The patience of a geophysicist

This is a state of mind that was not familiar to me before I arrived in Tanzania. I first encountered it with Greg Maude, the Australian who was doing the EM work in Rulenge, and have often wondered if I would ever aquire such a state of mind. Today was my coming of age... The patience of a geophysicist has to be able to withstand numerous major set backs and twice as many minor annoyances whilst remaining in a reasonable and logical frame of mind, ie. not flipping loosing it!

So today, we have 16 lines to complete on the current site totalling 4.6 km. This is not an infeasible amount, perfectly reasonable considering at the previous site we covered 9 km + on some days. We arrive at site at 9 and are off and away by 9:20. Now this isn't the Forest of Spiders any more, but it has been replaced by the forest of dense thorny bushes instead! So the lines we need to walk have to go through patches of these ridiculous thorn bushes - I mean the kind of thorns you only see in Kids story books when it's a horror in a wood - and they need to be cut out of the way. We invested in a punga - very large sharp machete - and this is what I was in charge of today, along with the GPS, and Abdallah was running the Magnetometer behind me. The path needed to be cleared but the thorns did not give up without a fight and would scratch and snag every part of me - I have had thorns stuck in my arms, legs, back, scalp and bottom - but I knew this was coming so, you know, it wasn't too bad.... not really.

So we're going well, we've complete 7 1/2 lines and we have a lot of time left as our drive is away from the field all day picking up a spare tyre following the puncture on the way to site the previous day. This is when Abdallah, who is a hard worker and was going strong carrying the very uncomfortable Magnetometer equipment, was struck by Malaria. He was fine he said, and continued working. He was however repeatedly ducking into the bush to vomit and so we didn't get much further very quickly.

This was when Murphy's Law kicked in. THe magentometer, a Geotron G5, suddenly turned off. And on again. And on and off again a few times. Now when we got it back online it had reset all of it's settings, time, date, mode etc. Not a problem, but then it had also filled up it's internal memory - something that really shouldn't be possible unless you were doing readings all day and all night, all week! So we head back to the site base, where the other equipment has been left, and we download the data onto the laptop - only to find that the data we had taken all day... has been deleted, and replaced with zeros. For everything. All day, all for nothing.

So yes, all is well when you look at the big picture and have a lot of patience! :) So we have to do the same work again tomorrow but never mind, T.I.G. (this is geophysics) after all. I'm still enjoying having a bit more control over things, even if they do go wrong!

I hope you are all well. It was lovely to speak to you (M+D, nanny, jenni), I really appreciate your calls.

Look after yourselves,

Love to all,

Joe.

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