Leader: Linda Fowler. Thanks to Adriano Pimentel at the University of the Azores who produced lists of good localities for our group to see, and also some guidance from Steve Self, we managed (despite no prior visit) to spend 6 full days looking at a mixture of volcanic deposits, geothermal activity and evidence of eruption and landslip hazards as well as a visit to the risk evaluation department in the university. The group met up at Gatwick for the once-a-week direct flight - though sadly 2 people missed it: 1 because his train broke down on the way to London and the other because he got the departure day wrong - and obviously it couldn't be a case of going on stand-by for the next flight! Plenty of occupation for the group on the flight with a c. 60 page handout to wade through... We stayed at the Casa do Jardim - a pension set in a lush 19th Century botanical garden in Ponta Delgada: this gave us a good (and economical) base from which to explore the island as well as being only a 10 minute walk from the town centre (and from the university) and hired self-drive cars.

Photo Sally Edwards.

The "exciting" part of doing a trip this way is that generally OU students have their field trips very well organised but a trip like this has the excitement of finding the best exposures to look at, of interpreting them on the basis of what they had learnt themselves, of the more experienced helping the less experienced, of tracking down a locality described in a 30-year old paper and finding it is still there and of course the occasional bonanza of finding something really stunning that we didn’t know existed such as the basalt with large mantle and crustal xenoliths around the corner from a café stop in Mosteiros, the sequence of tuff ring deposits and bomb sags on the path down to the old whaling station at Capelas, an unexpected and unplanned visit to a geothermal power plant etc.

Ladies and Gents in two halves of an old whaling boat: A Vigia café, Capelas.

A highlight, especially those who have done, or were planning to do SXG390, was the visit to the University where Adriano had, with the permission of the Director, arranged for us to be shown around the risk evaluation department. Here Adriano and other members of the team (Ana Gomes, Rogério Sousa, Fátima Viveiros, Nicolau Wallenstein, Rita Rodrigues and Rui Mestres) explained the seismic and volcanic gas monitoring networks and showed us the various labs, demonstrating the equipment they use for volcanology, petrography, rock geochemistry, volcanic gas geochemistry, seismology, engineering, geodesy and water geochemistry. One star attraction was the un-burst basalt "balloon" from a recent submarine eruption, another a coral sample from the Mid-Atlantic Ridge.

The group were also intrigued by the monitoring equipment - something generally outside their experience.

The island divides up well into areas to visit - the 3 active strato-volcanoes: Sete Cidades, Furnas and Fogo; the extinct Povoação and Nordeste area, and the Picos region in the island's "waist" north of Ponta Delgada. We visited most of these independently but on Saturday Adriano gave up some of his free time to take us to Furnas where (as well as getting mixed up with the annual "Festival of cooking in holes in the ground" and seeing a plethora of hot springs) we went to his current field site where he is investigating deposits from the 1630 Furnas eruption and then to Ribeira Quente where we saw the evidence of the 1997 landslide/debris flow that destroyed a complete street of houses one October night. The group had 1 day off so that they (and I!) could have another look at anything they were particularly interested in or somewhere not on the itinerary, and some even braved the mid-Atlantic in rigid inflatables and full foul-weather gear to go whale-watching! Throughout the week there was encouragement and guidance on use of field notebooks, and I hope that some will produce posters on aspects of the trip for a planned "Shoestringers" reunion this winter. The idea behind this is that it is an opportunity for extra practice of some of the skills needed for Level 3 residential schools. Feedback so far is that it was a good trip! The participants are putting together a fuller write up for the Journal that should be usable as a field guide for anyone visiting the island.

Martin "Hercules" Wass (R06 AL) with his bomb at Pico do Carvão scoria cone.