South Africa – 2012 and 2013

I’ve been to South Africa twice on a project lead by Aubrey Zerkle looking for atmospheric signals in ancient rocks.  We spent most of our time in the core shed in Pretoria:

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This one is particularly cool as there is over an order of magnitude of Earth history out on the floor. The “grey” rocks are the  ~2.65- 2.50 billion year old Archean rocks that we were studying.  The “red” rocks in the lower right are 250 million year from the Permian.

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Here’s the crew, out behind the coreshed, including our amazing postdoc Gareth Izon.

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Hey Simon, where’s the ostrich?

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We were able to get into the field proper on this trip. Here’s us looking confused trying to find an outcrop of the Duitschland Formation:

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I also was able to channel one of my heroes Jane Goodall, fishing for termites.

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