Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
stead of corals—creatures great and small were
alive.
Now they are but stony
memories.
My first trip to this island was brief: 1 blasted the concretions with my
hammer, 1 found a few beautiful fossils, I spent a glorious day on a glorious
beach, and 1 left, just a solitary day-tripper. 1 would not return for 12 years. I
had gathered some fossils, but I had not done any science. I was not really in-
terested in the age of Hornby Island, or in much else about it, at the time of
my first visit. That state of affairs was to change greatly by my next.
By early 1986 I had already learned that paleomagnetism, seemingly
such a simple and straightforward endeavor, was fraught with difficulty. If
the sampled rocks had been reheated to any significant degree, you could not
expect reliable results. Those scientists who had sampled for paleomagne-
tism in the Cretaceous-aged strata of Vancouver Island concluded that the
entire region had been reheated and was therefore unsuitable for paleomag-
netic work.
But had the previous workers exhausted all avenues? Had they shown
without a doubt that no region of the vast Vancouver Island area was unaf-
fected by regional heating? I thought that the easternmost islands of the
Georgian Strait might possibly be unaffected, because the ammonites there
were absolutely pristine. Like Sucia Island, Hornby had preserved its fossils
well. Might not it have preserved a primary magnetic signal too? It was
worth a try, so I journeyed there with two student field assistants to drill for
paleomagnetism.
The trip took place in perfect weather, a late summer lark. We arrived on
Fossil Beach, repository of so many exquisite ammonites, and began the labo-
rious process of drilling and recording our results. Such activity certainly drew
attention. Screaming like a banshee, throwing streams of muddy water out of
the nozzle, a paleomag drill set is a raw wound walking. Lots of natives came by
to see what in the world three mud-spattered men were doing on their beach.
Island folk being the friendly people they usually
.ire,
we were soon be-
friended by a long-legged woman, who graciously invited us to camp on her
nearby property. Early each morning we ventured from this cozy spot, pack-
ing lunches and dirty clothes, and managed to remove more than a hundred
