After months of anticipation and planning this Saturday was
the University of East Anglia’s 50th Anniversary celebration. The
whole campus was turned into some sort of educational fun fair with each
department contributing in some way.
As part of the School of Environmental Sciences and a
geologist (sort of) I was recruited for the Norfolk Volcano Team who’d
organised the grand finale of the day’s entertainment in the form of an erupting
scale replica of Mount Merapi, but more of that later.
As Friday was thesis deadline day for many of the department’s
4th year PhD’s the morning started badly, with a hangover thanks to
a few too many pints of ale at the departmental happy hour and then the pubs of
Norwich, and so setting up the first (of many) liquid nitrogen volcano (see
previous posts on ‘How to build a volcano’ and ‘Beware the liquid nitrogenpowered orange’ for the do’s and dont's of these) of the day before 10am was
not the most enjoyable task.
After a morning of exploding bins to the delight of crowds
of small children it was time for the (Great Norfolk?)’Volcano Cake Off’. In my
opinion this was definitely the highlight of the day. There were cakes with
accurately modelled magma chambers, beautifully layered stratovolcanoes,
bubbling and degassing vents, mini firework eruptions and (with his usual flare
of craziness) Honza managed to cover a couple of children in (edible but
possibly not washable) lava with a foot-pump-and-bursting-balloon-powered
stombolian eruption (and still got 3rd place)!!!
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| The Volcano Cake Off (photo by Honza Chylik) |
After the cakes had been judged, which generally resulted in
some major Canary Islands style flank collapse (with just as much possibility
of mega-tsunami generation as the real thing), it turned into some sort of
horrific cake eating free-for-all as the bakers suddenly made a LOT of new
friends.
My afternoon was spent in the Volcano tent doing ‘Ask a
Geologist’ which was (surprisingly given my lingering hangover) great fun. Both
children and adults came in with their rock collections, holiday photos and fracking/global
warming worries, here are a few highlights:
A child came in with a rock collection he’d bought on his
summer holiday at Mount Vesuvius, at some point the box had been dropped and
all the rocks and minerals had got muddled up, unfortunately, as you can see in
the photo, the labels were all in Italian so myself and one of the
vulcanologists spent a fun 10 minutes sorting that as best as we could. If you
speak Italian and can see any mistakes (we had no idea what the red, blue or
sparkly minerals were supposed to be, they may have been artificially dyed, as
may the ‘olivine’ which obviously wasn't found around Vesuvius even if it was
real) please comment.
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| Child's rock collection from Vesuvius, please comment with any corrections/translations |
Attempting to explain flint formation to a 6 year old – this
hurt me
Miming an ammonite and a pectin (scallop) while identifying
a fossil collection
Having a rather posh old couple come in and show me their
holiday photos from the south of France (on their iPad). Their guidebook to the
area had mentioned carved spheres of rock in the limestone but they were in
very distinct bands in the limestone beds and seemed to be a slightly different
rock type, so they’d realised these were a natural formation and had spent a
year trying to find out what they actually were. As soon as I saw the pictures
I know they were carbonate concretions, which at great coincidence were the
topic of my Master’s thesis, and so I spent a good 15 minutes telling them
EVERYTHING I could remember on the subject, finally a use for all that random
specialist knowledge. Although going into redox boundaries and drawing diagrams
of various types of concretion growth may have been going a bit far, they
seemed pretty happy to have found the answer.
A piece of scoria (highly vesicular lava) found on a beach
in Norfolk, this must have been brought by the sea all the way from Iceland or
Italy, if not from even further!
After many hours of working my way through bags and boxes of
rocks it was time, we thought, to relax and enjoy the firework volcano. But no,
there were not enough (paid) stewards and security staff so we had to ‘volunteer’
to steward the event. I managed to get myself into a pretty good spot but some
of the undergrads were not so lucky and after a full day’s volunteering barely
got to see any of the show, which seems pretty unfair.
The volcano itself was a scale model of Mount Merapi in
Indonesia, an active stratovolcano (which was chosen by the organisers for
reasons which can be found on their blog here). Months of planning by the
Norfolk Firework Volcano team had gone into researching, planning, organising
and then building the volcano and they’d even got the same guy who did the some
of the pyrotechnics for the London Olympics to create the eruption.
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| 'Mount Merapi' photo by Honza Chylik |
Once it got dark enough, the main eruption was preceded by traditional
Indonesian music and a Taiko drumming display and then Gimli himself, John Rhys
Davies, read an extract from ‘The Firework Maker’s Daughter’ by Phillip
Pullman, which, in his Treebeard voice, sounded amazing (check out the video
below) as the volcano started to de-gas and rumble next to him.
Then, finally it was time for the eruption, this was pretty
spectacular, as from where we were in the dark, it didn't look like we were
watching a small model of a volcano close up, it looked like we were watching a
real eruption up off in the distance. As if somehow the tectonic plates beneath
us had shifted and brought a subduction zone beneath Norfolk. I'm not going to
bother attempting to describe the eruption itself, instead here’s my attempt at
filming it and the following firework display. Unfortunately the fireworks are
cut short as a stray flame set fire to the big finale, you can hear John
Rhys Davies (yeah, we were sat next to Gimli) at the end joking about it, but it was still
pretty impressive.
Let’s just hope that UEA’s 100th anniversary is
just as impressive…
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