921 meters later, I'm home from Bremen, DE

So yes. It's been a busy month and a half. For a good portion of December I was in the UK for the annual Christmas trip. So that was all fun.

But January was geology business through and through. For three days I was in Houston for a conference that Exxon held for grant recipients and international scholars, and that was a surprisingly fun time. I got to hang out with one of the other grad students from CU a little - Aya, who is from Lebanon - and she introduced me to all of the other international scholars from the middle east. It was fantastic to get to talk with all of them. I also had a poster at the conference (it was pretty and contained no actual data!) and Exxon conducted a short course for us all as well.

The short course was kind of an interesting experience, since a lot of it focused on very basic petroleum reservoir concepts. It was a good reminder that many geologists really don't encounter that kind of thing until after they're done with grad school, if ever. And also a reminder to me that I'm still total crap at seismic interpretation.

A day after the Exxon conference, I flew to Bremen, Germany, because it was time to process all of the core (921 meters of it!) that we drilled in the Bighorn Basin last summer. It was a lot of hard work. We mostly did 10-11 hour days with only a lunch break, which was normally less than an hour - and we didn't get weekends. We were a 7 days a week operation.

I was the little cog in the process that did some general core description of each newly split core. It was definitely a new experience for me - I've done core description before, but never in that kind of situation. New cores were constantly coming in, so basically I had only 10-15 minutes with a core at most (normally less). The emphasis was on breaking the cores down into units that could be given a description with the important major features highlighted. There weren't a lot of places where I had a chance to pinpoint specific features.

So that was tough, and stressful. These cores were also a lot of mudstone, and a lot of paleosols. There were very few sharp contacts. Almost everything, from color to lithology, changed gradationally, and that made picking where to draw the line very difficult. There were also a lot of drab intervals that just made me crazy, because they were on this weird border between being sandy siltstone and silty sandstone and I just had to pick one with a very limited amount of inspection time.

But the cool part of my job was that I got to see almost every centimeter of those cores (except for the few that would get done while I was at lunch) and I saw some really, really cool stuff! There are some pictures of the most fantastic things linked below. But overall, it was a really cool experience, and it has confirmed for me that I really would enjoy that as a job. With the caveat that normal work days and weekends would be necessary.

With all the core split, now we're into the next phase of the project, which is going to be the real meat. Half of the core (the working half - I described the archive half) was extensively sampled for the various scientists in the project. Mary and I will be getting our samples soon, so we'll be able to start looking at grain size. Extremely high resolution image scans of the core were done as well (along with color analysis that should be way better than me frowning at the Munsell color chart and bitching that none of them look right) so I think I'll be looking at those in more detail, and then I have a feeling it's back to Adobe Illustrator and I'll be spending more weeks of my life drawing lots of little boxes. I'm excited to meet with Mary on Wednesday to see what direction I should be headed in next. And soon I should finally have a thesis topic hammered down! Which is exciting, and scary.

Anyway, here's the pictures, enjoy! We ended up working so hard and so fast that we had three days off during the course of the trip, and were able to use those days to do actual tourist-type things. So there are a lot of pictures of Bremen as well. I had a lot of fun, and I already miss all of the other people from the work group. I'm looking forward to seeing everyone in the near future, maybe at AGU!

Pictures

Pictures of Bremen
Pictures from our day trip to Bremerhaven
Pictures from work time at Marum - lots of pretty rocks.
Video of a ship leaving the docks at Bremerhaven because this was the first time I'd actually seen something like this up close and thought it was insanely cool.
Video of the adorable puffer fish at the Klimathaus in Bremerhaven
Here, listen to the horrible noise the reefer door at Marum made every single time it was opened, though after a while you just stop hearing it.
Video of a core being split which takes a long time, but it was near the start of work so Will and Rike weren't that fast at it.

The Mid-vacation Post

So far, it's been a nice visit to the UK, which is really no surprise to anyone. Christmas and Boxing Day were big family get togethers, which I enjoyed and only got a little drunk for. My jet lag problem is still present this year, though I think not nearly as obnoxious as it's been in years past. I've had to take naps on a couple of days, and have had a little bit of insomnia, but not to the point that I've been up at 3 in the morning and completely unable to sleep like I have been in other years.

The weather in the UK has been just fine as far as I'm concerned. There's been a lot of do about the temperature being below zero C, but I went for an hour and a half walk in it on Christmas morning while everyone else was at mass, and it was perfectly fine other than my ears getting cold since I forgot my hat back in the US. I think the bigger problem is just that the cold temperatures means the ice doesn't melt, and I guess this part of the UK doesn't know the wonders of car-destroying mag chloride the way we do in Colorado. I did have to avoid some terrifying icy sidewalks during my walk, to be sure. But other than that, it hasn's been any kind of Snowmageddon. Yesterday when we got back from London (around 2200) it was actually raining fairly heavily, so that's hopefully a sign that it's getting a bit warmer and the ice will go away. We ended up taking a cab from the train station at Wokingham, since the line west of it was shut down and the rain was nasty enough we didn't feel like waiting for the bus, or walking home once we caught said bus.

Speaking of Snowmageddon, we landed all right, but Heathrow has still apparently not gotten its shit together. Once we landed we had to park somewhere in the back of beyond for a good twenty minutes because there was nowhere for our plane to go, and then moved to a slightly less far away parking spot so that we could take buses to the terminal. Immigration was fast, but then we spent a stupid amount of time waiting for our luggage. I was also insanely thirsty the entire time, and there was nowhere to get anything to drink, though I could have apparently bought a SIM card from a vending machine if I wanted to. Maybe you can suck on those like mints. Anyway, our flight landed not long after 0900, and we didn't get our luggage collected and get out of there until after 1100. There was also a frightening graveyard of lost and unclaimed baggage taking up one entire section of the claim, which did not inspire confidence.

It's also worth noting that I didn't get to sit next to Mike for most of the flight, since the television for his seat was broken, and they moved him to the only empty seat on the airplane so he had something to do. I mostly used the flight to catch up on movies... I watched Toy Story 3, which I thought was very good and don't feel at all ashamed about sniffling through. I also watched The Sorcerer's Apprentice. The funny thing is, when Mike and I met up after landing and were talking about the movies we watched, we could each name two of them and it took us forever to remember which one the third was. For both of us, it was that movie. Which I think pretty much says all you need to know about how utterly unremarkable it was as a film.

Yesterday Mike and I went in to London. I paid a quick visit to Harrod's - the store was insanely busy, but everyone apparently just desperately wanted to buy perfume. After we got out of that section of the store it was just fine, and we were in and out in less than twenty minutes. After that we met up with Sam and Rick, and spent the rest of the day taking up space in a pub and playing board games. The game we started off with was Ticket to Ride, which was a lot of fun and I'm going to have to pick up a copy once my checking account stops crying about the furnace.

Oh yes, translation for any UK readers: by furnace, I mean boiler. Even though it has nothing to do with boiling water. I do not in fact own any sort of smelting equipment. This announcement brought to you by Mike's parents, who found that particular vocabulary mix-up very entertaining.

The Doctor Who Christmas special was pretty good, I think. I wouldn't place it higher than the first Christmas Invasion, or even the Runaway Bride, but I definitely liked it better than the silly episode with the space Titanic, or the one from two years ago that was kind of about the cyberman and all it really had going was a lovely steampunkish Victorian setting. I'd say this one was as close at Doctor Who's really gotten to just out and out producing a fable, and while it had the normal plot holes that you could drive a truck through, it at least had a lot more life in it than the last couple of episodes I've seen. (Which were, for the record, Victory of the Daleks and The Adventures of Spitty Timothy Dalton as the Most Underused Rassilon Imageinable [not its actual title].) Really, considering that I feel like the entire episode was based around someone saying, "I've got this awesome mental image of a shark flying through the air, pulling a rickshaw... let's combine that with Christmas!" the end result was surprisingly coherent and fun. It's also convinced me to give Matt Smith another chance as the Doctor... considering my first exposure to him was the underwhelmingly written turd of a Dalek episode from his season, he really needed something to recommend him.

I think a some point I may have to devote a post to how I feel about the way the Daleks have been used in recent episodes. It won't be a very nice post.

Today Mike and I are headed off to Brighton to see Sam and Dan and Rhi and hopefully Captain Stu, so that's exciting. It's hard to believe we're already at the midpoint of our trip, though this one's a few days shorter than trips we've taken in the past, since Mike ran out of vacation. Something to do with a wedding.

Also, Anotherealm has now published its 2011 lineup. Transportation will be the September offering - I'm really excited about that!