Hello and welcome to this column. For those of you who don’t know me, I’m a second-year geo-eng with very little clue about most things rock-related. This summer, I landed a sick job working for the Ontario Geologic Survey and I am getting thrown hat over boots into a whole new world: 12 weeks in the wilds north of Lake Superior, 12.5 hours from Toronto. Stick around as I go from a rocky start to a gneiss geologist, or maybe at least a respectable geo student!
This summer I’ll be facing deerflies, horseflies, blackflies, mosquitoes (and possibly ticks but I seriously have my fingers crossed against these!!), but I’ll also be seeing the Northern Lights, swimming, hiking, and learning the highest form of self-discipline: not scratching my bites! And what am I up in the middle of nowhere to do? Mapping Precambrian (AKA very old) bedrock, which I have zero experience in.
I’ll be going there in two weeks, but first I have to train. Survival, health and safety, boating, and how to use bear spray (that was a fun session!)… not to mention learning to drive an ATV and haul a trailer behind an F150. Have I mentioned that I’ve never even sat in the driver’s seat of a pickup? Then there’s the small matter of what I got myself into: lots and lots of rocks. We spend at least three hours a day talking rocks in our free time, talks in which I can contribute only questions…
For our two weeks of training, we’re living in Sudbury at Laurentian. To anyone who’s ever told me that this is not a nice city, they clearly weren’t paying attention to all the outcrops throwing themselves out of the city’s landscape like they’re trying to reclaim the land. Today after dinner, I went on a 5-minute hike from residence and wound up on a cliff looking out over Ramsay Lake. I stayed until sunset and then trooped home. No, I haven’t seen the Nickel yet, but I’m giving it time. I can’t wait for this long weekend to barbeque, go swimming, and get to know my field crew who I’ll be living with for the next few months!
As I learn more about batholiths, orogenies (and I do know what you just thought you read), granites, and what exactly mapping means, I’ll be telling you in an effort to give myself some meaning and maybe giving you some laughs.
Batholith: a bunch of igneous rock that is formed in magma in the earth’s core and pushes its way to the surface.
Orogeny: one formation process for mountain caused by tectonic folding, faulting and bringing rocks from below the crust to the surface.
Midcontinent Rift: a rift that formed about 1.1 billion years ago under North America. The middle was basically beneath Lake Superior and it’s responsible for some of the weird rock formations I’ll be looking at this summer.
Granite: (the definition that doesn’t include “good for countertops”): a coarse-grained rock composed of quartz, feldspars, and micas.
Gneiss: a high grade metamorphic (it’s been through some stuff) rock that usually has *gneiss* bands of alternating colours, visible along the highway in the Canadian Shield. Pronounced “nice”… get the pun?
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