Geologists from Planet Earth

Solo geological fieldwork: a path to independence - Richard White

• Julie Hollis

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Richard White is a man whose PhD involved spending weeks utterly alone in Australia's central desert. In this episode, he recounts tales of encountering herds of camels (while in bed!), carrying half a ton of rocks in an overloaded 4WD, and exploring remote terrain by following his dream... Richard's story is one of the glorious independence and a little eccentricity that makes a remarkable geologist. 

Teaching resources (questions prompts) for 12-16 year olds can be found here: https://www.tes.com/resource-detail/resource-13276404

Julie:

What do you know about geology? What does a geologist do? And who are these people who are so interested in rocks? In this podcast, I ask geologists from around the world to tell the stories that mean the most to them. And well, it turns out they're not who you might expect. The remarkable things they've done... the experiences they've had and the passion that every one of them feels for the planet that we live on. But it's not about what I think. You decide for yourself. My name is Julie Hollis and you're listening to Geologists from Planet Earth.

Richard:

Hi, I'm Richard and I'm a geologist.

Julie:

Hi Richard, welcome. What are you going to tell us about?

Richard:

Yeah, I'm going to talk about some of the work I did early on in my career when I was a PhD student and working in an area in the middle of Central Australia that hadn't really been looked at for a very, very long time. And this is an area called the Musgrave Block. And it's a belt of high temperature rocks which straddles the boundary between the Northern Territory and South Australia in Central Australia. It's a very remote area. The nearest town, as you could call it, would be Uluru Township, which is about one and a half days' drive from where I was working.

Julie:

So how did you get into this PhD in the middle of the Australian desert?

Richard:

I guess I got into this... Slightly by accident, I was doing a master's at Sydney University and I was working in Antarctica at the time. And at the end of that, I had some spare time and I was running the electron microprobe at the university.

Julie:

An electron microprobe is a scientific instrument designed to be able to measure the chemical composition of very small volumes of solid materials, in this case minerals.

Richard:

And my supervisor wanted me to look at some rocks that he'd collected a few years earlier out in the Musgrave block. And I started looking at these rocks at thin sections, which are thin slices of rock that you can look at with a microscope. And I was just fascinated by, I guess, some of the textures these rocks had. I'd never seen anything so complex in a rock.

Julie:

Richard is talking about the shape and arrangements of the different minerals in the rocks, which can tell us about how they formed, in this case of the Musgraves, at very high temperatures and shallow depths in the earth, which is unusual.

Richard:

And so I found that quite fascinating. And so I started looking at these and analyzing these. And I talked to my master's supervisor about doing a PhD. But I was also interested in leaving the University of Sydney, where I'd done my undergraduate and my master's, and going to another university. So we both collectively went over and talked to one of his colleagues at Macquarie University in Sydney. And this was Ron Vernon, who was a very well-known metamorphic geologist at the time. And he had a grant to do some work and applied for a scholarship. And I got that scholarship. Now, the grant was actually to study granites. A rock type which is not necessarily my favourite, I must say. I tend to find the closer you get to a granite, the less interesting it becomes. I will admit I collected some samples for geochrome, some of which were granites, which I dated, so I will cut that as some work on granites. But for the most part, I was more interested in the metamorphic story.

Julie:

That's the story of the complex mineral textures that formed when these rocks heated up inside the Earth and why that happened.

Richard:

So... I convinced Ron over a few beers and a couple of weeks that he really, really did want to go and work in the musk graves with me because it was an area that he'd never been. And he was very flexible with this. So we set up a trip for my first season and I was to go out there with another PhD student for safety reasons, etc. And I would spend probably six weeks out there. We had to drive all the equipment out from Sydney. So it was a five-day drive just to get into the field with a big four-wheel drive. Quite a tedious drive out there as well. So there was quite a lot of preparation because there was no shops nearby. You're kind of very isolated. The local Aboriginal community had a small shop, had a very unreliable supply of food and basic equipment. So we had to be very sort of independent people. I guess the first hiccup was the second PhD student never started. They decided to take another PhD and there was, I guess, a high risk that this trip was going to fall apart. In the end, what we did was myself, Ron and Jeff Clark, who was my other supervisor, all drove out there and spent about a week and a half looking around the area. Then I drove them back to Uluru. where they hopped on a plane. And then I went back out into the field on my own.

Julie:

Wow.

Richard:

A sort of behavior that would not be acceptable today, probably wasn't acceptable back then. And spent, I think, about a month and a half out there just mapping on my own. That was quite the experience. Having only myself a company, I know now how everybody else feels.

Julie:

Yeah.

Richard:

But it was also a very memorable trip because of that.

Julie:

I bet.

Richard:

And there's a lot of time to think when you're on your own. So I did quite a lot of thinking. It was in the middle of nowhere. There was no farming or anything around the area. So it was very pristine, outback desert, lots of wild animals and just nothing around. So it was not something that I think everybody would enjoy, but I really, really enjoyed it. And that was my first trip out there. And I spent... All that time basically mapping and collecting more rocks than I knew what to do with. I think the car on the way back was dangerously overloaded. I had a slight panic when I got a flat tire on the way back that I wouldn't be able to actually get the car off the ground with the jack that we had. So I ended up standing by the side of the road unloading about... half a ton of rocks onto the road and then jacking up the car and fixing it.

Julie:

So did you encounter any particular problems being out there completely alone? Of

Richard:

course, when you're on your own, there's danger. So back in those days, satellite phones weren't common. So everything was done on HF radio. So I'd have to set up a radio schedule each every couple of days. And we would do this with the Flying Doctor Service. I got food poisoning at one point, and I think food poisoning on your own in the desert is not much fun. And so I was just lying in a creek bed for two days, basically, just feeling worse for weather. And the other frightening thing that happened to me, it was early in the morning. I heard this rumbling noise and I thought, heavens, is that a big storm coming or something? So I stuck my head outside of my swag, which are these sleeping mats that we sleep on in Central Australia. And it wasn't a storm. What it was was a very large herd of camels trotting right through the middle of my camp. I had no idea what to do because they were coming quite close to me within an a foot or two. So I just crawled back into my swag until they'd passed. I didn't want it to happen again. So I went out with a four-wheel drive later in that day and found them and herded them off another five or six kilometers down the road by honking at them with the car and harassing them down the road a bit so they didn't come back through.

Julie:

And did you have any interaction with the Aboriginal traditional owners out there?

Richard:

We actually went out with some Aboriginal guides at times. They were really fantastic. But it was almost like a foreign world for somebody who grew up in Sydney to meet people who I think some of the elders in the group could remember when they first came across white people back in the 50s or their parents did. It was very unexplored for a very long time. And the only road out there was originally built for the rocket launching tests from Woomera in South Australia when the Americans and the British were testing rockets. And where I was working was... the direction that they aimed them so that when they came crashing back down to Earth, they'd had the minimal chance of hitting anyone. And there's actually quite a few large bits of rocket still lying around out there. There's that and a weather station. And that's pretty much it.

Julie:

Yeah, I guess it doesn't get much more remote in Australia or just about anywhere, really. So when it comes to the geology, what were you particularly interested in out there?

Richard:

When we were out there, we found some metapelites. These are metamorphosed mudstones. And these are really interesting. They're full of a mineral called spinel, which only forms at very high temperatures and typically fairly low pressures. So we realized we're in one of these metamorphic belts that we get in Australia, which are very hot. Those things I found very interesting and interesting. I guess that's what led me on to trying to understand how they formed.

Julie:

So how do you do that?

Richard:

Well, one of the things we do to understand how these textures and rocks form is using thermodynamics and in particular phase diagrams. And they show the relative stability of different minerals and sets of minerals at different pressures and temperatures. And we can use those to not only understand the main formation of the rock, but what happened to it after it got to its highest temperature, did it? come back up to the surface, or did it just cool down at depth?

Julie:

And this is how geologists can study processes that happened inside the Earth in the distant past.

Richard:

I think it's those rocks that really got me into trying to use phase diagrams, something which I've never really quite grown out of, I suspect.

Julie:

This is a bit of an understatement from Richard. It's been the central drive of his research for his entire career of more than three decades. So six weeks alone in the central Australian desert. Did you not go a little bit nuts out there so long on your own?

Richard:

I suspect I started at a fairly high level of nuts. It had a minimal effect on me. I've always quite liked that. I used to do a lot of bushwalking through the Blue Mountains on my own. I quite liked that. The solitude and the silence of it, I found it very relaxing for me. I just didn't have a care in the world other than what I was doing. I didn't have to deal with anyone else. I might have done a few trips to Antarctica before that. So I'm pretty experienced in the field for somebody starting a PhD, which is kind of the main reason why Jeff and Ron let me go out there on my own. I've been in search and rescue groups for bushwalking, done a few search and rescues. People might be familiar with one of them I did down in the Butterwangs.

Julie:

I am familiar with that one. having been on the receiving end of it. You were on a search and rescue team looking for me.

Richard:

I was indeed. I think it was before I even met you.

Julie:

I think I was 17 years old and hiking with some other Venturer scouts. We all got flooded in,

Richard:

It was the Easter break. I remember it was very, very wet.

Julie:

I can attest to it being very wet. So after all that time, six weeks alone in the field, how was it coming back to civilization again?

Richard:

Yeah, so you usually let yourself go in the field. So by the time I got back, I looked like a wild man with a large beard. I'd just been out in the desert for a little over 40 days and 40 nights. So I was being called Moses for a little while after that. I don't think I came back with any commandments, but I did come back with a quite nice map.

Julie:

And was that your only field work in that area?

Richard:

I did a second trip out there, but this time I was out there with an undergraduate student. We were looking in more detail at some of the areas that I'd found in the first trip, and in particular looking at these metapilite rocks, because we really hadn't collected enough of those. So I went out there with a student whose name was Nigel. There were three peelite sites that I'd found the previous year, which I'd imaginatively labeled the northern peelite, the central peelite, and the southern peelite. I lost one of my outcrops. You lost it? It completely disappeared. That's because when I'd found it, it had been very late in the afternoon on the first trip. I'd grabbed a couple of samples. And I'd somehow forgotten to put my location on the map.

Julie:

Ahh!

Richard:

I had a vague idea where it was. So Nigel and I went out looking for this mysterious outcrop. We spent the best part of a day looking for it and couldn't find it. And Nigel was having a bit of a panic about, you know, his whole project was going to fall apart because we couldn't find one of the outcrops. I said, oh, well, I'll keep on looking for it. It hasn't disappeared. It's out there somewhere. But a weird thing happened is that night I had a strange dream, which is odd because I don't actually normally remember my dreams. And when I woke up in the morning, I was telling Nigel about this strange dream I had where I dreamt about this little gully near where this pier light was and a white gum tree that was growing in this gully. When I told Nigel this, he did the sensible thing and thought I'd completely lost my mind. But I said, well, what I'm going to do today is I'm going to go and follow the dream. So I set out and I was beginning to think I had gone insane. And then I stumbled down this little creek. And out at the bottom was this white gum tree. And it was exactly how I remembered it in my dream.

Julie:

Wow.

Richard:

And I wandered about 20 meters up this creek. And there sitting there was this fairly freshly hammered lump of rock, which was the exact rock I was looking for. So this time I made sure I marked it on the map.

Julie:

So tell me a bit more about your interactions with the traditional owners out there.

Richard:

We'd often have, particularly at the beginning, local guides with us to show us where we can go and can't. And they also knew quite a lot of tracks and roads which weren't on maps or anything. And so for the first part, we would pay a few of the locals to go with us. They'd always be interested in what we were doing. They'd often go out hunting as well while we were there because they've got into a new area. So they'd go try and get some kangaroos or rabbits, which invariably ended up in the back of the car. One of them had a great eye for tektites. He kept on finding all these little tektites everywhere. He'd come up to us with these tektites. A tektite is a rock that's been ejected out of the Earth from a meteorite impact. It's partially molten, so it looks a bit like a glass. It's got a very smooth texture and sometimes has a shape, a bit like a drop, because it's actually been hot and fallen from the sky. Tektites are kind of cool because they're quite rare, so I never found any, but this guy kept on finding quite a few of them. If you could train him as a geologist, he'd be perfect.

Julie:

So what impact did all this have on your future as a research geologist?

Richard:

By the time I was doing that PhD, I'd sort of, I guess, started on an academic track. But there are geological events in the life of a geologist that steer you in new directions or change the way you do things. And for me... I guess the really important one was when I was much younger and I was still an undergraduate student. I got the opportunity to do my honours level mapping in Antarctica. And I think that was just such an amazing thing. And that's, I think, what really sort of got me into this sort of research interest and research side. Because, you know, I wasn't just mapping for the sake of it. I was, you know, working with Jeff and

Julie:

That's Professor Geoff Clarke he's referring to.

Richard:

On some real sort of major problems and trying to understand rocks that are not really being looked at a lot. And I guess really when I went to the Musgraves, I wanted to do that again, but I guess to lead that myself a bit more. It wasn't a highly supervised project. I think Geoff realised pretty quickly I was unsupervisable and I would kind of do what I wanted to do regardless. So both him and Ron were really good at just letting me do what I wanted to do, particularly Ron, seeing that he was funding everything and I was supposed to be working on granites. I think that's really where I became an independent researcher was during that period. It was the first time I supervised students as well in my usual sort of gentle way. Sorry, I had a bit of a reputation. I think I was harsh but fair. I found it a really positive experience. It did change who I was. It can't not change who you are, having that sort of experience. You know, I came back a little bit calmer than I'd been, a little less frantic about everything. And I think that's really great to have the opportunity to have been almost completely independent.

Julie:

Richard White is Head of the School of Earth and Environmental Sciences and Professor of Earth Sciences at St Andrews University in Scotland. My name's Julie Hollis, and you've been listening to Geologists from Planet Earth.