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The Angry Geologist is In The Hole
May. 30th, 2008 06:00 pmOne of the awesome things about my job is that sometimes I get to see things that a lot of people never even think about.
Take cement. Boring, gray, your house is probably built on it, and you step on it every day. You probably never think about it, one of those icky bits of infrastructure that the general public tend to regard as highly as parasites in an ecosystem. But how it's made...
The heavy machinery in cement plants would make a monster truck fan lose control of his bladder- trucks with tires as tall as I am are required to truck in and move around the limestone from the quarry to the crusher, and over to the kiln. It's mixed with coal and turned in a rotary kiln, a steel tube that you could drive one of these trucks through a few thousand feet long, that spans between two buildings. In this particular plant, the result of this process, called clinker, is slapped on a two-mile conveyor belt to cool on the way to the finishing kiln. I probably haven't gone into half the detail I need to, but the one thing you need to know is that it's incredibly dusty and dirty. The kiln dust and limestone powder gets into and onto everything. I washed my hands for lunch today, and there is now a water line on my hands.
In this area, the limestone is quarried practically on site- there were several active quarries at one point, but two had to be abandoned because they were encroaching on the town. We had to do some water sampling in one, so we drove on the long-abandoned road down to the bottom.
And down...
And down...
A
N
D
D
O
W
N
.
.
.
It took us almost twenty minutes to reach the bottom. On the way down, we saw a deer; apparently there is a breeding population down there, protected from hunters and vehicles in a place with plenty of food and water. It's something that you could imagine speciation in a couple of hundred generations down the line.
One side of the quarry was cut along the dip face of the rock; the others are terraced vertically, but the eastern side just slopes gently down in. They had cut across two cave drainages, which we could see discharging along the slope.
We passed an abandoned rock crusher. The plant environmental manager who was with me said that it wasn't that long ago that it was still in operation, even after the quarry had shut down. Before they built the new one, the trucks used to come across from the other quarry and dump their loads over a cliff a few hundred feet down for it to be moved to this crusher.
We finally reached our sampling site- a small pond in the very deepest part of the pit. It looked small, but as I got close to it, I changed my mind. It was a 20 foot deep pool of the clearest natural water I had ever seen; it was like looking into clear blue-tinted glass. And right in the center of it was this little bass, looking up at us from the other side of the mirror surface.
Even looking back on it now, I can't even put into words how lucky I feel to have been there. Even if it was just a job.
Take cement. Boring, gray, your house is probably built on it, and you step on it every day. You probably never think about it, one of those icky bits of infrastructure that the general public tend to regard as highly as parasites in an ecosystem. But how it's made...
The heavy machinery in cement plants would make a monster truck fan lose control of his bladder- trucks with tires as tall as I am are required to truck in and move around the limestone from the quarry to the crusher, and over to the kiln. It's mixed with coal and turned in a rotary kiln, a steel tube that you could drive one of these trucks through a few thousand feet long, that spans between two buildings. In this particular plant, the result of this process, called clinker, is slapped on a two-mile conveyor belt to cool on the way to the finishing kiln. I probably haven't gone into half the detail I need to, but the one thing you need to know is that it's incredibly dusty and dirty. The kiln dust and limestone powder gets into and onto everything. I washed my hands for lunch today, and there is now a water line on my hands.
In this area, the limestone is quarried practically on site- there were several active quarries at one point, but two had to be abandoned because they were encroaching on the town. We had to do some water sampling in one, so we drove on the long-abandoned road down to the bottom.
And down...
And down...
A
N
D
D
O
W
N
.
.
.
It took us almost twenty minutes to reach the bottom. On the way down, we saw a deer; apparently there is a breeding population down there, protected from hunters and vehicles in a place with plenty of food and water. It's something that you could imagine speciation in a couple of hundred generations down the line.
One side of the quarry was cut along the dip face of the rock; the others are terraced vertically, but the eastern side just slopes gently down in. They had cut across two cave drainages, which we could see discharging along the slope.
We passed an abandoned rock crusher. The plant environmental manager who was with me said that it wasn't that long ago that it was still in operation, even after the quarry had shut down. Before they built the new one, the trucks used to come across from the other quarry and dump their loads over a cliff a few hundred feet down for it to be moved to this crusher.
We finally reached our sampling site- a small pond in the very deepest part of the pit. It looked small, but as I got close to it, I changed my mind. It was a 20 foot deep pool of the clearest natural water I had ever seen; it was like looking into clear blue-tinted glass. And right in the center of it was this little bass, looking up at us from the other side of the mirror surface.
Even looking back on it now, I can't even put into words how lucky I feel to have been there. Even if it was just a job.
