The Joys of Mobbing

FILLMORE, UTAH – [Guest Bloggers Matt Peppers, Whitney Sims, and Will Cary]

Wizard Will enjoys some early morning tomfoolery.

With our alarms set for 6:30, we guaranteed that we wouldn’t be up before 7 am. After a hurried lunch packing session, the group headed out to inaugurate Tricia into the research community. She will be doing a project focused on the origin of the basalt islands in the western channel. Hopefully, her project will be used as an analogue for the islands found in the rest of the lava field. We mobbed Tricia in the morning, and through a heroic effort, managed to complete her fieldwork in just under three hours. Dr. Shelley “The Machine” Judge burned through a majority of the 50 individual columnar joint orientation measurements that will help Tricia with her interpretations. While the measurement team ran through the orientation measurements, the rest of the group broke into two smaller teams to collect samples and track out the significant fractures in the area. With each person working toward his or her specialty, the data collection process flew by.

Mob mentality at work.

Riding high after a stellar group outing, we moved toward the western breach to take a look at a large fissure Dr. Pollock, Whitney, and Tricia had seen a few days before. When we came across the gaping fissure (nicknamed “Chubman”), we decided to take a well-earned lunch break in the shade of the nearby wall before tackling the measurement process. While Team Fissure worked on mapping and tracking the fissure in the northern end, Team Flow Bandits tracked the fissure south on their way to investigate the possibility of a nearby flow boundary. The familiar call and response of, “Whitney, do you want to take a sample here?” followed by a subdued, “Yes…” echoed throughout the flows as the day came to an end. We had a weary trek back through the sand and sagebrush back to the car, satisfied after a productive workday. Celebratory pie for desert was the icing on the cake to yet another day in paradise.

The "Chubman" Fissure dominates the landscape.