To go back a page....| Arctic journal continued.... |
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 To skip ahead.... |
 July 5-9, 1996 Digi-talus (I'm missing the X-files badly now):I think I've seen enough talus slopes to last a lifetime. We split up into teams, one drilling (mine) and one orienting, (John's team). Ten hours + today, simply because we had the sun for once. John had the cam corder out at one point; now there is video tape proof that I look like a fool while using the drills. But I must admit, it is good to be drilling again after three days in the tent due to rain and fog. I've read most of the books I've brought up with me; we're going to end up swapping books before this trip is over. When it rains, there really isn't much else to do but read, sleep, or write in the journals (and boy can I babble when I'm motivated to do so... there is an 8-page entry on the merits of flush toilets). |
 July 8, 1996 Rainy days and Mondays always bring me down... Off those darn talus slopes and right in the middle of a fossil hunt. After dinner, John announced that I was leading a fossil hunting expedition (I was?!?). In the Kanguk shale (which lies above the volcanic section we've been sampling for the past two weeks) there are fossils beds, most prevalent in the iron concretionary beds. it would be nice to find some fossils that will give us a stratigraphic age (last time John was up here he found an Inoceramid that was about 40 cm long, at least what we were able to put together). Later we'll collect from the bentonite layers near the volcanics. |
| Now, like my father before me, I tend to look down a lot while I'm walking. This system has managed to find me a couple of dollars in spare change over the years and a really cool piece of glass that had been frosted by waves at Hamlin State Park in New York. So, I'm following John along the 'beach' (sand bar, if you must, but that's not the point) after a fruitless search for those cool Inocermaids that John found before, and I look down and see this really cool red rock. Lo and behold, it's a fossil with a hinge! Yea! Life has meaning. |
 July 12, 1996 My nose is runny and it snot funny....Got my bentonites (volcanic ash) today, and managed to add another Olympic event to out growing repertoire of classic Arctic games: can crushing, talus skiing, boulder dodging, mud-flat hurdles, sun-chasing, and the 50-yard mad-dash to Potty Hill. But that was not the only exciting event of the day... |
 THE BONE BED!!!While the other three went off to collect more data for their mapping project, John and I started to pack up the boxes for transport to the next campsite and then sojourned towards the volcanic section to take a closer look at the sedimentary units at the top. Earlier in the week, we had seen a lithographic sandstone layer, like the Green River formation. But we hadn't seen much the day before. After John taught me how to use the Sun compass to take strike measurements, we decided to look around a bit, just to see if we could find a few fossils worth keeping. It was only 3:45 pm, the others weren't expected back to camp until 5, so we were only going to search for about twenty minutes or so. As I was climbing up the embankment, I dislodged a piece of rubble, this iron-y stained blocky rock that didn't look all that interesting until I turned it on its side.... We have now just discovered that the bone fragment found within that piece of rubble is part of the femur of a Champsosaur. The twenty minutes turned into an hour and a half, and another 3 hours the following day while we excavate what we could from the bone bed. |
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