Amanda Schmidt, an assistant professor of geology at Oberlin
College, writes from Sichuan Province, China. She is studying
the relative natural hazards of some places where people choose
to live. Wednesday, Aug. 3 Our colleague from the University of
Washington left for Chengdu today, so Monday was our last day in
the field with him and we were determined to get a bunch of
items checked off our to-do list. He is more experienced with
this kind of fieldwork than I am, so we needed to get Xenna’s
and my questions answered before he took off, as we have another
10 days of fieldwork here. Also, for the last few days I’ve been
hauling around my heavy backpack with 10 30-cenitmeter metal
pipes for optically stimulated luminescence (O.S.L.) sampling.
If nothing else, I really wanted to get some O.S.L. samples
taken so that I could leave a few of the darn things behind! We
had three main objectives for the day: 1) determine how much the
paleosols in the terraces are offset by so we can try to get a
rate of movement;