January 13, 2012
We started our day in Shark Cove, on the western side of the island.
There are some fantastic metaconglomerates there. Natalie is going to
work on them for her senior thesis, so we spent the morning sampling
metaconglomerates. It was a very productive morning - we got about 12
cobbles in all.
After lunch along the beach we drove up to the end of the airport
runway. Along the road there are fantastic looking blocks in melange
matrix. It's a super place to see the block matrix relationships. We
even saw several blocks with rinds. The problem is sampling them....
The rocks are extremely weathered and it's simply impossible to get
anything fresh from them. We spent a little time trying. We ended up
getting some metaultramafic rocks and reaction zones adjacent to them.
We ended our day by going to the super large mafic block - Gorgon - and
collecting some pretty garnet amphibolites to take home with us.
Metaconglomerate in the ocean!