Life on Mars 2

Greetings, once again. I am back in Antofagasta, Chile now that my fieldwork is done and I only have a few logistical things to finish up before I head back to the Northern Hemisphere. It has been a great trip, from waking up with ice on my tent to learning that not all one-way roads are clearly labeled as such. I have included some more highlights to take you through some of my adventures here; hopefully you will enjoy the views. Here we go.

My previous entry briefly mentioned the coastal fog that dominates throughout the winter here, but it really does this wonder of weather practically no justice. Though the Atacama may be the driest place on Earth in terms of precipitation, throughout the winter the coast is haunted by the nightly ebb and flow of a fog so dense that it yanks the temperature down 15 degrees and limits visibility to just past arm's length at its most intense. Sometimes it arrives in a matter of minutes; other times you can watch it crawl over mountains and flow up valleys, like some mighty beast left over from the time of titans, coming to reclaim the land that is rightfully his.

By the time I took this picture and put my camera back in my pocket, I had to walk back to camp by following my footsteps in the sand; so quickly I had become surrounded.

Here you can see it just down the road, a white wall that almost looks like snow.

A photo snapped 15 seconds later, after passing into the fog. Obviously, this made for very slow driving conditions, and made it imperative to mark a GPS point where the truck is, should the fog come in while you were away. There were days when the fog didn't come in at all, and there were others when we were forced to stop working at 5 and not start up until 10 the next morning, because we simply couldn't see more than the distance between our tents. Maybe I'm crazy, just personifying the fog due to a complete lack of any other living things, but to me it is the kind of thing that myths and ancient gods are made of....

On a lighter note, this is where we camped for the final four days out in the field... really a beautiful location (and you can even see the fog lingering off to the right).


Here is a picture of Brad just as the sunset, taking some time after a long day of measuring orientations of cracks in the ground.... (he is my fantastically wonderful field assistant, for those of you who don't know.... and the only other living thing I've seen in the desert for the last three weeks)


A nice cheesy shot of me above the canyons behind our camp... the photo does not even approach doing justice to the view.


A camp from much earlier in the trip (you can tell by the three vehicles and many tents) but it seemed like a nice photo.


An example of the kind of roads to watch out for (look closely, see the switchbacks?)... on the map, this road is simply depicted by a straight line... oh Chileans...
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The view driving into Antofagasta from the north. After having spent a few days here, I've really come to love it. They really cram the city as much as possible in the little area between the coastal mountains and the ocean... which is not a very big space at all. Looking out the window of the hotel right now I can see the ocean if I look left and the mountains looming up above me if I look right. I don't have any good photos of it, but the building codes here are intense. Since they live on a subduction zone, the earthquake risk is higher than most of the US. Any new building I see, I am shocked by the amount of rebar. They know what they are doing though... when the magnitude 8.1 (that is very big) earthquake struck here in 1995, only 2 people died. In contrast, since they get less than a millimeter of rain annually, when 2 centimeters of rain fell in 1991, hundreds of people were killed in the floods and catastrophic landslides that followed. I can't even fathom being near here when it rained... I think you could just watch the entire surface ooze.


Finally some photos from the market in the center of town...here is a meat display to let everyone practice their spanish anatomy vocabulary... heart, stomach, intestines... take your pick!

Or how about some chickens' feet? We bought some chicken breasts from this stand and made them for dinner... they were wonderfully fresh and delicious.


Ok... that is it for now... time to do some actual work. Thanks again for spending some time.

Always,
Amanda