Polar Passport

Talking to Schools in PNG

I am tour guiding in the far north again, and have a spare day before the ship sails. Summer seems to have ended here (though the Sun won't set for another ten days yet), and it has been bucketing snow all morning.

Recently I was in Papua New Guinea again, making more measurements of how the tectonic plates are moving.

I stayed about 4 or 5 days in each location I visited, and while the instruments were running I usually visited the local school, to explain the work. In PNG everybody knows about earthquakes, volcanoes and tsunamis from personal experience, and I think it's important to explain how these things are related, and why geologists think their country is so exciting and interesting.

As well as talking about my work, the teachers and students had lots of other science questions for me! World Environment Day had just happened, so we talked a lot about climate change, sea-level, pollution and sustainability. As PNG develops, it's important that the people and future leaders are well informed on these topics.

Here are some images of the trip:

The pupils of Amboin Primary School and their teacher, beside my GPS antenna. Amboin is a small village in the Sepik River region, very hot and humid.

Talking to about 300 pupils at the United Primary School in Mt Hagen. Mt Hagen is PNG's third largest city in the Highlands region, about 1700 m above sea-level, and has a very comfortable climate for me.

St Xavier's High School is on Kairuru Islands, near the town of Wewak on the north coast of PNG.

Explaining plate tectonics at St Xavier's High School. The rocks in the school grounds are 'pillow lavas', which formed at volcanoes on the bottom of the sea. This is how much of the Earth's crust is formed, but not many people have the chance to see it so easily as these students!

Bam is a small island off the north coast of PNG. It is the top of a volcano, sticking out from the sea. The island is about 3 km wide, and has one village. Here are some students of the primary school, with the island's leader, Greg Kibai.

The Sepik River

After working for a week close to the coast around Wewak, we moved further inland.

With my colleague Sylvester, from the University of Technology in Lae, we set up a station in Maprik, an agricultural town in the foothills of the coastal ranges, on the edge of the Sepik plain. Important crops here are vanilla and cocoa, but the markets are not very good: a few years ago when the crops in Madagascar were failing, vanilla was bought here for 850 Kina per kilogram, and the town grew rich (one PNG Kina is currently about 40 Australian cents). Now it’s down below 5 Kina, and many plantations are being neglected.

I wanted to get to Ambunti, on the Sepik River, which has no road access. I had planned to get a small plane, operated by the Mission Aviation Fellowship, who support hundreds of small villages in PNG that have a grass airstrip and no other access apart from several days walk on a jungle track. But MAF were having their annual pilots’ meeting last week, so I left Sylvester in Maprik, and took a PMV truck down the dusty road to Pagwi, on the bank of the Sepik River. There I found a motor canoe going the 50 km upstream to Ambunti, and joined a few other people going the same way.

The motor canoe is a dugout canoe, made from a single tree trunk, like traditional river canoes here. But unlike those, which are double-ended, it has a transom at the stern where an outboard motor if mounted. It’s about 10 m long, about 1 m wide at the stern and tapering forwards, and the hull A 30 hp motor took 12 passengers and cargo upstream at 20 km/h, so the journey took about 2.5 hours, and I arrived at dusk in Ambunti.

The Sepik is the largest river in PNG. After it leaves the mountains, it winds slowly more than 1100 km to the sea. It’s what earth scientists call a ‘meandering river’. It is so ‘flat’ that gravity doesn’t pull it straight downhill. Instead it winds from side to side in large bends, which grow wider and wider until they are cut off, leaving the old channel as a ‘ox-bow’ lake on the plain beside the river. There are more than 1000 of these lakes alongside the river’s path.

There is very little development along the whole of the Sepik Rver. There is no mining or forestry activity and there are no major towns, so the river and the catchment are still in their natural condition.

After setting up my GPS equipment in Ambunti, I had time for a look around. At the top of the nearest hill, I visited a new telecommunications tower. It would be almost impossible to lay telephone cables through the jungle and swamp, so radio towers are the best solution. In a town with no road access and only a grass airstrip, fuel is expensive, so this transmitter is solar powered. My GPS gear uses one portable 35 watt panel to charge that batteries, so I was very impressed by 144 panels, each producing 75 watts!

At the end of my stay in Ambunti, MAF were flying again, and a single-engine Cessna 206 took me back to Wewak in 45 minutes, compared to the outward journey of about 5 hours in trucks and 2.5 hours in a canoe.

lukim yu,

dan

PNG - Land of the Unexpected

This is an official tourism slogan here, and it's perfect! The locals love it, and pull it out cheerfully and sarcastically at every opportunity.

We had a good drive today out to the west of Wewak, to a village called But. The road is rougher than I had expected, with several stream crossings and one big washout where the locals were busy with road works. We got there after a couple of hours - it's a lovely spot, with a beautiful beach and a Japanese WWII memorial. Our survey marker is on the lawn between the church and the police office, a safe location with good sky exposure for the GPS satellites.

Normally the village is tiny and quiet, but this week the beachfront is a mass of tents and shelters, with several hundred people in the village for the Momase Catholic Youth Forum. They've built a temporary stage, and a shelter about 30 x 30 m to give the audience shade... which is right on top of the mark, of course. There's really no practical way we could have checked this beforehand - the village has no phone, not even a short-wave radio.

The forum will be there until Sunday, so we've abandoned trying to measure it for the moment.

Tomorrow we'll go back to the east to recover the equipment from Angoram and Tring; it should be routine, but this is the land of the unexpected!

lukim yu,

Dan

A Day in a PMV

It's been a busy few days.

On Friday we installed one GPS receiver at Wewak airport, and arranged batteries and transport for the other sites.

The equipment here is quite similar to what we were installing in Antarctica: a GPS receiver and antenna, powered by batteries and a solar panel. But here the antenna is on a tripod, not bolted to the ground like in Antarctica, because it only has to stand a few days, and because we are measuring the horizontal movement of the earth, and not the vertical (it's hard to measure the height of a tripod accurately enough to measure vertical positions). And we don't need to transfer the data
by satellite here - we just download it from the receiver every day or two.

On Saturday we made a trip along the inland road east from Wewak about 120 km, to the town of Angoram, on the Sepik River. We installed two more sets of equipment on the way, in Angoram and the village of Tring, both on survey markers that have been measured several times in previous years. We leave the equipment in a small tent to shelter it from the Sun and rain, and ask the local people to take care of it until we come back again.

The sites are left to make measurements for four days, but today we went back to check them. When we don't have all the gear to carry (each site weighs about 80 kg in total), we don't need to have our own vehicle. I prefer to travel by PMV, or 'Private Motor Vehicle', which are the private transport services operating all over Papua New Guinea. They vary from small vans in the towns, to trucks in the countryside, and 4WD vehicles for the mountain areas with rough roads and river crossings. It's a good way to travel and talk with the local people, and see where they are going and what they're doing.

Today our PMV had bad luck, with several flat tyres to be changed and fixed along the way, but we checked both sites, which were operating normally. Due to the travel delays, we got back to Wewak after dark, but the apologetic driver dropped us at our door. And it was nice coming back through the hills at dusk - the road deserted compared to daytime, the smokey smell of cooking and the glow of small fires in the jungle across across the valley, at huts invisible in the darkness.

Better luck next time,

Dan

A Polar Scientist in the Tropics

Welcome back to the blog; sorry I've neglected it for a while.

The work in the arctic (Svalbard and Greenland) was great, but I didn't have the time to write about it, or the possibility to send email easily, so the blog suffered. Perhaps I'll be able to write a bit about what I did in those places,and post a couple of nice photos, but the coming months are pretty busy with more work and travel, so I hope there'll be enough exciting new stuff.

I'm in Papua New Guinea! As well as the Antarctic project I was working on last summer, the group I work with at the Australian National University does some research here. Like the Antarctic project, this one is 'GPS geodesy' - using precise GPS receivers to measure the movement of the Earth's crust. In Antarctica, we are trying to measure the movement caused by changes in the thickness of the ice there.

Here in PNG, we are measuring the movement of the tectonic plates. Where the Australian Plate is colliding with the Pacific Plate, there are a lot of fault lines and earthquakes, and the land is pushed up into high mountain ranges.

I arrived in Port Moresby on Monday, and stayed a couple of days to collect the equipment I'd shipped here from Australia, and make other arrangements. Today, I flew to Wewak, on the north coast of the island.

PNG's airlines have had experienced a lot of delays recently, so I arrived 2.5 hours early for my 10:00 flight this morning, having anenormous stack of excess luggage and remembering the long excess-baggage payment queue from when I was here last year.

After a lot of waiting without check-in for my flight being opened, it was announced that it was delayed four hours. At least I was able to check in and queue without fear of missing the flight. It turned out to be five hours delay, but I am now in Wewak. Flying over the Highlands, the land was mostly covered with cloud, but sometimes there was a glimpse through to rugged misty jungle-clad mountains. The plane did a wide turn before landing, and I saw the town of Wewak on a long coast, fringed with coconut palms.

Checking in early was a good idea. Though I felt a little guilty when it turned out on arrival in Wewak that a dozen other passengers' bags had been offloaded before we left, while all my 7 bags, 140 kg, arrived with me.

I'm staying close to the airport, where I'll start my work tomorrow. A healthy and contented-looking tree kangaroo is browsing in an enclosure outside my room, along with a couple of raucous parrots, and the frogs have started up in the evening rain, not quite loud enough to drown the sound of the surf at the beach just 50 m away. Very different to Antarctica and Greenland!

Lukim yu bihain ("see you later" in PNG pidgin)

Dan