THE CANAL

While on canal land we have to wear safety gear :(

We finally got access to go to the canal! It's not the all-encompassing, long-term permit we've been working on since day one, but for the next week we'll be allowed to prospect and excavate along one particular tract of canal expansion land. We've had this short-term permit in hand since the fourth of this month, but were told we needed an escort to the work site to cover safety regulations and let us know where we can and can't work. As I mentioned in an earlier post, the one man who had authority to do this was on vacation and we hadn't been able to get in contact with him. Only just this morning he finally returned Aaron's calls, so we switched gears immediately from a lab day into a field day and were down to the canal by 10:00 AM. We met up with our "chaperone" near the entrance and followed his truck down to the exposure where Aaron and the other interns had gone a few weeks ago, when I had stayed behind to work on the plaster project. When we got there, he rolled down his window, signaled to Aaron to park anywhere off the main road, and sped off back to his office. The frustration on Aaron's face was plain to see - we had been waiting over two weeks just to have someone take us down to a location we had already been to before. But that's the way it is with the Canal Authority, nothing we can do about it. At least we're on the canal now and (fingers crossed) by the time this permit expires, we should have the long-term permits in hand.

Our work site. Right underneath the hill is the current canal
and the tops of a few ships.

A pretty representative sample of what we're working with.

The site we worked at for the rest of the day was the wall of an immense ditch that had been dug out as part of the future canal passage. The rock was supposedly shallow marine (though we have reason to doubt this) and had been metamorphosed to a moderate degree (schist-grade?) so that all the clay minerals formed smooth sheets within the greater rock body. There were visible fractures within the wall at various scales, large to small, and looking into the ditch you could see the faults that had caused them. All of these features culminated in making it very difficult to remove any material without it crumbling or exploding under the force of the chisel. The beds we worked in contained planes of dense leaf impression fossils, some with truly extraordinary preservation, and it was inevitable that some were going to get destroyed in the process of excavation. Our strategy was to quarry out boulders much larger than would normally be necessary, using the existing fractures in the rock to decide which fossils we would sacrifice in the name of cutting things down in to smaller pieces. Even with the care that we put into it, old fractures would rupture or new fractures would form, destroying the leaves we had hoped to take back with us. So it was a slightly frustrating day, but also a lot of fun from a problem-solving perspective. Especially when compared to hours of lab work!

The workers had kindly marked off a fossil branch for us
and stopped excavating, so we packed it up!

We got back to the labs right at 4:00 PM, just in time for the day's seminar. It was given by a student from the University of Panama and was about a new species of fresh water dolphin that had been found along the Caribbean coast (very close to Pina!). What I did not know going in was that the talk would be given in Spanish! I was able to follow about 60% of the presentation, which I'd say is a decent amount. I was dead tired from being out under the sun (plus I'd been expecting a lab day, so I hadn't slept much) so I was very proud of myself for not dozing off, or even coming close, during the seminar.