Last week, I was on my very first paleontological field trip! This was part of a geology course at the University of Uppsala. The trip was around and through Estonia, a country in the eastern part of the Baltic. I found more fossils than I could ever have dreamed of, and met many wonderful people. This was by far the greatest adventure in my life! (Well… I am not a very adventurous person, so that is not a strange thing.)
On Monday the 9th of April, we took the ferry to Tallinn, the capital of Estonia. We would spend the night on the boat and arrive the following morning.
Almost everyone was unfamiliar: I had taken the course this winter, during weekends, while most of the others were studying it now. Only one more from my class, Sara, came along, so the rest, about twenty-five students, were from the other group. We were also joined by a handful of PhD-students and/or postdocs. I did not even know the teacher, as I had been ill during the days when he held lectures for us.
It was of course the other way around for the other students: they did not know who we were, so they did not invite us to join in their conversations. So, this night I basically only got to know the students I shared cabin with. I mostly talked to Sara, so we got quite close, at least.
We travelled within Estonia by buss. It would take us along the northern and western coastlines, then to the large island Saaremaa, as well as a little through Estonia’s interior. We would stop on various outcrops and quarries to explore their geology and fossils, and at the hotels we would spend the nights in. I will now tell you about these five marvellous days, but first a short introduction to the geology of Estonia.
Estonia is actually much like Sweden: most of the upper Phanerozoic has been wiped away by glaciers during the great Quaternary glaciations; there are no bedrock layers older than middle Devonian (around 390 million years ago), so there are no dinosaurs, or hardly any land-living vertebrates at all. (One might then wonder what on Earth this trip would be useful for, then, but invertebrate fossils are quite beautiful, actually – not very interesting, but nice to look at.) The bedrock is covered by a layer of till and other glacial deposits essentially everywhere, just like in Sweden. (Till is basically dark soil-like stuff with incorporated rough rock fragments; it is very ugly and there are no fossils there.) Estonia is very interesting in the sense that its layers (or strata, sing. stratum) are tilted horizontally at a slight angle, so the exposures are older the further south you go. This made it easier to get some chronology into the trip.
I first thought it would make more sense make the entire trip a single post, but, on writing, I realised that it would be very long, and my friend Hanna is getting impatient about me never posting anything (although this blog is four days old). So now I have decided to post each day separately.
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