Patagonia field work — Update #2

Field work is going well. Weather doing what it does down here, mostly a mix of clouds and sun, very windy, with occasional periods of rain. Typical Patagonia.

Yesterday, we made our way up a mountain to check out the strata exposed there and to get a view of regional relationships. One of the objectives of the work we are doing down here is to link very detailed sedimentological information (bed-scale sedimentary structures and ‘architectural’ scale stratigraphy) with basin-scale patterns (changes across several to many tens of kilometers). The patterns that fill a sedimentary basin span many orders of magnitude spatially and temporally.

To get a good sense of these larger-scale patterns we need to get up on top of mountains to get a vantage not available in the valleys. A result of doing these hikes — in addition to me feeling very sore and tired afterwards — is the opportunity for spectacular views of the landscape. The photo at the top is a view of the famous Paine Massif (a Miocene laccolith intruding into the Cretaceous turbidites we are studying) taken from such a vantage. And below is a short video from the ‘hiker’s perspective’ I took as we approached the top of this mountain.