Second Drill Site Started and Film Crew Arrives

We are joined in the field this week by a South African film crew and journalist Rehana Dada. She will be observing the Barberton Scientific Drilling Project and interviewing the geologists involved to explain to students and the general public why scientific drilling is so exciting and what we hope to discover in these rocks. Rehana will be producing an educational video for AEON, Cape Town and CGB Bergen to explain the importance and value of scientific drilling in some of the Africa's oldest rocks. Rehana previously produced a short programme "Reading the Rocks" for SABC (South African Broadcasting Cooporation) on our field work in South Africa.

Rehana will be making an educational film to explain how investigation of the modern deep seafloor can be used to help find and understand some of the earliest signs of life preserved in the ancient seafloor rocks from the Barberton Mnt Land. This type of work using modern environments to understand the past is a principle widely used in geology known as uniformitarianism.

We hope that we will make many new discoveries by combining the expertise of Archean geologists from South Africa with the insights gained by geobiologists working on the modern seafloor life and environments. See the cruise diary of our colleagues currently on a ship studying the modern deep sea vents in the Arctic ocean.

Aerial photo of the second drill site in the Songimvelo Nature Reserve, Barberton Greenstone belt. Photo taken from a helicopter flying southwards down the Komati River,
Photo Credit: Eugene Grosch