Day 6: Core shed

(Wednesday, 2 May 2007) All of the drill cores collected by CVRD are archived in several massive warehouses at the mine. As I mentioned at the end of Day 4, extensive coring operations were underway at a new plateau. To us geologists, this was like being given the keys to a candy shop. This place reminded me of the end of the movie "Raiders of the Lost Ark," where a lone technician is wheeling the boxed up Ark of the Covenant down row upon endless row of crates. Here in the core shed were hundreds of meters of core laid out for us to examine - a goldmine, er ironmine of information. I spent a good hunk of the morning poring over the cores looking for impact spherules, but sadly did not locate any.

Of particular interest to our team were the many sequences of jaspilite, which had been in short supply in the field. CVRD generously allowed us to take samples from the cores, so we identified several samples for the rock saw technicians to cut in half. In the afternoon, Simon Hook and myself worked with the rock saw technicians to try and reduce our sample set to a reasonable weight. The main problem with BIF samples is that they are freaking HEAVY. We tried very hard to be selective in our sampling and avoid the temptation of carting away everything we could carry. At the end of the day, we had a fully representative set of the various rock types exposed throughout the mining complex.

View inside the Core "Shed"

Scene from end of the movie "Raiders of the Lost Ark"

Dr. Nathan Bridges taking picture of core