Photography exercise: Textures of water

This post is just an excuse to show off some photos I took the other day. We were down at Middle Cove hunting for capelin (more about this hopefully in an upcoming post) and I took the opportunity to chill on the beach and practice my photography skills. Enjoy.

Searching for capelin.

Santa Claus' summer job.

Playing with long exposures.

Going the other way with fast shutter speeds.

Pockets of the pebbles under the water.

Foamy.

The more photos I take the more and more I enjoy it, and the better I become. Please comment and let me know what you think!

On the wrong side of the road

When I moved to Newfoundland, I had no great hopes of people coming to visit me. It costs a lot of money to get over here and there are far more exotic/sunny places for people to spend their hard earned money on. Imagine my excitement when my best friend told me she wanted to come over.

One of the prerequisites of visiting Newfoundland was a willingness to rent a car and to drive. On the other side of the road. A side effect of me not being able to drive on any side of the road, and the lack of public transport to get you anywhere other than St John's. Man, I miss trains.

I had ordered the weather especially for Emily's arrival, primarily to ensure that she was able to land, but also for aesthetic reasons. Anywhere looks better when the sun is shining. As she emerged from the airport to blue skies we made quick plans with our helpful Latvian chaffeur to go down to Cape Spear to see the arched iceberg that I had heard a lot of hype about. We arrived to a stream of cars parked on either side of the Cape Spear road and an impressive chunk of ice.

A huge iceberg with an ever growing arch. Tour boat for scale.

Partners in crime.

Sunshine, icebergs and fog. Newfoundland in one shot.

A little revision/learning of the road signs of Newfoundland the night before prepared both myself and Emily for our road trip. First stop Bonavista, where I had seen icebergs a few weeks previously. The weather wasn't great (I could only reserve the good weather for a couple of non-consecutive days) but it was dry, which is the most you can ask for. When the icebergs are around, the weather stays grey and cold unfortunately. The 300km drive ended with some awesome icebergs, bracing winds, and a suprisingly precisely timed appearance from a gathering of puffins.

The Dungeon. Small English girl for scale.

An array of different shaped icebergs,
one curiously resembling either a Muppet or a dog.

The wonders of puffins attempting to fly.

The following day after a typically Canadian breakfast of pancakes, maple syrup and bacon for Emily, and a tasting of some of the 42 homemade jams on offer at White's B&B we headed back towards the Avalon with a couple pitstops along Bay de Verde.

The Spirit of Harbour Grace, commemorating Emelia Earheart's maiden
female solo flight across the Atlantic, setting off from Harbour Grace itself.

Day 3 was dedicated to the Irish Loop. I've (been) driven down the eastern coast about as far as Renews, but I've always wanted to explore the southern Avalon. Unfortunately Mistaken Point was a no go. The tours aren't running at the moment and the roads are in really bad condition. I will get there before I leave though! Most of the way down the loop is typical Newfoundland landscape of trees and rocks, but you pass a point down past Cappahayden when the trees disappear and you are in the barrens. Civilisation seems a distant memory. After popping into the Mistaken Point interpretation centre at Portugal Cove South we drive on past Trepassey and stopped for lunch near the St Shott's Rd. The silence was deafening. It was fabulous. We were expectantly hoping to see caribou but the lack of wildlife made the experience all the more great. It wasn't completely devoid of life however. As I was filming a panorama an unidentified bird got spooked, made a funny noise and flew away. No idea what it was.

Nothingness.

Always wanted to take one of these.

Never devoid of human activity.

We also stopped at Cape Spear again to check on the arched iceberg from above.
These were the remains.

Day 4 saw our shortest trip, exploring the northern Avalon as well as popping into The Geocentre (Emily is a geologist at heart). The sun decided to pop out in the afternoon so we got a great view from Signal Hill to finish the day. Overall driving total was ~1100 km. Great job Em, and thanks for doing it again!!

Naturally a Screech In was in order for the Friday night. Bologna was eaten, cod were kissed and rum was drank. Another Newfoundlander was inducted. A night of spending all my Loonies on the jukebox ensued and involved a trip to the poutinerie. Walking home as the sun started to make an appearance ended a typical Newfoundland night out. Definitely wasn't an early one.

The last thing on the list of things to do was the Signal Hill hike, and Sunday was a perfect day for it. Around The Battery, up to Cabot Tower and then over to see the growing eagles, before dropping down into Quidi Vidi village, an impromptu lunch at Mallard Cottage, washed down with a brewery tour, rounded things off nicely, and ensured that Emily hadn't brought her hiking boots out with her for nothing.

Stunning day.

Difficult to understand the scale of these two things floating in the ocean.

Eagles are growing with every visit.

Love these stilted houses in The Gut.

Great beers from this place.

Things we learnt on this trip. Puffins can only fly anti-clockwise. There is no such thing as too much jam. Beach sediments are exciting to both geographers and geologists alike. You can play Ed Sheeran's "Sing" too much. Ivica Olić isn't a scary Croatian to everybody. How to say condominiums. Poutine is only good when there is still cheese. English pubs should always have hunting wallpaper. Iceberg beer tastes of nothing. I love my friends (well I didn't learn this, but the trip did reinforce it). Thanks so much for coming Emily.

Not-so-bald bald eaglets

Just a quick post today about the latest new residents of Signal Hill. Around the beginning of May a returning pair of Bald Eagles made a nest on the cliffs just off the Cuckold's Cove trail between Signal Hill and Quidi Vidi. Eagles aren't that exotic to some people ('Merica!) but I got very excited and hiked up to see them. Walking down from the Signal Hill side (the easiest direction to do it in), I asked my friend Tijana (who had previously seen them) where exactly the eagles were. As we started our descent the answer became apparent; where the crowds of people with zoom lenses were huddled.

One of the eagles in its nest, May 10th.

There location was also demarcated by "Bald Eagle breeding area" signs, and yellow triangular signs warning people not to go near the cliff. An excellent move on behalf of St Johns in my opinion, as common sense isn't as common as we would all like to think. The nest is a fair way out as expected, really testing the x35 optical zoom on my camera, so getting any closer than the trail is dangerous, stupid and nigh on impossible.

Devoted ornithologists have since become a near permanent feature in one particular spot on the trail, and in the last week it broke on social media and various blogs that two chicks had emerged from the nest. Cue another impromptu hike through this beautiful town. I was worried, walking up this time from the Quidi Vidi side, that I wouldn't be able to see it as it was a foggy day out to sea, despite the sunshine in Downtown. Thankfully my effort wasn't in vain, and the fluffy eaglets were plainly visible.

Nest and proud mother on sentry duty.

Two grey fluffy blobs.

It'll always be cool to see an Eagle.

Converted to VMS

My Dad recently asked me to show him more pictures of rocks. Anyone who knows me knows that I never have a shortage of rock photos, something exploited in a drinking game we made up in undergrad. But my Dad's earnest request was well timed. I was just about to go off on another of my geological jaunts across Newfoundland.

This one was in the form of the MUN SEG Student Chapter Spring fieldtrip. The MUN SEG Student Chapter is a sub-society of the Society of Econominc Geologists, and is run by the students, myself included, here at MUN. The Chapter had been dead in the water for the last couple years, something my colleagues and I saw as a great shame, what with all the fabulous economic geology research that is done here at Memorial. So we revamped and got it up and going again. This year we've had a trip to the Bell Island Iron Mines, a Bowling Night with AAPG, and numerous exciting guest speakers. But we had bigger plans. And that's how this trip came about.

The gang down the Bell Island Iron Mine in October 2013.

The weather you would expect going to Bell Island in October.

The majority of the (hard rock) people that live on the 5th floor of the Murray Building are economic geologists, specifically ones that work on VMS (volcanigenic massive sulphide) deposits. These are volcanic hydrothermal systems near the sea floor (akin to black smokers) that form big deposits of metal sulphides (metals like copper, lead zinc, sometimes gold). I've been taught the basics behind how they work in class. I've been to seminars from all my colleagues who dissect the individual bits of the system, from the magmatic heat sources, to the muds on top of them, to the deposit itself. Yet I've never actually seen one "in the wild" as I like to call it. And that's why I was so excited about the trip. Add to that the fact that it was my colleagues that were running it, showing us the rocks they have dedicated so much time to, and that we were going further west than I had ever been on this island, I knew it was going to be a good weekend.

We started the trip by heading 6 hours west to the Duck Pond Mine, via an overnight stop in Grand Falls-Windsor. After a detailed intro to the rocks we got ready to go underground. This required a number of sexy accessories including white overalls, helmets, headlamps, emergency oxygen packs, safety glasses and hi-vis jackets. I've been underground before in coal and salt mines, but we went down via elevator shaft. It is a completely different experience driving down the ramp in complete darkness, 300m into the earth, with the hustle and bustle of other trucks and machinery around you. 

Having a look at the rocks underground.

The gang dolled up after we returned to surface.

Safely back at the surface, laden with tonnes of shiny sulphide-bearing rocks we had lunch and then proceeded to look at drill core from the Boundary and Lemarchant mines, as well as looking at the "scrap" pile, in hope of discovering some goodies.

Found some Au (albeit in core)! It helps when its circled for you through...

Some replacement style VMS textures.

Big diggers.

We then went up to the Baie Verte Peninsula and the Dorset Museum that was to be our home for the next 2 nights. We arrived in the settlement of Fler de Lys to a spectacular sight of broken up sea ice with the most incredible dusky lighting. Me and Eddie were raring to go with our cameras set before the vans had even stopped. My photos don't do it justice.

I upped the saturation a lot but I don't even care.

Why wouldn't you kayak through the ice?

Lovely sunset.

The only Soapstone (talc-schist) outcrop in North America that preserves
 Paleoeskimo (~1600 yrs ago) vessels being carved out of the rocks.

Next day and we were off the to Ming deposit where again we looked at core and got to pick up shiny samples from the ore pad. We also got to go to the milling facility where those very same metalliferous rocks are concentrated into a product that is shipped off elsewhere in the world for further refinement. This is done by the froth flotation method, by which ore is crushed and then mixed into a slurry. Then the slurry is foamed up to create a froth on the top which holds the metals you're concentrating, which leaves the gangue material you don't want at the bottom. You then skim off the metals from the top using paddles. Watching it in action is surprisingly mesmerising, looking like a bubbling golden cauldron of heavy metals.

A rock like this...

Gets turned into a moving slurry like this...

That gets swept off like this.

As well as the mine site visits we wanted to explore why these mines were there; what geologically allowed these deposits to form. I'm not going to try and explain that to you here, primarily because I'm not even sure myself what was going on. Cool rocks are cool rocks regardless as to whether I can wrap my little brain around a hugely complicated tectonic story. Along the way we stopped at Tilt Cove to see some of the ophiolite sequence, rare seafloor rocks that have been thrust up to the earth's surface. We stopped at Coachman's Cove to see some highly deformed and folded rocks that record crashing together of landmasses. And we saw the locally famed "virginite outcrop", an awesome, striking green rock that went through some strange geochemical processes producing some really odd chromium-rich minerals. Then we finished up at a fabulous roadside outcrop that showing a great number of complexly intruding molten rocks of all different size, colour and composition. All parts of the puzzle that people much smarter than me are trying to put together.

Leftover core pile.
Population of Tilt Cove in 1901 = 1370.
Population of Tilt Cove in 2011 = 5.

Brecciated pillow basalt at Tilt Cove.

The gang at Coachman's Cove.

Deformed wavy rocks and sea ice.

Another triumph for Miniature Mode.

Green colour in the virginite coming from fuchsite,
a chromium-rich mica.

At least 4 phases of intrusion seen in this particular part of
the Paul's Lake Dyke Swarm.

My fellow SEG committe members worked their socks off to put on this trip and I and everyone else are very thankful for that. I'm chuffed I finally got to see a VMS in the wild. A lot of golden shiny sulphide samples were taken. A lot of card games were played. A lot of miles were driven. And a lot was learned. Let's hope that the MUN SEG Student Chapter can keep going from strength the strength.

PS. Dad, was that enough rock photos for you?

PPS. If it wasn't, check out the video I put together to commemorate the trip;

MUN SEG Spring Fieldtrip video