Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Here, if we could obtain a reliable paleomagnetic record, we could correlate
the biostratigraphic markers of the latest Cretaceous, as recorded by am-
monite fossils, with the paleomagnetic reversal record.
We had boarded the plane on a breathtakingly hot California day, and
Jeff traveled in shorts. By New York he was shivering, by Spain a vicious cold
had taken him—a rhinovirus assault of some gravity. But who in his thirties
surrenders to a cold after traveling thousands of miles to finish a great deal of
work in a short time? As the days went by he got sicker and sicker, and still
we worked. Up at 6 each morning, the Spanish excuse for a breakfast (strong
coffee and a length of French bread and butter), and then onto the outcrop.
Through the coastal village of Zumaya, we guided our small rental car
through the tiny lanes scraping by old brick and plaster buildings, past the
haystacks to the isolated coastal exposures. Drag the drill onto the rocks, fill
the gas tank and the large water canister necessary to cool the drill, find the
last site from the day before, and begin drilling anew.
Spring is the time of squalls in the Bay of Biscay, rapidly moving blusters
of wind and rain gathering from the south and belting the coast. We would try
to find shelter at first, but eventually we just kept working, huddling under-
neath our raincoats during the worst of squalls, hoping for the brief islands of
sun in the ocean of clouds above. Day by day our sites marched down the
beach—and down section. We started at the Cretaceous/Tertiary boundary,
the site marking the great mass extinction that ended the Age of Dinosaurs,
a site visible at Zumaya as a distinct lithological change. And then we
dropped, layer by layer, into ever older rocks, drilling every few meters going
down this enormous column of stacked limestone and marl, passing down a
million years, and then two, heading layer by layer, page by page of this stratal
book, toward ever older oceans, eventually reaching rocks I thought to be the
same age as Sucia Island, but who knew? With these cores, however,
we
might
know. We would be the first; we would tie Gubbio to Zumaya to Sucia Island
in a web of magnetic correlation and time lines.
For 10 days we drilled the coastal exposures. There was other work as
well, of course. We collected fossils and we studied the Cretaceous/Tertiary
boundary, searching for evidence that a large cometary collision 65 million
