Day 16 - Logging data

Once upon a time in desert road flats, after revisiting our pyroclastic flow from the day before, our merry band found columns of pumice in the desert wasteland. Not your normal deposition feature, these tabular columns of larger pumices had blown out their matrix leaving behind elutriation pipes.

Our next adventure was into a pyroclastic fall that had been carved out just enough for us (without our backpacks) to squeeze into.

After our usual heated debate (during which Guil, Lydia, and Brad left us to fight for a consensus on ages and lithics) we left for an even cooler rock! A sparkly, shiny, magical colored rock awaited us. A funky little anomaly, it had us throwing around all guesses to what had caused it. Eventually it struck us - LIGHTNING. Possibly the coolest thing we’ve seen, we were busy giving the rock a photo shoot while being taught that it was a fulgurite with vaporized charcoal and reheated pumice.

After, we learned about the charcoal from burnt trees in the pyroclastic flow and some of us even drew trees with the burnt trees!

Then a new challenge greeted us - but this time we were all competing with each other. To help with a paper on pyroclastic flow direction based on tree falls, we were set off to document the direction of all possible charcoal trees in the area. Splitting into 3 teams we swept the entire area furiously scribbling down directions and giving each tree its own GPS tag.

Hours later, the three teams converged: John and the Curly Bois, Finding Trees and Kicking Ash, and Tree Time with the Pretty Girls. We totaled at around 920 data entries for the paper. We then all did rose diagrams for our own data and Guil did a big overall one as well. We did find a majority of the trees laying North South interestingly enough. Stay tuned for our upcoming paper - we were promised an acknowledgment if our data was useful.

As the sun set on the distant volcanoes, we concluded our day and headed to dinner happily ever after.

The end.

Loren & Margaret

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NZ Maymester 2019!

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