Day 1 - A bit of a recci

You might think that following a 30-hour journey, only arriving at your accommodation in the early hours would lend itself to a long lie and a day to recover. Not in this line of work. Being the dedicated geologists we are, we were in the field by 10.30am. Granted, it was an easy first day of fieldwork, and regardless of how tired we were waking up to this veiw got us very excited to head into the field.

A panoramic of the veiw from our 'tent', the sun just touching on the western-most crater walls in the far distance.

We recci’d our fieldwork area, driving around to get our bearing, and a feel for what to expect. We located the youngest lava flows – which we will be sampling at some point during our time here.

The rocks here are certainly interesting; within the caldera we see lots of lava’s flows (of differing ages) which all erupted after the caldera collapse. We have seen lots of obsidian, and some very dark pumices mixed in with the lava’s. I had never seen such a dark pumice before, but I am assured that this is very normal. There are also lots of very nice Tuffs (pyroclastic deposits), though these are mostly (not exclusively) found outside the caldera ‘wall’. Although generally a fairly simple mix of rocks, we have seen some very odd, uncharacteristic features within the lava’s…something to keep us busy thinking! It has definitely dawned on us just how vast the caldera is (it is the 2nd largest in the world) and how much ground we need to cover in just 3 weeks! Especially as the terrain doesn’t look the kindest.

The youngest lava certainly looks a challenge to travel over – especially as it’s so crumbly in places.

We arrived at one of the drill sites towards the end of the day. Although busy at this time, they were happy to arrange a tour of the drill site tomorrow. The purpose of this is for Helen to get a better understanding of the engineering side of geothermal energy production. Having seen the site today I am very excited for this. Throughout the day I kept thinking I was hearing an airplane or something but didn’t ever see one when looking up to the sky. It soon became apparent that what I thought was an airplane was in fact one of the wells being vented. They had detected sulphur, and so opened up the well to let out as much as possible. It was a very impressive site, especially upon learning that all the steam was in fact hot water travelling up from around 2km underground and ‘flashing’ to steam as it hits the surface- it changes state instantaneously at the surface because the sudden change in temperature and pressure. To produce electricity, a turbine is put in the tanks collecting the steam. So simple, yet so effective.

‘Venting’ at well 10. The smell down wind was lovely, a strong stench of rotten eggs!

We were treated to a delicious dinner on getting back to our accommodation. It is great here at Maili Saba Camp, a definite home away from home.