Yes, we have no bananas

In field-food has a tendency to become very repetitive, especially when it’s the same thing everyday. Because cave work is so hot and sweaty and the caves are dark and humid and often muddy you never really feel like eating anything. But the energy is needed and snacking always helps give you a blood sugar boost in the cave. Our in-cave food consists mostly of Pokari Sweat, an isotonic drink that I believe is Japanese, and SilverQueen, a brand of chocolate bar. The Pokari Sweat is excellent because drinking just water isn’t enough in the caves to give you energy back and replacing lost salts when in the tropics and doing hard work is obviously a very good idea. Plus its not too sweet. As for the SilverQueen, we try for the dark chocolate variety, partly because it has a slightly higher melting point than the other ones, and partly because when you’re in a muddy cave, the dark chocolate hides the dirt the best.

One food that never travels particularly well is the humble banana. So you can imagine that in a situation where there are big packs with everything loose inside being banged against rocks and hauled up pitches that bananas would not necessarily be the cavers’ fruit of choice. And yet we haul in quite a few bananas. Being the tropical variety they are the very small ones which you can eat in two mouthfuls, or one if you feel like showing off, and not too sweet. Very tasty but not very practical.

Bintang Beer

Ahh, Bintang Beer, Indonesia’s local brew. For the first half of our trip we’re in southern Sulawesi, which is quite a conservatively Muslim area and so drinking is fairly unheard of round these parts, at least for Indonesians. Still being a fairly tolerant bunch, westerners aren’t expected to comply and it’s fairly easy to buy. Of course, public drunkenness is still very much frowned upon and since the owner of our accommodation is quite a devout Muslim, a Hajji we don’t drink at our place. We are therefore generally forgoing the post-field beer (which is a travesty for any self-respecting geologist) except when discussing goings on with the village patriarch who some people visit on the occasional evening before dinner. The second half of the trip will be spent on a catholic island though, so I expect there will be more drinking there. Meanwhile, in the port area of Makassar, the nearest major city where we’ve spent a day or two it’s possible to buy a couple of bottles, and sit and watch the sun set over the Celebes Sea. Perfect.

Going deeper into-ground

If you’ve ever tried to take photos in caves then you will know that a typical camera doesn’t always produce the best results, often the flash bounces off any moisture just in front of the camera and you get a photo of that instead. Plus its muddy and dirty and sweaty so I’m hardly inclined to take my nice camera in. So I won’t be posting any subterranean photos. Yet. Luckily, one of our expert cavers is a decent amateur photographer, with separate flash guns (necessary for caves) and the combination of patience, diligence and obsessive attention to detail required for good photography. So there will be later, at some point, some very, very good in cave photos. With any luck!

Note: we also have a happy snap kind of camera which does produce some decent results, I will try to post some of these at some point.

What’s interesting about our caves is that they’re not underneath the floodplain. We’re in a tower karst area. Imagine the big towers of karst in China and Vietnam that are world famous surrounded by flat paddy-fields and twisting winding rivers. It’s a bit like that, but, because we’re in the tropics, there aren’t these vast outcrops of rocks of the steep sides of the towers, instead there is vegetation. Trees and bushes growing on near (and in many cases fully) vertical cliff faces. The caves themselves lie inside the tower karst up to hundreds of metres above the valley floor. The water has only eroded as far as field level, where huge rivers run underground emerging at the base of the karst before being channelled into canals and rivers feeding thousands of rice-paddies. Thus it is the levels above the river way up in the karts towers in the previously eroded rivers that the stalagmites lie. Drips of water percolating through the limestone leave a thin layer of calcium carbonate inside the cave where they hit the ground. Over time, at a rate of 1cm per hundred years (give or take) these layers of calcium carbonate build up from the floor and down from the ceiling, forming stalagmites and stalactites. Which is what we’re here to collect.

So to get to the caves there’s usually a bit of a hike up the side of the karst, through grikes (dead-straight mini canyons formed in areas of weakness) tens of metres deep to get to the cave entrances. The caves themselves are bigger than I thought they would be, which is a relief. There’s far less crawling and small gaps to get into them, and the chambers are much bigger than I thought they would be.

Small gaps and constrictions are very useful in a cave when you want to collect speleothems. Caves with airflow through them, either from multiple entrances or from wide passages, don’t produce very good records. Or rather they include an extra couple of variables which require interpretation. Caves with a good tight constriction tend to be more humid beyond the constriction which reduces evaporation which can influence the chemistry and also have more consistent air temperatures. So all our good stals come from beyond a tight constriction which requires crawling through. This is good fun, especially when they’re combined with pitches (areas of the cave which are steep enough to require a rope or rope-ladder to help you get up and down. There have been a few of these so far but they don’t pose to much of a problem. Although, as you can imagine, they form a bit of a bottleneck during the walk-in to a cave (often several hundred metres) and so slow us down quite considerably. They are also a pain to get the stalagmites out through!

The rest of the cave tends to involve lots of scrambling, which is good fun as I like scrambling! Whilst there are some big chambers where its possible to walk around quite freely. As a result the inside of the caves are also less claustrophobic than I thought they would be. It’s actually quite natural. Hot though (typically in the high twenties) with near 100% humidity which makes doing anything very hot and sweaty. So when you have to do some physical labour, which is frequently, you can get very tired and drenched very quickly. Plus some of the caves can be very muddy inside.

More will follow, detailing how we collect stalagmites.

Taking a step back, and a few steps around the big durian

I feel I may have been too tough on Jakarta from what I've seen so far.  It is a South-east asian city and has some of the features of south-east asian cities that I like such as the chaotic roads, imposssibly shiny floors, narrow staircases and the faint smell of durian. So in our final day in Jakarta, known as "The Big Durian" I headed off to the old part of town, Kota, also known as Batavia (twas a Dutch colony), to see if this city could be redeemed by actually going and having a look at the more interesting things, rather than just the traffic, noise and pollution.

An old Dutch colonial building

The answer is somewhat.  Jakarta remains noisy dirty and polluted and even Kota was a dirty place. It had some character, but not loads compared to other comparable cities (Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh, Kota Kinabalu, Bandarseribagawan being my main reference points). The main square was nice-enough, the port interesting enough, but there was no real wow factor.  Jakarta may be a great place to shop and to go clubbing and to feel the pulse of real Indonesia, but its not really a city with sights, and things to go and do and see. The old town was falling apart, not just at the edges, bur right in the middle too.

Bikes with hats

An old drawbridge, above a really dirty, stinky, gas releasing canal

Boats in the harbour

Lined up

We visited the port that formed the northern end of Kota.  It was an interesting place with all these boats, quite large, being loaded up with either bags of rice or bags of cement, often by hand, often by little cranes built into each boat. It was good fun to watch.

Loading cement bags by hand

"Five-legged creatures" - What food carts are known as in Jakarta

Treating ourselves to some fancy drinks in the fancy joint in town. A colonial/art deco mix of  a building with dark wood, and photos of movie stars hanging on the walls.

Off on real fieldwork tomorrow (a few days ago when this gets published), who knows how good the internet connection will be and when I'll next be posting more of my Indonesian adventures!

Up in the haze

Up in the hills in the centre of Java, two to three hours out of Jakarta, through rice paddies and fruit trees lies the city of Bandung. Its much nicer than Jakarta, though its still hazy and polluted (whether this is self-generated or just gets blown in from Jakarta down below I don't know, probably a bit of both).  There are more trees though, which makes it better. Bandung is the home of LIPI, the Indonesian Centre for Sciences (or similar translation of the acronym) and where our Indonesian contacts work. Its also where we store a lot of gear for fieldwork. So we took the trip up to LIPI to sort through the field-gear, through some things away, check what we had and prepare everything for shipping to the field-sites.  This field-work has a lot of equipment I can tell you that!

An interesting bridge for all you engineers out there - the arch is upside-down!

 The Geoteknologi Department

Once the gear was sorted we took an excursion to the top of a mountain, which was shut due to clouds, despite the trees looking all misty and atmospheric and rather cool. So we went to the local waterfalls, which were interesting, but not particularly nice. They smelt a bit funny, were a bit too foamy and the water was just the wrong colour. Even up here, this part of the world is polluted.  And its a shame because otherwise this place might have been quite pretty.

Well, pretty if they also got rid of all the concrete structures around the place too which made the whole area look not unlike a badly designed Rivendell.

Just not the colour waterfalls should be if they desire to be in the picturesque category

Nice-ish

Not that the place was all bad, the two restaurants we visited for lunch and dinner were very good.  Proper Indonesian fare. Very tasty. And there was a thunderstorm on the way back, which did help clear the air somewhat.

Jakarta: Where the air is as thick as the pile of paperwork

Jakarta is a big, polluted, hazy, concretey, endless sprawl of a city.  A bit like Los Angeles. The city has a population of 9.5 million.  Take into account the Greater Jakarta area (ie. the suburbs and commuter belts) and the population jumps to 28 million, making it the second biggest city in the world (or fourth, depending on how you count). It's polluted, the sky is very hazy and the roads are constantly packed.

We’re in Jakarta at the start of our fieldwork.  This is because the Indonesians love their paperwork. There are lots of forms to fill out, stamps to get hold of, and queues to be queued in.  And it has been taking us days to get sorted so we can actually fly out and begin fieldwork. We reckoits not realy whats on he forms thats important, its about having the right forms.  There's no way that anyone has the time to look at all of the forms for everybody that passes through the immigration office. We’ve been having meetings, travelling to Immigration offices (there are eight of them), getting hold of permits in order to go and do our fieldwork, and sorting out all of the equipment we need to take with us.  Much of our time has been spent in taxis in the endless traffic jams in this endless city so this photo seems pretty appropriate. I don’t really have many others as we’ve been busy and not really touristing around much. A thirty minute PhD, I wish!

The roads are reasonably chaotic, but as nobody is travelling particularly fast, its more jostling for position, and therefore the whole thing doesn’t really feel that dangerous. Lots of motorbikes and scooters, but not as many as, say, Hanoi.  Perhaps this is because Indonesia is a more affluent country and so more people can afford cars.  I dare say the city would go more quickly with more bikes and fewer cars.  But then again, a decent public transport system wouldn’t go amiss either!

Looking forward to bananas (amongst other things)

Hi everyone,

I'm away on fieldwork for the next six weeks (in fact I left on Sunday but had a couple of posts to make so put them in a queue for a while). There may or may not be regular or fast enough internet access to post too many times, but there will be lots of cool photos being taken, and lots of awesome geologising to be done.

Looking forward to bananas that don't cost $12 a kilo. Stupid Australian protectionist policies coupled with cyclone damage in Queensland has meant there are no bananas in this country.

Hooray fieldwork! I'm so excited!

Here's one I made earlier

 

I've been attempting to grow my own calcite.  The reason for doing this is to create whats known as a standard. We dope the calcite with chemicals we want to analyse in other things. Then when we know what the concentration of these chemicals (or elements) are in the calcite (which we get from using other machines) we know how the machine we are measuring our samples on is behaving.  As a result we can quantify our results rather than just say that the machine measures this much of an element. For most things you can buy standards from various companies.  But for some elements in a calcite matrix (the background structure) there is no standard, so you have to make one yourself.

Its been a tricky procedure full of lots of chemistry (remember doing titrations at school, well I was doing them for real - as a scientist - wow!).  Though it has been good fun. It basically involves mixing calcium hydroxide with carbonic acid (which you make by bubbling carbon dioxide through water), plus whatever you want to dope the calcite with.  Simple enough in theory, but when you have to make/mix your own chemicals and then dilute them to the correct concentrations it actually ends up taking all day to do, plus a day beforehand to get hold of all the equipment. And even then it didn't really go too well, no calcite was growing in my beakers.

So the following morning I checked the pH of my solution and found it was far too high, so I threw quantitative chemistry out the window and bubbled more carbon dioxide through the solution until the pH lowered.  And low and behold, after a few more hours back on the stirring plate, calcite was beginning to grow.  Hooray.

A light show on the Rocks

I do like Sydney, it really is a very nice city. In fact I'd say its biggest fault is that it knows its so good and goes around flaunting it. In that kind of way that makes you want to dislike it. So much so that I enjoy telling people that Sydney's annual rainfall is approximately twice that of London, with 37 more rainy days per year.

I spent last weekend in Sydney, visiting with a few friends who had never been there before (international students eh, what are they like!). Despite doing and seeing things that I'd mostly done before I still had a good time.  And Sydney was having a light festival called "Vivid" where there are all sorts of lit-up landmarks and art installations around the city, making it a fun place to explore after dark.  Here are some photos:

Sydney harbour, pretty as ever.

Some jellyfish around circular quay

No idea, but fun

Of course, all public art is really just an excuse for a playground.

This staircase was fun.  It lit up only the steps that people were standing on.

Art, not without its pretentiousness, these things have something to do with self and consciousness and stuff.

The Opera House gets in on the act with some great light shows.

The Rocks

More stuff on the Rocks, it certainly made the between pubs part of our evening's drinking more entertaining.

Milling

Milling is what I'm going to be doing quite a lot of over the next year. Its the cutting out and collecting of each sample from the stalagmite ready for analysis in the mass spec.

 

This is the mill. A super-accurate (0.01mm) computer controlled drill. We have two, this is the compact shiny new one which I have set up and am learning how to use. The other is a big bulky thing that we've been using for years.  The old one is good, but it doesn't have good z-control (up/down).

 

You start by lining up the stalagmite very carefully and clamping it in place. You need to be able to transect across the area you want using just one axis, so the line needs to be perfectly aligned. Then you mill a trench in the material to get rid of surface contaminants and any carbon from the pencil marks on the stal surface.

Now you're ready to go.  By milling in a mm deeper than the trench and slowly inching your way along you slowly cut out a small piece of the stal into a fine powder. Then you collect all the material on a small scalpel and transfer to a vial. Sounds easy, but its really fiddly. Then you clear the cutting area of any loose debris with compressed air so as not to contaminate the next sample, then move on. Repeat, repeat, repeat. Several hundred times! And so on and so on until you've finished your PhD!

Foggy Canberra

Canberra in winter is a cold place.

 

The bike path to work

 Foggy weather tends to lend itself to black and white photography

It is also a foggy place in the mornings. Fog is Canberra's default state early in winter mornings.  It lasts some mornings more than others and so far this year, its generally been gone before I've got out of the house in the mornings.  But when it does linger it is very pretty.

Part of campus. Black Mountain, which normally looms over the uni, is invisible

The fog also affects the airport as you might expect.  If you're not on the first flight out in the mornings (which is already at the airport overnight so has few issues with landing) then its inadvisable to schedule a flight before 10:30am.

Artsy shot!

The Stal is ready for its close-up

In a previous installment of "My PhD" I did some arts and crafts cutting out some black masks for some stal photography.  Well I finally have the reflected light photos back.  We also took transmitted light photos where there is a light table on underneath the stalagmite - this makes them look really cool but I'm yet to get these photos back.  We use pretty professional equipment, taking photos at lots of different exposures.  Choosing the right one and then altering contrast and brightness takes a while, especially when there are far better things to be getting on with (not that it was me who was doing the processing).  Hence the slight delay, but the results are pretty pretty!

 

They look a bit weird to me, being used to seeing them in the "flesh".  I guess the contrast is adjusted so that all the layers and features are as visible as possible.

Enjoy!

Keck

One of the main things we did at the top of Mauan Kea was visit the W.M. Keck Observatories. We were up there as part of a self-drive tour, the guides were pretty damn knowledgeable, lots of interesting info was imparted.

Keck has two telescopes. Which can be used together for judging distances, like how we use two eyes, by processing how the background moves behind the object for the two separate images.  Its known as interferometry, though with my rudimentary knowledge of physics having a baseline of tens of metres for a pair of telescopes seems fairly pointless for the distances required.  For example, the second Gemini telescope is in Chile.  But these guys are probably better physicists than I am, so I trust them that they can make it work.

The inside of the Keck telescope, staring up at the back of the 10m primary mirrors, the second largest optical telescope mirrors in the world. The large primary mirror is actually 36 smaller hexagonal mirrors, each one can be controlled independantly and moved by microns every fraction of a second.  There is some amazing technology going on here. They keep the inside of the observatory refrigerated so that when they open the doors at night, there's no temperature difference. To go with an impressive telescope with impressive technology, there's also some impressive science going on here. At a cost to the user of just $50,000 a night. A snip! As you can imagine there's a long waiting list, for just for a couple of minutes on the telescope.

 The Keck twin telescopes at sunset.

Keck opens up for a night of stargazing.