Anyway, later we drove on to the dam in the valley of Verzasca.
This photograph shows you the HUGE dam! That's actually the place where one of the James Bond movies was shot and nowadays folks are bungy-jumping there. But of course our group's main interest wasn't looking at crazy people jumping - head-down - into freedom and sickness?!... We looked at some really nice folds and some kind of ancient fault. This very fault actually caused quite some problems when they first filled the lake all at once. Because of the water there were tensions and the fault started to become active again; result: lovely earthquakes!;) Luckily they managed to work the problem out by filling the lake slowly step by step. We talked about even more problems which might occur when building a dam and how important it is for a geologist to consider every single of them. Very interesting I thought!This was our last stop of the day and therefore we drove to Sonogno which is a cute small village at the very end of the valley. There we hung out, ate dinner and stayed overnight.
The view from the place we stayed at in Sonogno.Sunday, our main topic were structures of all kind. We therefore basically spent all the long haning out in the riverbed oberserving every single rock! (Very much a nice pastime when the sun's shining, the sky's blue!!!) In the following some pictures of this very part of our excursion (as a matter of fact I didn't take any pictures at the first stop; therefore all of the pictures are taken in a place called Lavertezzo):
This first picture shows you a most amazing example of a fold. You can see that the second-order folds are m-shaped at the hinge and depending whether you looked at the left or the right limb you see s- or z-folds. These second-order folds (and especially there shape) is very essentiel if one cannot see the whole first-order fold but has to determine how it is integrated in its enviroment.
These two pictures should simply give you an impression of future earth scientists working in the field during a fair weather day...;) The picture on the right handside shows you the whole valley - there wasn't a lot of water in the riverbed.
I cannot show you all of the interesting pictures becaue sometimes it's really hard to see the one important fault, fold or whatever I'd like to point out. On the next one it's really easy to see what I mean, though.;)
You can see two different quartz veins. These two veins can tell you something about age. How come? Well, it's just because you see exactly which of the veins was there first. Why? Because the first one was 'broken' by a strike slip fault (destral) whereas the one you spot kind of horizontal is cutting through everything!
What's so interesting about this shot?! When I first got to this spot I thought that it looked like two different kind of rocks - like one metamorphic and the other maybe sed. or ign.. But when you pay some more attention to it and have a closer look (and listen to your 'teachers' carefully) you get to know that this different appearance of the rock is simply based on some bacteria or so. Meaning that where these living things lived they slightly changed the surface of the rock.
And with this last view we ended our excursion already, drove to Bellinzona where we took the train back to Zurich...
Summarized I must admit that I am very much looking forward to further excursion and especially the one week fieldtrip in July!!! It's gonna be terrific like this past weekend - I'm sure! (It's just kind of worrying that now only 40 students are left and half of us are probably not gonna pass the exams in fall...)
Wisdom?! Regarding the immense time scales you're working with in geology I'll add an interesting question someone asked me recently.
How old do you NOT want to grow?
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