| Ben, Daria and Isobel investigate the stratigraphy |
Following Emma's departure back to the UK, I headed north from Valdivia for part 2 of my field season in Chile. Three buses, each slower and more decrepit than the last took me to Temuco, then Carahue and finally Tirua. Here, I met up with Marco Cisternas again, along with Lisa Ely, Alan Nelson, Rob Wesson and Isobel Hong from the US. Ben Horton and Daria Nikitina swelled our numbers to 8 when they arrived yesterday.
We've spent the last four days working at Quidico, a small river valley 20 minutes drive north of Tirua. We've been digging deep pits, cleaning river bank exposures and taking thin columns of sediment using a coring device to try to understand the sequence of sediments that has been laid down at the site. The presence of sand layers may suggest inundation by tsunamis.