Bahamas Carbonate Trip the tropics- for credit!
Tuesday, March 8, 2005
 
I got to take a class over spring break where we could go to the Bahamas to explore the carbonate systems in action there. It was a trip run by Western Michigan University, and they were kind enough to invite some of us MTU people along.
 
Tuesday, March 8
    Flights to Miami went well, but I found out when I got there that there were two Fairfield Hotels. Fortunately I choose the correct shuttle and met up with the rest of the Geo crew and we went to a neat Haitian restaurant for dinner. We had things like goat tidbits and conch fritters, and I had shrimp in coconut sauce as a main course, and it was very good. Even better, Buddy paid for all our dinners!
    When we got back to the hotel and Ben, Jeremie and I tried out or masks and snorkels in the hotel pool.
 
Wednesday, March 9
    We spent the day in the Everglades and it was rather cold and wet. But it was still a neat trip and we saw an alligator. When we got back we loaded onto the
boat which was the Coral Reef II. The boat was about 80 ft long and had the following crew: Captain by John, 2nd Captain Lou and the Cook Charles (who seemed to fit the typical surly boat chief stereotype quite well).
    The idea was to spend the night on the boat and then head out early in the morning. When we were sitting around in the evening, some of the Western girls were chit-chatting, and one was talking about a rather distinctive tattoo someone she knew had, and I though ‘hey- I know someone with that tattoo!’. So I inquired, and sure enough, she was talking about my friend Ila who lives in Ann Arbor.
    Due to the number of people on the trip Ben, Jeremie, Tony, Peter and myself had to sleep in the dining room/ lounge area. Also, the bathroom on the boat has an interesting procedure. You have to set a timer for 1.5 minutes to power up the vacuum pump, and then when you’re ready you step on a pedal to flush. I was just intrigued as I’d never seen a timered toilet before.
 
Thursday, March 10
    I woke up to find all my sleeping mates gone, and while I was pretty exhausted from the night before, I was surprised that I had managed to s
leep through all the wake-up activity in the morning. I woke up to someone saying that we were definitely out of the Miami river, and my body was rolling back and forth on my therma-rest. The rocking had also tipped over a trash can and was causing a sliding drawer to slide in and out repetitively.
    I could barely stand up, and decided to get dressed. I had a hard time getting downstairs, and being in the tiny bathroom to change was a bad idea.. just the time it took me to change in there made me feel sick. I decided to head out on deck to get some fresh air, but clinging to a pole for a few minutes didn’t make me feel much better. I have to admit that this was one of the most miserable mornings of my life. Looking at the horizon wasn’t helping as it was composed of jagged spikes of waves. Apparently we were in 9ft swells due to the cold front that had come through to make the day before cold and rainy. The captain claimed the trip would have been a lot worse had we been trying to get to Miami rather than away from it. I wasn’t the only one adversely affected by the rough waves- there were at least 3 other people hugging the railing with me.
    Some people, like Jim, were smart enough to stay in their bunks until is was over. I have the feeling I would have been fine if I had stayed laying down. Things finally settled down when we got out of the Gulf Stream, and we finally had breakfast around 11:30am. While staring at the water I did see some flying fish which were neat.
    The rest of the say wasn’t too bad, and we stopped to do some practice snorkeling. The water was warm, and my equipment worked well despite my trepidation. The 2nd snorkel stop was colder and we swam out to an ooid shoal. I was a large cushion sea star and a crab. The shoal was pretty neat, quite shallow and was entirely ooids with no mud.
    About 10 miles from that stop we took a bottom sample and got a sample of peloids. These were smaller than the ooids and again didn’t come with any mud.
    We learned that algae in this area secrete aragonite in order to build a firm structure, and then when the algae dies it is broken down into carbonate muds.
    Another 10 miles out we took another bottom sample. We saw some baby portugese man-o-wars float by while we were stopped. Apparenly peloids can become ooids, and ooids can become peloids. Peloids are internally strucureless, while ooids have concentric layers.
    And, shrimp burrows can fill with coarse storm deposits after the shrimp dies, so generations of shrimp burrow-strom cycles can totally change the original texture of the rock that would be expected. Which, can lead to good lateral porosity and permeability.
 
Friday, March 11
    We didn’t do any snorkeling today, and instead took a small boat to Andros
Island. The Coral Reef II was too big to traverse the shallow water. We went to 3 creeks and way up the rivers to take some cores.
    Carbonate environments are odd as all the sediments we saw were carbonates that originated in the ocean and were carried to the stream banks by the tides. I’m used to thinking of sediments coming from the land and being taken to the sea. The island was very flat, and all you could see for miles were mangroves, and the levees along the rivers were only a few inches high.
  
So, cyanobacteria colonized the surface of the muds and created laminations. Roots, gas bubbles and burrows created fenestral porosity. Deposits in dry environments may resemble those from Andros (with mud cracks and what not), however Andros is a humid tidal flat, and an arid envrionment would have evaporite deposits. So, the moral of the story is that mudcracks to not mean dry. In fact, on our way out, the tide was coming in, and some mudracks we had examined earlier in the day were underwater!
    We ended up at a beach with sand rather than mud- but the sane was all from crushed up shells. There were old beach deposits that were eroding, and quite a few shells were from these old beaches. We also saw a rather large hermit crab and a ray by where we parked the boats. Most of us got soaked on the way back to the Coral Reef II as we were going against the waves.  I still can’t get over the color of the water out here - it’s such an amazing turquoise color.
    I decided to take a shower back on the boat, and it was going fine until I swiped my foot across the pipe going into the shower floor. It hurt alot, but I didn’t think about it too much. When I got out I couldn’t figure out how to turn the shower off. As I was getting dressed I looked down and there was blood on the carpet and I thought it looked like someone had been bleeding... then I look at my foot and realize that, hey! I’m bleeding! So, I stuff toilet paper between my toes, finish dressing and hobble out and recruit  Rick to turn off the shower. I had managed to cut all 4 of my little toes. Tony fixed me up pretty well and the ship’s cook complained I was using up all the band-aids.
 
Saturday, March 12
    
Our plans had to be changed today as the wind was coming out of the NW again. We headed to Captain Morgan’s Cove, and my name was already featured in the cave as graphitti, but alas, there was no rum or treasure. The island was littered with fossil coral and conch shells. We got a really good view and saw a massive water tanker- apparently water has to be shipped to from Andros to Nassau. We also saw a 3-master sailboat that was from Wisconsin of all places! It runs out of Milawaukee
in the summer and Miami in the winter.
    After we went to Joulters and walked up to the beach which was all ooids. And, ooids get everywhere! We went to another spot and walked out on some shoals. It was so shallow that it looked like we were walking on the water. The exposed ripples were amazing, and the shell collecting was excellent.
    Unfortunately we couldn’t visit the reef due to the winds- if we had tried we would have been dashed upon the corals, which didn’t sound too fun
 
Sunday, March 13
    We got back into Miami around 5:30am. I slept through
some rough seas that occurred around 3am, and the entire arrival. Ben, Rick, Jeremie and I took a taxi back to the hotel, but it was too early to check into our rooms, so we had to kill several hours outside under a sun umbrella with a free breakfast buffet. We all took a taxi to South Beach and wandered around. The beach was wall-to-wall people, but was interesting to watch. We walked the length of a pedestrian market which was still fun even though I was with a group of guys. We caught a ride back to the hotel, making our total taxi expenditure $70 for the day. Dinner and beers were had at the hotel restaurant, and by the end of the day we were all pretty tired. Also, out inner ears were messing with us all day, so when we sat down it felt like we were moving. That’s a very odd sensations.
 
Monday, March 14
    I woke up at 5am so I could catch the 5:30 shuttle to the airport. I didn’t have any sort of wait at American Airlines, but when I wandered over to see how the boys were doing a NW, that looked like a mess. When they were done we got coffees and chatted for a bit before parting ways. Security for me went smoothly, as I didn’t set off any alarms. Yay me!