pm and headed home for a lovely afternoon of admin. Getting office maps up to date, drawing out cross sections and stressing ourselves out by looking at the exemplar mapping project and wondering how we will ever know enough to be able to write one successfully.
This being said, I think we are making very good progress with the project and I actually feel we can afford to maybe take a few more rest days than we have been (I AM EXHAUSTED!).
Tomorrow though, is actually a day off and there is honestly no better feeling than going to bed knowing I don't have to get up early and go into the field. I can't wait to catch up on sleep and have a day at home.
Day 26:
A lovely sunny dinner in the garden!
Today was, thank goodness, a day off. It was also not my turn to be involved in doing the communal shop for the week so I spent a lovely day in the house. After so many days hiking it's lovely to have a day where we don't have to do anything remotely related to exercise.
There was a brief 45 minutes where Catherine and I remembered we did in fact have a degree to do and wrote some in depth descriptions of our lithologies and their depositional environments but once we had finished we all sat down to play Catan. If you have never heard of the board game Catan, it is basically a game where you have to collect resources and build an empire, think monopoly but like also not monopoly at all (maybe google it if that explanation wasn't up to your standard). The instructions were in fact in Swedish as it was one of Aria's birthday presents from her family so there is a slight chance we may have not been playing it right but based on Aria's translations and our common sense we figured out the rules and got set to play. An hour and a bit of strategic game play later I came out victorious and was rewarded by having to cook dinner. Lovely stuff. Aria and I cooked a delicious (if I do so myself) dinner and we ended the evening, classically, with a bit of love island before heading bed.
Day 27:
Me perched on a rock for a snack break with a lovely view of Lough Kilbride (was safe, I promise mum)
Fresh off a rest day, we decided it was time to tackle one of the few big hike days we have lefts. To reach the area we were mapping today we unfortunately had to hike up and over one of our peaks as there is no car access at all on the other side. This was not a fun way to spend the morning but after meeting a very friendly Jack Russel and its owner out on their walk we hike for about 2 hours up to our area for the day.
Once we were up their we decided to make it a long one as we want to get this area done in about 2 days (the fewer times we have to climb up to it the better). The day was spent trying to find and follow the contact between a grey sandstone and another, technically grey-green but really also grey sandstone. This was not easy and involved a lot of hammering and very close inspection of rocks.
At about 5pm we decided (well I decided and told Catherine) we had done enough and it was time to go home. The way home was much nicer than the way there (downhill yay!) and we made it home for just after 6pm. Our maps are really taking shape now and we should only have 2 more days of big climbs to do before the end!
Day 28:
A cute little bit of wavy bedding we found in some grey sandstone
As we did not want to do big hikes two days running we decided on an easy day in the valley today. By 11:30 we had however already covered all the ground we had access to and got what we wanted out of the day in terms of our maps.
Since we are not too worried about time pressure (we did annoyingly long days at the start with annoyingly few rest days) we decided that the intense rain and long day yesterday meant we could call it a day early and head home.
Making it home in time for lunch really was a luxury and after eating we put Gilmore Girls on in the background (brilliant TV show, but anyone who is pro Jess and Anti Logan is objectively incorrect, sorry Catherine) and set to work on our maps. We actually had quite a productive admin session, getting all office maps up to date and completing some cross sections to try and make sense of the structure in the area. We then hopped in the car to pick up some of the other girls who were being soaked in the rain and had called it a day as well.
Day 29:
If you look hard enough there is actually a rainbow in this picture which we were excited to see after the rain had stopped and the sun showed itself for like a second.
Expecting decent weather today, we aimed for a full day in the field. This was not what we were met with. At 11:30am when Catherine and I were sat cross legged in a bog trying to shelter behind some grass from the hail there were some regrets about our decision.
When the weather did eventually get a bit better we resumed our mapping for the day but spirits were low and socks were soggy so the day was in fact ended at 3pm. That being said, we did complete our aims for the day, mapping one of the few areas we have left to do. It is frustrating how little exposure there is in key areas of our map which is preventing us from being certain about some boundaries. The structure of our area doesn't really follow any logic so even educated guesses are quite uncertain.
Day 30:
A cute BeReal of us playing Catan in the evening.
An office day today meant I got 12 hours of sleep last night and woke up feeling great! I then spent about 3 hours plotting points onto a clean office map because we have 4 different base maps and I have realised I won't have the will power to plot points onto them all for final versions in a single day. For some context, we are almost on the last week of our project and have done around 450 outcrops, some of these end up on multiple maps due to overlap. Plotting them is a very, very monotonous task!
After a break involving a trip to Aldi and Tesco then cooking lunch, we put Friends on the TV and I resumed plotting points. It's quite nice us all being able to work in the same room as we can have the TV on in the background and chat. Makes it all a bit less boring.
After a lovely curry dinner cooked by Lauren and Aria I sat down to do some cross sections. Our area, it turns out, is so much more structurally complex than we thought it would be. There is no obvious place to do a cross section at all and the multiple little ones I have been trying to do are incredibly confusing. I am doing my best but the write up of this project is going to be a difficult one. Catherine and I are going to need a while to sort out he structure in our heads. It's frustrating as we could have chosen an area with a much more obvious line to do a cross section along and I am worried this may impact my results as the sketch ones in my notebook currently are low quality simply because I am so confused. For anyone that knows a bit more about geology, the structure of our area is essentially an incredibly faulted syncline. However, the orientation of our area is that it pretty much goes along the fold axis. Faulting is very broadly perpendicular to the fold axis meaning multiple cross sections need to be drawn in order to capture both the faulting and folding. This is rather frustrating!
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