One week In - Dominica Day 7

Hello everyone,

This is Abadie and Marcus here to tell you about day 7 of our time here on the island! After breakfast the group split up into two teams, team geomorph and team petro. Fortunate enough for all you readers, we we're each on different teams so you'll read about everything. 

Team petrology started out the day hunting for enclaves in a quarry on Micotrin, a lava dome in Morne Trois Pitons National Park. We were quite successful, we found a lot and several different types of enclaves that Sarah will be looking at for her project, as well as andesite for Jessie and Abadie to use.

An enclave from the quarry at Micotrin.

After the quarry, we attempted to hike up Micotrin to find more samples, but didn't get very far. The trail was practically vertical, and we were on all fours on the way up climbing over rocks and roots, so we headed back after about ten minutes.

The trail up Micotrin.

We visited two ignimbrites in Roseau valley to find pumice clasts, and we ended our day in the Botanical Gardens in Roseau getting more pumice at the top of a short trail. 

A beautiful ignimbrite in Roseau Valley.

There was a festival going on in the gardens, so we checked that out before heading back to Springfield to relax for the rest of the afternoon.

The view of Roseau from Jack's Walk Trail in the Botanical Gardens.

Team Geomorphology spent the day along the east coast of the island. Our groups goal was to collect sediment sieved to a specific grain size (less than 63 microns and between 250-850 microns) as well as collecting water samples from different rivers and streams. As Holli has been working in this region for years, these locations have been tested and photographed before, so a side project I've taken up is repeat photography; trying to recreate photos that have been taken in previous field seasons and see the changes. We started the day with high hopes of collecting sediment and water samples from 8 different locations, but unfortunately got rained out after site number six. 

Our first stop was at near a grocery store in the town of Portsmouth, which is in the north-eastern section of the island. It was a fast moving stream with large cobbles covering the banks and stream beds, and smaller to medium sized boulders acting as obstructions and creating rapids. This was a very common setting for most of places we sampled at. Other notable things throughout the day included stopping at a site with two large trees uprooted and integrated into the channel, seeing a small hermit crab scurry along the bank and leaving Amanda's camera at one site without realizing it. Its alright though, we figured out that we were missing it fairly quickly though, and were able to go back and grab it.

One of the repeat photography comparisons. Previous years image on the left, todays on the right. There was a noticeable increase in size and frequency of large rocks as well as much faster moving water. 

Overall, it was a fun day, not as exciting as the Valley of Desolation hike or  going through the Sulfur deposits, but interesting and eventful nonetheless!