Azuma Fieldwork

Greetings everyone,

Much has happened since my last post. I am afraid I rarely find the opportunity to sit down and compile one of these. This time I am writing to you while in the move. Currently I am riding the bullet train bound for Tokyo. From there I will take the bus to Tsukuba to visit Isoji and his family, as I have promised last time we had met. I can't wait to see all of them again. Taking the bullet train in Japan is rather expensive so I am combining this trip with a visit to Kanazawa University, where I will learn about setting up and running experiments. For my project I am planning to make my own experiment from scratch but I do not have any experience doing that. This trip will allow me to gather ideas and discuss them with professionals. It will be quite a valuable endeavor, me thinks. Since this trip is connected to my PhD my train fare and hotel stays are mostly taken care of by the university. That is also nice, me thinks.

But enough about that, let's talk about my trip to Azuma (again). This time I was helping out a bachelor student with his research. He is interested in the ballistic trajectories of a recent (over 100 years ago, so basically yesterday in a geological sense) eruption, so we were mapping the locations of volcanic rocks as well as their size. We also took a sample to determine their density. With this information he wants to do a hazard analysis for this particular volcano since it is frequented by many tourists. We were rather lucky with the weather in the sense that 1) it wasn't raining, and 2) we were not melting (The parking lot is about 1500 m above sea level, duh). Both are not necessarily a given since we are currently in the rainy season. So I was quite content with the weather situation. I am a simple man after all.

After arriving at Azuma we donned our special field research equipment: Helmet, working gloves, and reflective vests, and made our way up the mountain along a hiking trail. By the way, meet Tomo. He is a bachelor student in his final year and sits next to me in the lab. I have recently found out that he wants to continue and do his Master as well. If everything goes according to plan we will be graduating at the same time.

The initial part took us over a wooden catwalk through a swamp. This area does get a lot of snow after all, which melts over the summer months and collects in this little basin. Quite interesting actually.

You have got to hand it to the Japanese, they know how a hiking trail needs to look like.

It didn't take long before we came across our first specimen. It was quite a sight. I honestly wasn't expecting it to be this large, but we were quite close to the site of the eruption itself so it really shouldn't be surprising. This thing is about 4 meters in diameter.

Not all specimen were this large, most of them were actually more about this size (Folding ruler: 20 cm):

On the way up we had a nice view of Azuma-Kofuji, albeit partially covered by clouds.

After a few hours we actually reached a field of snow, at which point we decided to turn around. It was meant to be a daytrip anyway and we were able to gather data on about 30 rocks. Not bad, I'd say.

And as always, here is a friendly reminder that this volcano is still quite active:

You could hear this vent roaring the entire time. Depending on the wind direction you could also smell it.

I am now almost in Tokyo. The Japanese Shinkansen is fast as hell. I have seen a lot of rivers with a significantly high water level. It has been raining a lot this past week and it will continue for at least one more. This is quite surprising since the Japanese Meteorological Agency has declared the rainy season to be over a few weeks ago. Predicting the weather in our current environment seems to become more and more difficult. I wonder if Japan will experience some major flooding soon. If that is the case I also wonder whether I will be able to come back to Yamagata next week. We will see.

Until then,

Nils