Day 4 - Some uninvited guests

Today we had Tito from the GDC (Geothermal Development Company) offices in Nakuru come and join us. He is one of the GDC geologists and he had kindly sorted the access issue we were having. He joined us today to impart his knowledge of the area and show us about. He was also keen to learn what we are doing here. Just to clarify, Tito certainly wasn’t one of the unwelcome guests mentioned in the title of this post… I’ll get onto them. Before even leaving Maili Saba (our accommodation) he told us with no doubt that it will be impossible for us to get to the caldera walls to do structural mapping. This is down to there being no road access remotely close to where we want to be mapping. Or if there is a road nearby, the snake infested, crumbly, sharp lava stands between the road and the caldera wall.

The large lava flows that stand between the roads and where we want to be mapping. I am stood in the foreground for scale. Bottom picture shows the nature of the lava we would need to clamber over to get to the caldera walls.

Ordinarily I would happily venture into such terrain. The remoteness of this place, and lack of rescue infrastructure however, turns even a small incident into something potentially serious – and the likelihood of a small fall here makes it a risk not worth taking. As such we must re-assess our strategy for structurally mapping the caldera walls…. We will be racking our brains over the next day or so to produce a new plan of action.

Despite this rather large set-back to our overall objectives we thought we were in for a good long, and productive day, especially having Tito with us - his expertise and knowledge of the area is invaluable to us. But there is always something to disrupt plans…. today it was car troubles.

Our car being reapaired... no jacks here, just rocks to prop uo the car.

I quickly became nicknamed ‘the mechanic’ as I managed to guess correctly what the problem was – brake pads and wheel bearings- just from noise the car was making. I would love to say I have some genius ‘mechanic psyche’, but it’s probably just down to the number of times my old car broke down before finally dying earlier this year. We didn’t get back on the road until gone midday…. Once in the caldera Tito took us to the one place he thought we might be able to access the caldera wall - in the NW section. But the road through the lava (which was up to 30m thick here) is not yet complete. We did spend a bit of time getting our bearings in this section of the caldera- we hadn’t ventured this far before now.

We were invited to see ’The Brine project’. They are currently experimenting using brine (the waste water from the wells) in agriculture. Brine is contaminated, often with heavy metals that are poisonous to us if too much is ingested.

GDC are currently testing the levels of such contaminants that are taken up by plants grown in the contaminated water. The hope is that with certain methods in place the brine can be ‘recycled’ and used to irrigate local farms. We were shown around a greenhouse in which they are growing tomatoes and kale using different concentrations of brine. There is very little (if any) difference in yield or quality between the different brine concentrations. The tomatoes and kale are in the lab at present to test for metals such as boron. It will be really interesting to see the results, if levels are safe then this would be a very effective way of recycling the water. As we know A LOT of water is required in both drilling and in producing geothermal energy here.

Top - the different concentrations of Brine - from 100% brine to 100% water- stored by the greenhouse and feeding the different sections growing kale and tomatoes. Bottom - In the greenhouse, divided into 5 sections (0% brine, 30% brine, 50% brine, 70% brine and 100% brine) each growing a plot of kale and a plot of tomatoes. No difference in the amount or quality between the 5 plots. Let's see what the lab results show...

Following this Tito took us to his ‘office’ in the caldera. He studies the ‘cuttings’ from the drilling, and produces a report on the mineralogy and rock type. The cuttings are the rock fragments produced when drilling. When Tito gets them, it looks like a bag of coarse clay/mud. But washed, and looked at under the microscope you can easily see the minerals. It was very insightful to see the rocks we had been unsure about the other day under the microscope. Some of the literature had called them Trachytes but I hadn’t been convinced. Trachyte is usually quite a pale colour, but the rocks we were looking at on Saturday was very dark, basaltic looking. Under the microscope these dark rocks look very pale and are composed mostly of plagioclase feldspar – I have been convinced that the lava’s are Trachyte, at least these ones anyway.

Looking at the cuttings under the microscope, only when seeing the lava under the microscope was I convinced that it was Trachyte.

On our drive out of the calders we spotted surface emanations. This is where steam rises from the ground due to heated water moving up through ground. These are better known as fumeroles, though I was informed the difference between the two is that fumeroles are much more vigourous, producing more steam. The entire area from where the surface emanations were originating was really warm. It was like a hot bath of air in the muddy trench. Very surreal, but an awesome thing to experience – I’ve been to natural hot springs before, but this was so different and kind of odd, even though I know both are caused by the same process.

The steaming trench. The trench is from pipes being remove. As there wasn't too much steam rising it was difficult to photograph, but you can just see some steam to the left of my hand.

On to the uninvited guests… returning to camp from a wonderful day in the field we were greeted by baboons in the camp. This didn’t concern me in the slightest to begin with; I know baboons can be aggressive but I also know that they usually keep themselves to themselves. But the staff seemed quite concerned by the baboons in camp, and so I was slightly weary. Apparently they are attracted to females, especially white women. But as I said the baboons I don’t really mind…. when the guest is a rather large spider in the bathroom of our tent however, it is a very different story! Those who know me will know I don’t deal too well with spiders! It took some courage, and the fact I really needed to pee, for me to go back into the bathroom…