January 16, 2012

We spent our morning today on the beach at Little Harbor sampling more metaconglomerate cobbles for Natalie's study. The sky was overcast all morning, but it cleared up early in the afternoon. The metaconglomerate block is right on the beach, and you can't get around it at high tide, so we visited it during low tide today. We arrived there around 7:30 am and worked until 10 am, which was low tide. We got a nice suite of samples. On the other side of the block it is in contact with the melange matrix, so we were able to get several samples of melange matrix in addition to the conglomerate cobbles.

When we left Little Harbor we went up towards the airport to scout out some more amhpibolite facies blocks and rinds for Julia's study. We hiked around and found several good blocks, however many of them are hard to obtain samples that represent a traverse across the block and rind. We ended up collecting one traverse that is somewhat weathered and one block rind-core pair (not a traverse). We then went to the airport for lunch and found another area to scout out blocks and rinds on the north side of the airport. We collected one sample that may be a traverse - it was a bit difficult to tell from the weathered surface of the sample exactly what we collected. We'll wait to see what the rock saw will reveal when we return home!