Notes from the field: Tiryns, 2012

At the beginning of our last day in the field, the sun was already well above the ruins of the Mycenaen castle in Tiryns. We had to wait for the GPS to wake up - he'd been increasingly sluggish the last week. Then we made some random gravity measurements and a few quick profiles before the van had to be packed for the drive back to Germany (on the Superfast ferry from Patras to Ancona, Italy and then overland). Most of us flew back to Cologne from Athens.

Looking back, three days later and home in rainy Cologne, it's amazing all the data we collected: passive seismic, P-wave tomography, S-wave tomography, active seismic (in place until next spring), gravity, and differential GPS locations for almost everything. Hector, our doctoral student also did some structural geology measurements.

It's been a field campaign of varying length. A couple of us had been there for four weeks at that time, others three weeks. I think I could have handled another week, but then would have come to the end of my endurance. Once you're over fifty, you really feel it in your bones when you're measuring in 35^oC for eight hours a day. I wouldn't have been able to stand it if it weren't for my lovely and capable measuring partner, Jana (featured below).

 A girl and her differential GPS. It's not easy looking good in the field, but Jana managed it every day.

Next year we'll go back to uncover Medea's geophysical secrets.

A pictorial journal shows the highlights of our Odyssey along our appropriately-named project HERACLES.

The van with its Uni Cologne logo - driven from Cologne to Tiryns and back again.

A panoramic view of Tiryns castle from the east

West view of the castle from the aptly named Mosquito Alley. A mini seismometer array lurks in the foreground

 

Science in Action! Here's the newly designed shear wave source being applied to a refraction line on Mosquito Alley.

Our hotel pool at Anthemion House and a view to Napflion and the hills beyond. Unfortunately, we could not enjoy the pool as much as we would have liked due to just being too darn tired at the end of the day.

Dida, the dig Hund helping Gregor analyze the day's data.

Heracles : Report from Tiryns, Week 1

HERACLES, our archaeoseismological (big word, eight syllables, wooh) project in the ruins of the Mycanean Palace in Tiryns started last week. I won't be joining the crew for another week, but I do have pictures!

The gravimeter that has my name on it. He's waiting patiently for my arrival.

Not a field of flowers, but a field of seismometers. With their own sun.

Every dig needs its own dog. He has a Greek name (Dida) and a German one (Wurst).

Archeologists and Geoscientists of all sizes and nationalities working together. Yes, it can be done.

Archeoseismic study of damage in Roman and Medieval structures in the center of Cologne, Germany

I am proud of all the authors of the above-named paper (Klaus-G. Hinzen, Stephan Schreiber, Claus Fleischer, myself, and Isabel Wiosna; see link below), the culmination of three years of research, one doctor title (Stephan Schreiber), a master's degree (Isabel Wiosna), and much groundbreaking research. The original research proposal, funded by the German Science Foundation, heavily influenced scenarios in the first two books of my fantasy series. (N.B. None of the researchers can be blamed for the parts about the Druids; I came up with that on my own, or indeed any of the facts I may have misrepresented on purpose or accidentally.)

The 3D laserscans form the meaty portion of the paper, used by Dr. Schreiber in his dissertation for documenting the damage to and creating a comprehensive virtual model (CVM) of the ruins, samples of which are shown below:

Perspective views towards the virtual model of the (town hall) apse, before and after the start of the excavations, respectively. In between d and e an orthographic view from south to the Roman well is shown.

The Roman well caught my fancy. Wells were sacred places to the Celts, and I thought it would make a great place to hide something. ('Hide what?' you ask. Stay tuned for Shaky Ground, book 2 of the Schattenreich series, due out in late Fall, 2012). Although many of the facts warped into something different in my series (as fiction is wont to do and for which I make no apologies), it was an honor to work with everyone on the project.
 
The above-named paper, out in the August 2012 issue of Journal of Seismology is an Open Access paper. The pdf can be freely downloaded or read online at this link: http://rd.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10950-012-9327-2.

Looking for Ground Truth in the High Fens

In seismology, ground truth is jargon that originated when discrimination of earthquakes and other seismic events from small nuclear blasts was a hot research field. It refers to the collection of data to verify the source or location of a seismic event other than just the seismic data available on a network. It could include satellite imagery or infrasound data, for example. That's a mouthful, but it really just means, verifying where something happened, seismically, from as many different kinds of data as are available. It's important, especially if the event places suspicion on a (possible) rogue state for testing nuclear weapons, to be able to verify the source of the event with as many kinds of data as possible.

Not as important as monitoring rogue states, I view research for fiction writing as an essential form of ground truth. These days, mostly, writers use the Internet as a primary source (more than is good for us), and when that isn't sufficient, must delve into books, scientific papers, newspaper articles, pursue conversations with experts, and watch films and documentaries. This kind of ground truth is especially important for historical fiction, but anytime you're writing fiction that takes place somewhere you don't know well or have never been to (a star system, the Jovian planets, or Des Moines, Iowa, for example), ground truth is highly desirable and sometimes fun.

Last Thursday, I did a bit of ground truth for the third book in my Schattenreich series (Double-Couple) by visiting the Hohes Venn (High Fen), part of the Ardennes and quite complicated geologically (meaning, I don't know enough about this to try and tell you about it). I think the important thing is that an impermeable layer of rock (in this case, I think it's Cambrian shale) creates the environment for the fens. I was mainly interested in the possibility that the Hohes Venn was potentially a sacred place in Iron Age times for the Celtic tribes that populated Belgium and the Rhineland and therefore had access to the moors and bogs that make up a good part of the fen.

There's not much literature - at least any I've found so far - to suggest it was a proven sacred place, but its proximity to the well-populated areas suggests that it could have been. And moors are well known for keeping their secrets - including bog bodies, valuable sacrificial items and so on (see, for example, the excellent, Dying for the Gods from Miranda Green, ISBN 978-0752425283). Well-preserved corpses and other artifacts have been discovered elsewhere in Germany when the peat bogs were mined and their contents exposed to the surface. But the Hohes Venn is a natural preserve and so is not subject to extensive peat bog mining.

Absence of evidence is not the same as evidence of absence, so I assumed I was safe in just making up a sacred sacrificial place in the fen that would still hold its 'power' today, two centuries after the Celts would have roamed its forests and bogs. I wanted to 'walk it' myself to get a feeling for what it would be like, all the better to add that something special to my story, and as further impetus to seek out additional information and literature (yes, research is downright addictive sometimes).

So, here's a bit of ground truth from the Hohes Venn, courtesy of my walking companion, Klaus Hinzen.

Approaching the High Fen

The journey is the way.

A bomb crater, now a vibrant biotope

The bog lake

Cotton grass

One of the many bogs with very red-tinged waters

The Latest from Frog Central

Seismic Amphibians

At the Earthquake Observatory of the University of Cologne (in Bensberg) we have frogs and toads. And no, that's not a euphemism for our current crop of students. I see them whenever I go downstairs to my basement office as this window - a rain gutter window - is usually home to several at any one time, depending on the season and the weather. Since we are in the midst of a very rainy summer here in Bensberg, there is currently a healthy population. There are around ten of them in there today.

We at first thought they were falling through the grating above the window, and would carry them back down to the large pond on the Bensberg grounds, imagining ourselves with do-gooders' halos. I imagine the frogs were slapping themselves on their froggy foreheads at this. They don't 'fall in', they 'fall up'. They travel upwards and backwards through the drainage pipe - which comes out near the pond - to enter the drainage window. Why they do this is a mystery (any frog experts out there?), but they seem to enjoy being in there. They also seem to enjoy observing us and regularly clatter up to the tiny ledge on the window to see what those weird two-legged simians inside the window are doing.

I'm looking at you.

Students and staff occasionally add a bit of furniture to spruce the place up - a branch for climbing up to the small window ledge where these frogs are doing their ballet - an improvised garden consisting of a container with some moss and other plant material (since dried up, but the frogs don't seem to mind) - an ash tray with a tiny bit of water, a mini-pond - and various pieces of bark and rock for them to crawl over and under and otherwise declare as their piece of sacred ground.

They range in size from the tiniest frog (less than a centimeter), to good-sized toad - like the one in the picture; he's on the bottom. Newts also show up less often, those gadflies of the amphibian world, but they're harder to spot. National Geographic's Lucy Cooke does in-depth views on frogs and toads and other 'creepy' animals, so check it out if you want some more frogginess.

Frog ballet in Bensberg

Now, if we can only train them to predict earthquakes, I think our fortune would be made.

Does time exist?

We have arrived at the tail end of yet another year. For those of us with children, it might sometimes seem that as the children grow so quickly, the years pass that much faster. It does to me. End-of-the-year retrospectives are also much in vogue. I often dread them, especially as there are so many events that seemed like they occurred years ago rather than months. Does it also seem to you that each year starts off with a leisurely gait but ends up in a labored-breath sprint? 

As a geophysicist, I understand that when it comes to time, the word 'seems' is highly appropriate. Time is relative, we learned from Albert Einstein. Quantum physicists and cosmologists are now telling us that time may not even exist at all (http://www.scientificamerican.com/

article.cfm?id=is-time-an-illusion). For a geo-person like myself, comparing the blink of a human lifespan to 4.5 billion years of Earth's evolution puts a different spin on.

But yet, we have markers for time. Milestones in our lives and our children's lives, birth, childhood, youth, middle-age, old age, and death, give us reasons to believe that time exists. And not just that. As we near the borders of middle-age, we feel the pressure of time, chances we no longer have or dreams we run to catch before it's too late. For young people, the pressure of time is felt in grabbing at the grails of secondary and higher education or apprenticeships and career ladders. 

When preparing the calendars for this double issue, I came across many dates to commemorate—markers of a different sort. There are special days for everything from maple syrup to human rights and many more too bizarre to contemplate. 

And there is that one day special to Americans (and Canadians!) where we choose to be thankful. Thanksgiving is my very favoritest of all holidays on this planet and maybe even the galaxy (Walk Like a Venutian Day comes a close second). Although historically Thanksgiving has Christian underpinnings, it is usually celebrated in America today as secular, free from any burden of gift-giving and, if honored traditionally, brings friends and family together in the joy of a shared meal. Many choose to express their thanks on this day by acts of charity—also in the best of Thanksgiving traditions. 

But yet, maybe imagining that time does not exist is not such a bad idea after all—especially this time of year and on this particular day. All of us have things we are thankful for, and stepping out of time to recognize these things, apart from everything else whizzing past us, is perhaps a Most Wonderful Thing. Being thankful allows us, just for that one ephemeral breath, to forget that time exists, bringing the luster of meaning to our mortality. That is the beauty of giving thanks.