Bugged by a Chip
Tuesday October 7, 2008
Sunday I visited Shell Beach, on the Sonoma County coast. The trip was to collect photos for an upcoming gallery on this showcase of Franciscan rocks, like the fine boulder of chlorite schist shown here. The locality is visited by geology classes and not many other people. Geology instructors are very good about training their students to NOT bring hammers to parklands and NOT to collect specimens (beyond a few beach pebbles) without a permit.
So when I noticed several chips knocked out of the boulder, like this one, I didn't know how to feel. Either someone disobeyed the code of the field, or some lay person, like the teenager I caught carrying out a serpentinite boulder, exercised their curiosity on this wonderful stone. Darwin suspected that humans have a monkey nature, and indeed all primates seem to enjoy banging on things and throwing refuse around. So I felt disappointment, but on the other hand the mica layers in the rock were beautifully exposed by the damage. And am I ethically compromised in photographing the scar?
Geology Guide photos
Comments
I don’t think so - sometimes we have to use what we can get, like roadcuts, even if we might not have encouraged the exposure.
There is a fine line to be drawn between conservation and preservation. Last week I revisited a (ex-)quarry that I hadn’t been to in thirty years. Back then, when it was a working quarry, there were fantastic exposures of basalt containing ultrabasic olivine-rich mantle xenoliths (I still have a piece in my office). It is the only place that ‘the mantle can be seen’ in England.
Thirty years on, the quarry is now abandoned and what was not back-filled with waste is now a SSSI (site of special scientific interest) and no hammering is allowed. All the olivine in the xenoliths has rotted away.
Students today can’t experience the excitement that I felt thirty years ago of ’seeing a piece of the mantle’ in the field.
There is a case to be made I think as geoconservationists rather than geopreservationists to [professionally] freshen up some classic geology from time to time.
Weathering Happens… in many ways.
The beauty of beach exposures is that nature freshens the “quarry face” constantly. I get some of my best photos of rocks at the beach.