University in Germany

I have now sit-in on to two meeting of a geology class at the Freie University Berlin, on the subject of Sedimentary Petrology.  I'm quite excited to have been able to do this, since the class I am taking later this summer at Humboldt University is going to be a different experience - most of the students are going to be international students. I had wanted to do some work with the Sand Wiki, but I didn't realize how expensive transit was going to be, and my list of "fun" projects that I came up with seemed to be too long to include that too.

About the subject: The subject is well within "related" to my degrees, though kind of an extension. I have learned a lot about streams and water on time scales of 100 years or so, but this class' concepts are much longer in history.  For example, many sedimentary rocks that contain marine fossils are the product of thousands of years of accumulation and compaction on continental shelves that probably are not there today.  Fossil beds in Colorado are the result of deposition of shells of marine organisms in the Jurassic/Cretaceous shallow seas in the western USA, but have since been uplifted more than a mile thanks to the subduction zone on the western coast of the USA.  They are no longer located in the environment in which they are deposited, which looked more like the Bahamas.

At any rate, when these sedimentary rocks are sliced very thinly (30 microns) and viewed under a microscope, the results can be very pretty (and also helpful in decoding earth's past, but I know most of you don't care!)

Ooids (calcium carbonate rolled into spheres via turbulent shoreline wave action)

Radial ooid at higher magnification

Foraminifera

Algae-coated brachiopod shell fragments

 About the people: They are supposed to know English, and many of them do.  They seem to not use it all the time (which is more than I can say for most of my fellow Americans and any other language). However, the professor seemed very entertained when he announced during the first class in which I was present that "today, this lecture will be in English.  Does anyone have a problem with English?" - to which, some people sat up quickly with an, "Oh...!"  Everyone seemed to find the lecture comprehensible (the professor did his Masters at UTexas in Austin, and is very comfortable with German, Spanish, and English) and at least at the beginning I felt a little bit guilty, though reassuring myself that I could probably understand if it were in Spanish.  At the end of the lecture, showed thanks in the most unusual way.  Imagine "knocking on wood" but for the length of an applause at the end of a concert.  This is commonplace, and seems to have the same effect as clapping, though I didn't remember to ask anyone about it. 

In between the lecture and lab, the group of three I approached didn't engage talking to me first, but were quick to include me in a new conversation in English when I said "Hi".  I just asked them about where they were from, where they had been in the world, and where they like to go in Berlin.  They were your standard Geology nerds, and I felt like I was in the company of people I identified with.