MITZPE RAMON, ISRAEL–Very early this morning (5:05 am) Yoav and I boarded a bus in Mitzpe Ramon for a journey north to Jerusalem. After a change of buses in Beersheva, we arrived in Jerusalem 3.5 hours later. (This is Yoav’s commute to his office!) I was scheduled to give a morning talk at the Geological Survey of Israel‘s headquarters in a crowded haredi (ultraorthodox) neighborhood. It is always a moment to leave the noisy streets and pass through a gate onto the campus of the Survey, shown above. This is an old British military base from the 1940s, and it shows the wear.
The parking here is incredible. The cars are closely imbricated. Drivers who blocked other cars leave their phone numbers on their windshields so they can be summoned to move. Some just leave their keys inside for others to shift them out of the way. Here’s an advantage of taking the bus! The Survey will have a new campus elsewhere in the city in about four years.
Geologist and good friend Amihai Sneh is here setting up chairs for the talk in the conference/tearoom.
Here’s my lecture set-up ready to go. The talk went well enough, and my geological colleagues had a lot of good comments and ideas afterwards. As with any presentation, I was most pleased to have it over!
After the talk and lunch, Yoav, Amihai and Eitan Sass (a well-known Israeli geologist and former advisor of Yoav) planned a fieldtrip to further explore Cenomanian units in an attempt to solve some correlation dilemmas. This is the same project we have been working on with the En Yorqe’am Formation to the south. We actually used Yoav’s equivalent of an Independent Study thesis he completed over 25 years ago in Jerusalem. It looks like a master’s thesis. A critical fence diagram from the work is shown above. It was very useful in our explorations.
Yoav is here examining an exposure of the Bet Meir Formation in the Newe Daniel settlement in the southern West Bank. We examined it in several places, noting changes in the amount of dolomitization and fossil content. It was best exposed here because of recent construction.
Dr. Sass has studied these nodules in the Bet Meir Formation and concluded they are after anhydrite nodules. In fact, some still have anhydrite entombed within later quartz replacement. This chalky sediment was likely influenced by flows of dense brines from nearby shallow evaporitic basins.
Did I mention we were in the West Bank? This was very interesting, and an unexpected visit for me. These settlements are entirely normal once you’re on the inside, but the various layers of security measures on the outside are impressive. I learned a lot about the history of this particular place from my colleagues. Complex, to say the least.
History moment. From a tower in Newe Daniel you can see a curious conical mountain called the Herodium. It is far too steep to be natural. It was constructed by Herod the Great as a palace and his tomb. The recent discovery of the actual burial site is a dramatic story.
Bonus history moment: On the walk from the bus station to the Survey headquarters, Yoav and I passed this monument to the surrender of Jerusalem to British troops on December 9, 1917. This too is a good story. It happened on this spot. Check out the famous image below from that day.
