Luke, Martin and Jarryd headed off to Wolfe Creek meteorite crater in remote WA last week. The plan was to make a 3D image of the crater using a drone, map the crater, take some samples (to analyse for shock or melt glass and confirm the date of impact) and combine it all to make a virtual fieldwork laboratory so that anyone can zoom around the crater, looking at various rocks and features.
Luke’s journal continues …
Dear diary,
Today is the last day of our expedition. We had pancakes with sugar and lemon. Party! Unfortunately, our sugar was in the form of sugar cubes – fantastic for coffee, less so for sprinkling on pancakes. We resorted to crushing the cubes between two spoons which resulted in loss of about 70% of the sugar. At least the ants were happy. We rolled up our swags or as I like to call them ‘bizarre dream factories’ for the last time (you have no idea! For example, I learnt in an evangelical church, where the pastors were a boy band, that the basketball player Lebron James is in fact 6’3″, and Donald Trump was interviewed by Jon Stewart from The Daily Show!).
We began the final stretch. We could smell home and relative safety – safe from fictional murderers, but probably at a higher risk of death associated with all major cities … I say major, I am talking about Perth here and I was born in London… I just looked up the correct descriptor for Perth. It is technically a ‘metropolis’ … Only one step down from London which is a ‘conurbation’. Who knew?
Anyway, I was holding the wheel until we got back to Perth – we stopped for a pie to abate our craving … It was awful. All that anticipation met with abject disappointment. We did finally arrive safely in Perth and seeing tall buildings again was a tad unnerving. It was also surprisingly cold. Turns out, if you travel 3,000 km south, you lose about 30 degrees. My northern hemisphere brain struggles to deal with this. If you did that from the UK you’d be in the Sahara desert!
Our whole trip = 6,131 km (also equivalent to 6 days driving or 60 hours driving time or listening to the entirety of Terry Pratchett’s “Guards, Guards” and the whole of the BBC’s Radio 4 “Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy”, “A History of the World in 100 Objects”, and most of “Infinite monkey cage”).
I’m now cream crackered but because I’m back early, I’ll just have to go to my friend’s birthday party. Not before having a very thorough shower! It’s going to take some scrubbing to remove the orange tan of desert, plastered over layers of 50+ sun cream.
Ah well, party time! Work hard, play hard kids, see you next time!
– Luke