Now I’m curious: what goes on the must-pack list for geoscience fieldwork in the tropics?

Geological Context

Fire and Ice are the local theme:

Fire:Vancouver is located in an active subduction zone (yes, we have the potential for megaquakes like Japan), and is part of the Ring of Fire. Our volcanoes are dormant, although you can see Washington’s Mount Baker to the south on a clear day. The combination of heat and stress characterizes almost all the rocks you’ll see: keep your eyes peeled for volcanic flows, columnar basalts, and dikes, as well as crazy folding and metamorphism jumbling everything up.

Ice:Our most recent glaciation was 15,000 years ago. Glaciers act like geological sandpaper, smoothing and polishing everything, scattering implausibly huge debris everywhere.

For a broader context, check out the geologic and disaster history of British Columbia.

Vancouver Convention Centre

The convention center is a lesson in ecology, climate change, and sustainability. Read the plaques around the interior to get the story of British Columbia’s mountain pine beetle infestation, and if you feel like braving the constant drizzle, check out the roof for active beehives on the urban green roof experiment.

From north windows and balconies, you get a fabulous view of the North Shore (ok, that’s a western view, but same idea!), highlighting the mountains polished by glaciers. Try to spot the line where smooth topography transitions to jagged peaks: that’s the ice line where everything polished was scoured by glaciers, and everything jagged poked out above the ice.

Local Fieldtrips

• Like most downtown city cores, our building materials feature quite a bit of local geology.
• Stanley Park is on the northwest corner of downtown, accessible via a moderate walk along the sea wall, or via public transit. The park features lovely old forests preserved to repair ships, but more importantly, 20 million years of history.
• The University of British Columbia is southwest of downtown, separated from the city by the Endowment Lands (a huge park totally worth an afternoon stroll). The university is located on glacial outwash sands compacted by later glaciers (glaciers everywhere!), resulting in a loosely cemented sandstone. Head down to the beaches to check out huge erratics (boulders dropped casually from melting glaciers), sandstone cliffs with delicate crossbedding features, and the occasional stray nudist (although it’s getting a bit chilly for them). You’ll see many small landslides; check out “A Vanishing Cliff” (page 29) for info on the Grand Campus Washout.
• Lighthouse Park is on the north shore, and is accessible via public transit.
• Lynn Canyon is the public-park alternative to Capilano. On the north shore, free, and accessible via public transit, this wooded mountain park is another great place to check out glacier features (and to cross a suspension bridge above a rushing baby river).
• Cypress is pretty much covered in snow, but is another public park on the north shore if you want to go snowshoing (rent from Mec).
• The Sea-to-Sky Corridor between Vancouver and Whistler travels along a stunning fjord, with all sorts of stunning destinations. My favourites are Shannon Falls (a quick from-the-parking-lot hike to a towering waterfall over glacially-polished cliffs; also home to deaf frogs), the Chief (the go-to local mountain climbing destination just shy of Squamish), and constant variations of columnar basalts.
• Any highway in BC is a mini-lesson in disaster mitigation, particularly for landslides and avalanches. The interior routes pass over a brand-new river delta, the catastrophic Hope Slide, and, depending on route-choice, into the abruptly vertical Fraser Canyon.

Vancouver International Airport (YVR)

Even when leaving town, you’ve still got a few bits of geoscience to eyeball:

• Domestic Terminal
• US Departures Terminal
• International Terminal

Additional Resources

• Vancouver, City on the Edge
• Questions? Ask me on Twitter or leave a comment here. I’ll be at the convention centre every day except Saturday, and I’m happy to meet up to talk rocks and/or disasters.
• Check out the Ocean Networks Canada live feed of the ocean floor in the exhibit hall.

My first crew chief.

My first crew chief, a man who radiated so much rugged masculinity he was promptly nicknamed “Stallone” or “Rambo” in every camp he worked, flagged all our radios in pink. This differentiated the company crew radios from the survey site’s camp radios, and made it far easier to spot the radios when they inevitably toppled into the brush.

Toolbag

The consequences of prevalent pink in my field gear goes beyond ease of identification and increased visibility. Having a signature colour makes it far faster to pull my gear when unpacking at the office; by assigning my field clothes to a colour I rarely wear in “real life,” post-laundry sorting and last-minute packing are faster, too.

Picking a signature colour strongly associated with femininity while working in a male-dominated industry greatly reduced the number of incidents of my gear growing legs and casually walking away. Better yet, converting to pink field gear has also increased the likelihood of misplaced items making their way back to me. In an iconic moment, at one field camp I was approached by a well-meaning gentleman who informed me he’d found my glasses on the floor of the mudroom, and tucked them into my raincoat pocket for safekeeping. The only problem? Neither glasses nor coat was mine, nor did they belong to the same person!

Field Fashion

This tactic is not without its risks. The first time I wore I pink hard hat, I had my first casual confrontation over the colour:

I’d never wear a pink hardhat because it would instantly undermine my credibility.

The flip side of finding it truly revolting to “make science girly“^[1] by colour-coding it pink is that I should be able to wear pink if it pleases me, so the next morning I laced pink sparkly shoelaces into my steel-toed rubber boots.

Field Boots

So go on, wear pink in the field. Just not on my job sites, please.

1. ^[1] Especially Comment 20 by Mandy Moon ↩

In recent decades, recreational users are more likely to be involved in fatalities than industrial users, and most of those avalanche victims triggered the avalanche that buried them. Online information is a good start for establishing background and context, but is no replacement for a trained, experienced guide. If you want to go into the backcountry, get trained, bring safety equipment, take an experienced guide with you, and adapt your plans to current conditions.

Aerodynamics at LAX

The domestic discount flight terminal at LAX features almost nothing at all, yet does have diagrams for Bernoulli’s Theorum, and shock waves at the transonic barrier.

• Disasters
• Biology
• Space Science
• Geoscience
• Science & Art

The Sea-to-Sky Wall

Granodiorite & Rhyolite

The rhyolite cools in columns, and is part of what makes the Sea-to-Sky corridor drive so pretty.

Related Reading

Industrial Minerals: Garibaldi Golden
Ashlu River Quarry
Glaciers & Volcanism
Canadian Cascade volcanism

• It took getting stuck in the Terrace Airport for me to finally discover the Earth Science Picture of the Day
• Singing sand dunes, paired up with Martian sands in motion as part of the impromptu geosphere Dunes Week in November.
• All the early tweets out of AGU involved beer, procrastination, and earthquakes in that order. Why beer? ‎”It helps with the free flow of information.” paired with “We go camping a lot.”
• Foo Fighters + 50,000 fans + proximity to seismic station = semi-continuous seismic signal peaking at 3Hz.
• Geotechnical Photo Album

Related Reading

2011 Link Fest