Acid drainage

What you are looking at here is sulphate crystals forming out of creek water flow. This sort of crystal formation is often only seen on the top of a car battery where the acid has been evaporating. In this case, this has lead to the naming and finding of a significant mineral resource called Sulphur Springs of zinc, copper and silver. As the orebody has been oxidised and weathered near surface, the water perculating through the hills flows out down this deeply incised creek/gorge and all the rocks are coated with this mostly white sulphate salts, though in places more pure sulphur is found (which is yellow in colour). This is how the deposit was located when in 1984 a geo H.Wilhelmij decided to investigate this encrustation and followed it up until it stopped and then sought an explanation for this.

As an aside, this deposit is yet to be mined though as the tiranny of distance, the ruggedness of the location and the fluctuations of comodity prices has left it a marginal deposit, though one day all the ducks will line up and this will be developed. More than 50km of drilling has been completed to get it to this stage though.

It's life Jim, but not as we know it!

Occasionally, just occasionally we get to see some really cool stuff in our wanderings in the shubbery. Well, OK cool stuff if you are into rocks and geo stuff. In 2006 I got to see a site that is considered worthy of the equivalent of heritage listing at a location generally known as North Pole (in the Pilbara).

A bit warmer than that other joint, it is also home to some outcropping sedimentary beds that are dated by lots of careful science (you need volcanic rocks to date, so you carefully map out the rocks in the area and decide which ones brackets the age of the sedimentary rocks you are looking at, then figure it out that way). Anyway, I digress. These rocks are bloody old, somewhere in the order of 3.5 billion years (3,500,000,000) ans they have this wavey dome like structures in them.

3,500,000,000 year old stromatolites in the Pilbara

While a few like to seek other explanations, the majority of people who see this accept that this is the earliest evidence for life on earth, which had probably not been solid for a full 1 billion years yet. The life form is generally known as stromatolites, and WA is also home to a couple of extremely rare examples of living stromatolite locations, most famously Shark Bay near Denham, and less well known but closer to civilisation in Lake Clifton, just south of Dawesville between Bunbury and Mandurah. I have also had the opportunity to visit both of these locations as well. Now, these domes are made up of particles of sand and silt trapped in algal like mats, or cyanobacteria, which are filament like stringy things naturally matted together like felt. They look for all intensive purposes like rocks, or black coral like bombies, but are in fact soft like felt, and can be easily sliced with a knife (as was demonstrated on a student field trip).

Shark Bay Stromaltolites

Soft enough to cut with a knife (and less, we did put it back afterwards).

You can see the layers and the gentle wavey domes.

Lake Clifton Thrombolites - Living fossils!

These thrombolites are just next door to a winery that I noticed was suffering from the loss of trade now the new Mandurah bypass road is up and running. Easy to get to for a quick visit then of for a tasting (and cheap wine).

I have also seen more recent outcrops of fossil stromatolites from different parts of the state, and have a small example of it sitting on the shelf in my office, but this one is probably only 450 million years old or there abouts.

What so cool about these things? Well, in the begining, we had a massive "greenhouse gas" problem. So much CO2, that literally there was no oxygen for us to exist on. This is evident by the nature of various sediments of the time. Some minerals that normally oxidise in the presence of air as we know it today can be seen rounded by abraision... litterally plucked from the rock they formed in, and rolled around in water in a stream similar to pebbles we like to use inlandscaping these days, and then deposited into a pile of other sediments and re-cemented to protect it from oxidation.

Anyway, back to no oxygen. Along come these cyanobacteria, and in the presence of sunlight we get that marvelous process called photosynthesis occuring, producing sugars and oxygen, both of which we now rely on to exist today.

It took a little while to get going... but about 2.6 billion years the cyanobacteria got plentiful enough to make heaps of oxygen, permant changing the makeup of our little 3rd rock from the sun. In fact, youmight say they almost did themselves out of a job, except plenty of other forms of life evolved to utilise this stored energy and convert it all back to CO2.

One final connection to where I am now.... once all this oxygen was freely available, iron which used to be quite soluable in water started to convert into rust coloured scum, like Perth bore water and become insluble in water. This happened as the water mixed (storms or algal blooms or something) and tiny layers of iron started being put down in the sediments with the usual stuff, givig rise to the funniest of all rock types.... BIF's (Banded Iron Formations). These have now become the source of much of our iron ore industry that has made WA a source of a lot of the world's steel.

Fish

As part of my early mid life crisis (plus a resources slump) I went of teaching science at a country high school. One of the most enjoyable component for me was I was allowed to teach aquaculture. Below is the feeding procedure we used when I high tailed back off to Perth to catch up with my girlfriend and left students in charge to feed. I tender the photo below as a measure of our success. I would like to try the aquaponics in the back yard now to grow herbs.

FISH FEEDING PROCEDURE

· Fish are generally fed twice a day. They are used to about 8:30am and between 3:30pm and 5pm.
· Currently (beginning of July) they are being fed between 75g and 100g pellets per feeding session.
· 100g works out to be approximately 200ml in the plastic beaker provided with the pellets (25g per 50ml). There are approximately 600 pellets per 100gms.
· Throw the feed out in small handfuls, and observe the feeding activity between each handful. Stop feeding them when the activity slows down.
· Record the temperature (thermometer on weldmesh bench inside enclosure) at the time of feeding.
· All records to be noted on sheet in blue file (currently kept in grey plastic bag wedged behind pole near door).
· If you miss a feeding do not try to make up the food amount. It will not harm them to miss a feed or two, and there will be less cleaning as a result.
CLEANING
· Clean the floor when build up of brown waste on tank becomes noticeable (approximately every 3 days, but this depends on feeding rates). This is done by starting a siphon with the hose attached to the aluminium pole and vacuuming the floor. It is easier to turn off the pumps while doing this to see the bottom. Replace the water by turning on the red tap while siphoning.
· It is also useful to drain the biofilter about once a week by turning off the pump and pulling it out of the water. It will then drain out, and you can clean the pre-filter of the pump during this time. Just pull it apart and wash under tap at sink outside.

I'll huff, and I'll puff....

This is a picture of a small exploration camp in the way of a cyclone.... I think less than 12 hours to impact. This one blew category 4, almost category 5 which means the winds were greater than 250kph. Our guys hooked up the vans and headed up the highway. The donga (set of accomodation rooms could not just be hooked up... instead was chained to the ground with cemented in anchor points).

Some days later we got to go back into the site. The dark rail-track like things in the foreground is all that is left of the donga in the original location. The rest was spread over a trail of at least 2km, where the remnants of a bar fridge (minus the door) was located.

In this cyclone unfortunately 3 people died. We are only now two and a half years on, going through the courts to understand the reasons. If this was anywhere else in the world the number would have been higher. It is just that so few live in this country, but this will always be a lesson that buildings need to be well contructed, properly anchored, and people need to get to somewhere safe (either away from the cyclone or a properly rated building). To see building tossed around like some three year olds play building blocks shows the potentency of these storms.

A new cyclone season is about to commence... it never hurts to be prepared.

Somebody’s got to do something!

One of the most distressing tragic events being played out reguarly across this country is the plight of the indigenous people. Any visit to any remote community leaves most city folk deeply saddened to see the squalor and crowding evident in community housing. The thing is, most city folk do not visit. The closest they get is a visit via the local tabloid with a few photographs, but the page gets turned (whether to the back page or page three) and the problem forgotten. I have attached a few words I wrote following the death of a young child electrocuted in a wall space, and our local Premier daring to say what many thought.

http://au.news.yahoo.com/thewest/a/-/newshome/5984134/barnett-attacked-over-roebourne-death-comments/

I have been mulling over this tragedy wondering how it connects (it may not have made much of a story in the east) and one of the key things about this is that state of the house. Barnett has just been castigated for saying what he sees by the looks of it. I am amused by the rallying cry - yet again “Somebody’s got to do something” or “the government to blame” . It looks to me the hole in the wall that this toddler has crawled through and got zapped has been temporarily repaired (see glue patches on the wall and the panel leaning up against the wall). I wonder when this was ripped off, when was the hole either uncovered, or enlarged. The lack of an RCD is a tragedy and I don’t want to predict the cause of that (apparently one was supposed to have been installed according to records, but there was only one for next door).

We take the blame for nannying these people, yet we also cop it for not fixing the (often willful) damage where they live.

Let me take up the cry “Somebody’s got to do something…” Guess who!

Launching something new

Six Mile Creek after a cyclone - Pilbara WA

I strongly suspect I will be an irregular poster due partly to a busy lifestyle with two older boys at home, and a job that takes me away from the bright lights to where I think Australia shines it's best. What I will try to do is relay some of the great stories that I have collected over some two decades of working in the mineral industry, in particular exploration geology across this wide brown land. A bit of a snapper with the camera, I think I can share some of the pictures, but at all time I will have to be cautious to not expose who I work for or any commecially sensitive information.





If you happen upon this post, perhaps give me a little time to adjust to the technology and get my rusty memory working to relay some of the adventures I have experienced, then return to sample to see if it is to your taste.

Bigtones