Geologists from Planet Earth

Geological fieldwork as a window to the world - David Schofield

• Julie Hollis • Season 1 • Episode 2

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David Schofield never really planned on being a geologist. But sometimes, life (and an outbreak of foot and mouth disease) throws you a curveball. David recounts his adventures mapping vast stretches of the Saharan desert, learning to survive on newly-learned resilience and sheer geological grit, and becoming the leader he hadn't realised he was.

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.

David:

Hi, my name's David and I'm a geologist.

Julie:

Welcome, David. Tell us about how you became a geologist.

David:

I grew up in a town to the west of London. I didn't really aspire to being a scientist when I was younger. I didn't do very well at school. When I left school, I had to work. Mainly, I chose to go to university because I wanted to leave the town that I grew up in. I think I chose geology because just for some subliminal interest in rocks. I didn't really have any desire to be a geologist.

Julie:

And what about when you started studying geology?

David:

At university, it was an environment I fitted into very well. I felt very comfortable. And I did my PhD in hard rock geology, working with the Canadian Geological Survey in Newfoundland. And I think that really sparked much more of a passion for being outdoors and observing geology in its natural environment for want of a better word.

Julie:

And this led you ultimately to work for the British Geological Survey. What did you work on there?

David:

My job was really to be out in the field for most of the year. I worked in the West Wales, a rural, sparsely populated hill, agricultural kind of country, where I was quite happy wandering around outside, making geological maps, not seeing anybody from the start of the day to the end of the day, and very much manager of my own destiny and of my own time. And it was really quite rewarding.

Julie:

But ultimately, you ended up doing a lot of international work. How did that happen?

David:

Somewhere about 2000, there was an outbreak of foot and mouth disease in the UK and we stopped doing field work. We couldn't go out in the field. So I was asked to work on another project that the British Geological Survey was doing in Mauritania in West Africa. I said yes to this. It was exciting. It was field-based. I was looking forward to it. However, I had never been to Africa and I'd never... worked in quite such isolated conditions in a culture that was very different from my own. But ultimately, after about four or five years of doing this, it was possibly a turning point in terms of my personal, professional, scientific development, I think.

Julie:

What do you mean by that?

David:

Before then, I'd had no aspiration to travel the world and go to Africa. It seemed like so different and so difficult. And I was really unaware. I think I was quite naive that this was actually a place where the world continued. And I had a very sheltered upbringing, I think, in that respect. The job itself was sponsored by the World Bank to help Deville build the capacity of geologists in Mauritania. The whole country was divided between two geological surveys. It was ourself, the British Geological Survey, worked in the south of Mauritania, and our French colleagues from Bay RGM were working in the north part of the country. We had a job to make a new geological map of the southern part of Mauritania. Roughly, that's an area about half the size of France. It's quite a large area. It's sparsely populated. Most of the country is Saharan desert areas. So it's quite empty. The tradition is for nomadic dwelling there. It's a country that doesn't really have any agriculture. Food is imported. And it's fairly underdeveloped in many respects. So it's quite a contrast from anywhere I've been in my life before, I think. So I remember when we first went there, there were about four or five British geologists. We all worked separately. we each had two pickup trucks with drivers, a cook and a Mauritanian counterpart. And we're literally just sent off into the desert with a large area to make a geological map of. From a geological perspective, it was quite fantastic. I mean, we were looking at some of the oldest rocks on the earth as part of it. And we were looking at some of the younger rocks that sat on top of them. So part of our job was to draw the relationships between those two. And the way we worked was simply to head off into the desert for two months at a time and just make geological maps with everything that went with that. And I think that what was perhaps the most interesting skills that I had to learn was simply how to survive in that kind of environment and how to operate and how to work on a day-to-day basis. So I think the first trip we had, we were constantly... running out of food, running out of water, running out of fuel, and really didn't know how to operate, how to make this sort of thing work. I do quite clearly remember the first night I spent in the desert. At that stage, I had a camp bed, something I gave up on quite soon afterwards. I was lying out underneath the stars. The temperature was still about 34, 35 degrees in the night and there was a meteor shower. I didn't sleep a wink. I was too hot. I was too dehydrated. All I could see were these shooting stars flying across completely clear sky. I wasn't quite sure what I'd let myself in for, but I knew that it was going to be something that was quite different from anything I'd seen before. My first trip, we traveled a long distance to try and understand how to operate and where to go. So that was traveling for days on old tracks in the desert or just across sand dunes and regolith plains and just trying to get an understanding of how to operate. My team, my cook and my counterpart, we got quite close in the end. We got used to buying goats whenever we came across a village and we would take a couple of goats in the back of the pickup truck and then just slaughter them and eat them when we felt like eating something, food was quite thin on the ground. And again, that was quite an experience. You're in a whole country that doesn't really grow any food. It's at a premium.

Julie:

It seems that you were, as you say, dropped into an environment where you just had to figure out how to both survive in quite extreme conditions, but also how to work in those same conditions.

David:

I mean, that really boils down to, well, where are we going to find food for the next week? Where are we going to find some fuel to cook our food on? I had one trip where I was actually working in the further north of Mauritania, and we didn't have anything to cook on. We'd run out of charcoal. So we had to kind of source something to cook our food with, which involved driving 300 kilometers to Morocco, to buy charcoal in sacks and then driving back to our field area. Logistically, that was the scale of things that you have to think about, basically. We were happily driving around the desert looking at geology. The rhythm would usually be we'd set up a camp for a few days. We'd have a tent that the cook would use you know to keep the sand out of our food most of the time and then the rest of us you know that myself and the drivers the counterpart we would just sleep out on mats on the on the desert floor you know and the idea of having a mat was the scorpions tend to go underneath the mats rather than crawl over the top of them so it was very much a case of waking up in the morning and shaking your scorpions out of your boots. In terms of the weather at night times, I mean, in camp, if there was a wind coming from the north in the Sahara coming from Europe, the temperature would drop down to below freezing. If the temperature was coming from the east, all across the length of the Sahara, it would stay in the 30s. So very much dependent on the wind direction. And I used to love those mornings where I'd wake up and it was below freezing. I've been sleeping in my sleeping bag with my long johns on and the top of my sleeping bag pulled up over my head and I'd get up just before first light and it would be fresh. I could walk around and the air was cold. But then half an hour later, the temperature would be back in the 30s and I'd be sweating. It was definitely quite challenging. And then there would be other nights where the temperature just didn't drop and you were just lying on the sand gasping and trying to stay cool. Again, we learned very quickly that The first trip that I went, we were there at slightly the wrong time of year. We'd have to be there over Christmas when the temperatures were at their lowest. But even so, they would probably still be in the high 30s, low 40s. To me, learning how to work in those kind of temperatures was quite challenging and becoming a shade loving animal yes taking the opportunity for any bit of shade you can find and stopping to look at geology and you know stepping out of a vehicle to look at some geology and pulling a notebook out of my pocket and looking at a rock and actually my brain's simply not functioning properly because it's just too hot and again a month of that and you're starting to acclimatize and you start to function and so simply learning how to work in that environment is definitely quite interesting but having said that i found that working in deserts. I feel much more comfortable with working in deserts because there's a logistical order to it. If you're comfortable with how you've planned and you're comfortable with some of the things that might go wrong, then you can head out and you can have a successful trip. Some of the other environments I've worked in, like jungles, rainforests, I find them very challenging. It's that sort of everything is wet all the time and everything wants to eat you and it's all quite difficult. But deserts I'm much more comfortable with. And, you know, daily traveling might involve traveling across regular planes that stretch on for 100 kilometers where, you know, what I would do is I would take my GPS unit and, get some gaffer tape and stick it to the windscreen of the vehicle and say, right, we're going in that direction for 200 kilometers. And it'd be like being in a ship at sea. You'd just see the gravel planes just rolling away beneath your wheels for hours on end. Then the other day, just trying to navigate dune fields where you're in a maze of piles of sand and you might travel five kilometres in a day just trying to navigate your way around this and constantly getting stuck and having to dig and shovel in the heat. Once you get used to that and once you learn how to work with that, it has a rhythm to it which becomes quite enjoyable.

Julie:

Did your colleagues or your work prepare you for operating in this kind of environment?

David:

Not really. I mean, my colleagues were all people who'd worked in Africa for since they were young and they were mostly much older than me. So people who'd worked in Africa for 20, 30 years, who just thought, oh, well, here we go. It's fine. You'll be fine. Off you go. Work it as you go along. And there was a certain amount of being dropped in at the deep end. But I think at that time in my career, that wasn't a bad thing. I was already a capable geologist. This was really a case of just applying what I knew to a very, very different environment. And I think walking into a culture, spending a couple of months in a country where I didn't share a common language with any of the people that I met, that was quite interesting. Being faced with most people being extremely poor compared to myself, where food wasn't available in the way that it is in Europe, so quite often people were quite malnourished, where water is not available and becomes a major... major effort to simply have water for life, just to be faced with everybody I met living a far more challenging lifestyle than anything that I had ever experienced before. I mean, it really challenged my perceptions about people and my own views. I think I'd had a very black and white view of the world before I actually started meeting people who didn't have all the advantages of living in Europe. I felt the pressures of European colonial past. I was unsure about how to really think about that and how to relate to people. After a while, you break down barriers and you learn a lot about people around the world and the fact that we are very similar. Our aspirations are all very similar at the end of the day. It was a great learning experience.

Julie:

How do you feel that having to learn to work in this environment has changed you?

David:

I came away with that with most of my values that I'd grown up with being quite strongly challenged and perhaps a new set of values emerging from that. And hopefully that's been an experience that I've carried with me throughout the rest of my career, basically. In terms of my professional development, I think what was interesting about projects like that, I mean, I mentioned being dropped in at the deep end, but that's quite important in the sense that being in charge of your own program of work and actually having responsibility for your own programme of work, which extends a little bit further to the health and wellbeing of yourself and the people that are with you. That's also quite a good experience. And professionally, that definitely sets the bar of where you need to be in the future, where if you want to develop a career that has some kind of leadership potential, having experiences like that, where you really have to take responsibility. There is nobody else. It's my job to make sure everybody's healthy, happy, travelling, and delivering the work that we need to do. It's quite a responsibility and I think that accepting that, getting past the stage where it suddenly feels like stressful and hard to cope with and actually coping with it and actually managing it and realising that you can do it well, I think that was quite a learning experience as well.

Julie:

And it seems pretty clear that even if you never anticipated becoming a geologist, As it turns out, the geology itself has become a major driver for you, a real passion.

David:

Geologically, I mean, this was also a fantastic time for being a scientist as well, working in a country where there wasn't a weight of other geological knowledge. And if you're working in Europe, there have been a million geologists who've come before you and a million other people have an opinion. And here we were working in a country where There was an outline. There was a geological map. It wasn't in a digital format. And, you know, that part of our job was to produce information in a modern style. And the geology was absolutely fascinating. You know, some quite early earth rocks, large sedimentary basins, and just having the opportunity to travel and see these things. Some of the rocks that I was looking at, you know, fed into the early parts of my career. And I was sort of seeing bits of geology that were putting... all the rest of my geological career into context in some way because I was seeing something where all the sand came from, for instance. And it wasn't lost on me that I was looking at rocks that were effectively frozen sand dunes that were 600 million years old that were still in a desert and that had modern sand dunes sat on top of them. And those modern sand dunes were just recycling the same sand from those 600 million year old rocks that was recycling sand in a desert from much older than that. And that sort of continuity is completely inconceivable. It's unimaginable. The geological time that doesn't really bear explanation, but fascinating to actually see firsthand. And to be in a desert in the Sahara, looking at the evidence for former glaciations, looking at... rocks that were actually deposits of glaciers that were five to six hundred million years old and to think that that part of the world that which is now in a hot desert i'm standing there it's 46 degrees and i'm looking at rocks that were deposited by ice 600 million years previously i mean that that again tells you something about the kind of the the magic of geology and one of the things that keeps people like me motivated for for a long time

Julie:

David Schofield spent 27 years working as a survey geologist for the British Geological Survey, including as the Director for National and International Geoscience. He is now the Chief Geologist for Nuclear Waste Services UK. My name's Julie Hollis, and you've been listening to Geologists from Planet Earth.