Sweaty clothes and rocky roads

If you have never gone for a geology field work, you've never studied the subject. The word 'geology' might still sound alien to many ears, it did to me when I first heard about it. During my initial days of trying to understand this subject, I could not find anything else in it except one thing- rocks. Whether you are in the laboratory or outside, all you get to study is rocks. 

Geology awakened me to the presence of so many rocks around- based on the way they look and how they were formed- hard, soft, igneous, metamorphic, layered, folded, with joints, glassy, gemstones and many more. There are also the ones with dead creatures embedded in or at times engraved on them, that come under paleontology. These rocks are usually studied based on their texture, what are they made of, internal structure of the stuff they are made of and so on. Just like an X-ray machine is used in medical sciences to get the images of the human skeleton, an X-ray diffraction technique is used to study the internal structure or the crystal structure of a rock. The X-rays are bombarded on a part of the rock sample that is usually in the form of a powder. Depending on the kind of atoms present in the rock, the regions where they are present, spaces between them, the x-rays get scattered at different angles and with different intensities, studying which, the possible arrangement of the atoms and thus the internal structure can be understood. Before this point, I'd never gone to visit a place to study what kind of rocks are found there and how they are different from the ones found at other places.

These field visits would be day-long where, we would walk, climb, run, crawl through mountains, flatlands, plateaus and thorny paths. We would start early in the morning with a heavy first meal of the day- apparently that was the only meal of the day we would have without sweat or dust and in a quiet place. Lunch was usually packed to carry along. The field work for the day ended late in the evening, followed by a quiet dinner, with no energy left. The day would end with a discussion or more precisely, a day-summary session where our professor would discuss what all we saw during the day and explain extra stuff. We would finally get to sleep late at the night and after a few hours it would be time to get ready for the next day's field work. 

All the locations we had to visit during the day were always pre-planned. The first thing that we would do at any topography was to find out the latitude and longitude of the place using a software called Latlong. Then, our professor would ask us to observe the rock type, watch for any specific patterns in the rock- like folds, joints, its texture. He would also help us recollect whatever we'd studied in theory and try to correlate. We used an instrument called the clinometer to study the inclination and the angle between two rock surfaces. A hammer was also a part of our geological field kit. This was used to break apart a small portion of the rock to study its internals and for keeping a sample of it to carry at the laboratory. But this needed to be done really carefully. I remember once, me and my friend hit a rock surface so hard that there was a tiny sparkle created and a small piece flew up in the air. Fortunately it didn't hit anyone. The hammer was also used as a standard for estimating the size of a rock feature while we took pictures of it. It goes without saying that, a comprehensive report on our field work was mandatory for evaluation. We would map all the collected data. Just like maps and globes have a scale in them to incorporate places of large distances, geological maps have contour lines to connect regions of equal altitudes.

After the first two days, the purpose started getting clearer. It struck to me that these were attempts to answer some of the fundamental questions of the universe- How was the Earth formed? How did the life originate? What caused the things around us to be the way they are? 

Rocks were tools, studying which we could address some of these questions. Geology wasn't just rocks but something much beyond. This subject had a vast reasoning landscape for many of the natural phenomenon like the continental drift, earthquakes, volcanoes, the underground water table, petroleum and coal reserves and many more. One of the really interesting concepts is the geological time scale, a systematic classification of ages of the Earth based on the evolving rock strata.

Its been a long time now since I last studied the subject. Many of my friends have walked down the geological career paths. I get to hear many stories from the quarry mines, construction sites-where the base rock needs to be studied before laying the foundation and so on. Some of them are also in the ground water table studies and as petroleum geologists. I am not very sure about the current scope of this subject, only a geologist would be able to answer it. I've had my share of it with the first and the only geology field work of my life in 2018. After which I chose pungent odors and fumes of chemicals over dusty and rocky roads. 

©Neha Kanase