Day 2 - June 28th, 2011 – Tuesday, 7am
I’m writing this in the most idyllic spot one can possibly imagine – sitting on an outcrop of larvikite overlooking the North Sea while drinking a coffee and enjoying the sound of the birds and the waves at 7am in the morning. Ah, life in the field in Norway!
We arrived here yesterday afternoon after a routine trip from Ottawa to Frankfurt (Germany, 7.5 hours) and then a short 1.5 hour flight from Frankfurt into Oslo, Norway. Jet-lag was taking its toll by the time we landed as neither Glenn nor I had gotten any sleep while on the long Ottawa-Frankfurt flight. I even resorted to trying to sleep with my butt on the ground and my head on the seat, but even that strange position didn’t help. We landed in Oslo around 2pm, local time (6 hours ahead of Ottawa) and waited (fingers crossed) for our bags to arrive. Luckily they all did, and off we went to get (1) a coffee, and (2) the rental car.
Note to all car rental companies: when you give the renter a choice between an Alfa Romeo and anything else? They are going to choose the Alfa Romeo!! Maybe not the best choice of a field vehicle, but hey! It fit all our luggage and the two of us comfortably so off we went in our little 6-speed sporty car!! Woo hoo! Traveling around Norway in style! And at $150 less than I was initially quoted for the similar-sized VW Golf!
Construction in Oslo, on both the main highway and the commuter railway lines, meant that we spent the good part of 2 hours doing about 20-30 km/h on the E18 headed south. Not really a good thing when you have not slept for the better portion of 24 hours and are trying to figure out what good 6 speeds on a standard car are! Is it one gear up or down from my 5 speed? I dunno. We still haven’t quite figured it out.
We arrived in the Larvik area around 5pm and called Alf Olav who agreed to meet us near the campsite we are staying at around 5:30pm. He met us at the turn off on Hummerbahkenvien Road, off the 301, and drove us to the main office at Stolpostead Campground, got us keys, registered and paid up in full. 8 nights at the cottage for 5500 Krone, not bad! The cottage is really, really nice. It’s a typical Georgian Bay-type cottage – 2 bedrooms and an annex with more bunkbeds, a small living room, fireplace, bathroom with a strong, hot shower, and a small well-equipped kitchen. The first time driving in here was an adventure – the cottage itself is away from the main RV park, along a fjord and up and down dirt track. Alf Olav got us lost the first time in, which we have proceeded to duplicate on more than one try since!! It’s embarrassing when you can’t find your own home!!
After unloading all our gear, we went to the campground restaurant for a pizza supper, absolutely famished and exhausted, and had a very pleasant time chatting with Alf Olav, catching up and telling him our plans for the week – focusing on the Bratthagen area, ring sections 9 and 10 in the complex, and then collecting host rock samples from the main localities where I collected in 2003. The centre ring sections haven’t been studied or even mapped extensively, so this work will be very useful. We plan to make a couple of traverses around the area, first using the main N-S railway line and then perpendicular to it, to find new pegmatites. Provided the bush isn’t too thick and that it’s passable. The nice thing about field work in Norway that everything is crown land, so walking in the countryside, no matter where, is completely legal and no one is going to pull a gun on you.
After supper, we drove into Stavern for the adventure of grocery shopping! Along with “Bog”, some sort of canned Norwegian Spam that we couldn’t resist, we stocked up on breakfast and lunch supplies, toilet paper, beer, and coffee supplies. Not reading Norwegian, we asked at the counter if what we had bought was actually granulated sugar. Nope. We were buying flour! Oops. That wouldn’t have tasted too great! $200 later for the basics (cringe), we headed back to our cottage, had a few beers to relax, wandered around the coast below the cottage, and then headed off for much-needed sleep. The only problem with this is that we are so far north that the sun doesn’t set until 11pm here. At 10:30pm, we still didn’t need lights in the cottage and outside it was foggy but full daylight!! How do you sleep with that? Luckily last night posed no problem as we were exhausted, but it’ll be an interesting factor to deal with in the coming days. In addition, the sun (and the birds) rise at 4am. It’s a long day. The nice thing about this is that it makes for long daylight to work in the field.
More later! More coffee and a shower await.
Day 2, continued – June 28th, 2011, 8:30pm
Today Glenn and I spent the entire day in Ring Sections 9 and 10, the most evolved part of the Larvik complex. Located about 20 km from where we are staying, the rocks are quite different than what we observe here in Stavern and Larvik – they are almost true nepheline or foid syenites. They have very distinct textures as well – many of them display a foliation, or flow texture, with lath-like feldspars and mafics that you don’t see in some of the coarser-grained larvikites. The rocks in RS 9 and 10 are called “lardalites” but as with “larvikite”, this is a historic name that has simply been grandfathered into the literature.
We drove up E18 to Hwy 40 and stopped in Heum, a very tiny village consisting of a couple of cottages and a few cows who seemed less than happy to see us. Luckily we found a ski/bike path that we were able to follow to get into the interior of RS 10. There was actually quite a bit of fresh outcrop, however biology was in full force and they were mostly covered by moss, lichen and trees. Not conducive to collecting a sample, that’s for sure! But luckily pegmatites are fairly easy to spot, green organic matter or not. They weather differently and can be spotted through any covering. For the most part. :)
We walked up and down the trail, exploring all outcrops we came across, bushwhacking across fields, and finally came to a well-kept mountain bike road. We saw one person throughout this part of the day – a Norwegian man who was cutting firewood out of an old logging cut on the side of a steep hill. He said that it was logged in the 1970’s and 1980’s and he is allowed to cut all the trees that are fallen down – the ones left standing are for the local wildlife. Which, to be honest, in Norway are not abundant! Birds are common, but there isn’t much other than moose around here. Certainly makes for excellent field work – there is nothing in this region that could possibly eat you or kill you!
We managed to sample 10 localities within RS 9 and 10, including a couple of pegmatites. As no one has truly examined the general geology of these two rings, I wanted to pick up whole rock samples from across the sections to determine if it truly is homogeneous, if it is related to the larvikites that make up the bulk of the Larvik complex, or if they are a 2nd pulse of magma entirely. I suspect the latter, but we’ll see when chemistry and petrography are completed. B.Sc. or M.Sc. project anyone?
By 4:30pm, both of us were crashing – jetlag was taking its toll and we were getting sore and tired and very hungry. Hiking is one thing – hiking up and down logging cuts with many pounds of rock on your back is another! We stopped in Larvik at Meny, which is a chain grocery store, and decided that BBQ’ing had to be accomplished for supper. We have a small Weber charcoal grill at the cottage so plan to BBQ most of our suppers. BBQ’d hamburgers, some corn, which we later found out to be ‘pre-cooked’, a definite mistake, and veggie toppings. Plus the essential Aass Fatol beer, some electrolytes (definitely dehydrated today from not drinking enough water) and spices (well-equipped kitchen by no spices or condiments to be found). If anyone wants to get an idea of how expensive Norway is, just getting the basics in groceries yesterday and today – cereal, milk, yoghurt, fruit, bread, meat, cheese, coffee, sugar, toilet paper, etc., has cost us $340. Yup. Ridiculous, eh? And we’re not being extravagant by any means! It’s an expensive country for a foreigner.
After our yummy cheese burger supper, we took a walk to the point and checked out the S-type (Stavern type) pegmatites that are common throughout the least-evolved sections. We are sitting in RS 4, very close to the contact with RS 6. But the pegmatites are still quite barren – microperthite feldspars up to 1 foot long (absolutely stunning), amphiboles, zircon and magnetite. The interesting thing about these pegmatites is the gravitational settling that we can see with the mafics – all the amphiboles and coarser biotite is segregated at the “bottom” of the pegmatite body, whether it’s a pod or a true dike. From a density point of view, this makes sense – amphiboles are heavy, feldspars are lighter – put them into a slush or slurry and which one will sink to the bottom? Obvious. But the going theory is that pegmatites crystallize from the sides inward. At Mont Saint-Hilaire, it’s quite common to see large aegirine crystals projecting inward to the centre of the pegmatite, growing perpendicular to the contact with the host rock. Here, the rules are off and crystal settling appears to be the controlling factor. Why? We don’t know. Another B.Sc. or M.Sc. project anyone?
