Here is a link to an interesting video about a find in an amazing place ......
Who Made These Circles?
Who Made These Circles?
Who Made These Circles in the Sahara?
- Thread starter ski3pin
- Start date
Foy
Resident Geologist
Very good story and well put together. But I'm downright shocked the geophysicist didn't nail it right out of the box. Those are "shot holes" all day long. I never spent a minute of my mineral exploration career doing seismic or anything related to oil and gas, but I spent 2 years using buggy mounted (think articulated 4WD log skidder chassis)shot hole rigs to drill 300' deep holes to find lignite coal in the Gulf Coast states of TX, LA, and MS, I heard a lot of stories about seismic lines from my drillers, and they all had scrapbooks of jobs they'd been on. Every one of the drillers was deaf as a post, too. That'll happen when you spend a couple of decades with your left ear about 30' from the exhaust stack for a screaming Detroit 3-53 three cylinder 2-stroke diesel.
So yeah, shot holes. The geophysicist must be a young'un.
Foy
So yeah, shot holes. The geophysicist must be a young'un.
Foy
OP
OP
and thus, we must always remember all the analog knowledge geezers possess.Foy said:
So yeah, shot holes. The geophysicist must be a young'un.
Foy, Monte
Fun story!
I was in southern Tunisia once, long ago, to help unravel a magnetic survey problem. One of the seismic crew, a brit, drove me around that part of the Sahara desert to see the area. His tour included a lake in the middle of a sabkha out on one of the chotts. Apparently, about 6 months before, my company (which will go unnamed) lost a seismic shot hole drill rig there by drilling down deep enough to breach a confined aquifer which proceeded to gush up, grow ever larger, and after a while the drill rig just sunk out of sight. From the days of the 'Energy Crisis' up to the mid 1980's there were geophysical exploration crews of all types everywhere. Dynamite crews, vibro-seis, aeromag, gravity, you name it, we tried it. My duty area was east and north africa and the middle east. We left our spoor everywhere a D-9 cat could cut a line, or a helicopter could establish a benchmark.
I imagine there is a lot more than just shot-hole patterns out in those empty lands.
Tony
P.S. The 'expert' that said any marks would be removed after a seismic survey is surely pulling someone's leg. He likely has never met either juggies or drillers.
Foy, Monte
Fun story!
I was in southern Tunisia once, long ago, to help unravel a magnetic survey problem. One of the seismic crew, a brit, drove me around that part of the Sahara desert to see the area. His tour included a lake in the middle of a sabkha out on one of the chotts. Apparently, about 6 months before, my company (which will go unnamed) lost a seismic shot hole drill rig there by drilling down deep enough to breach a confined aquifer which proceeded to gush up, grow ever larger, and after a while the drill rig just sunk out of sight. From the days of the 'Energy Crisis' up to the mid 1980's there were geophysical exploration crews of all types everywhere. Dynamite crews, vibro-seis, aeromag, gravity, you name it, we tried it. My duty area was east and north africa and the middle east. We left our spoor everywhere a D-9 cat could cut a line, or a helicopter could establish a benchmark.
I imagine there is a lot more than just shot-hole patterns out in those empty lands.
Tony
P.S. The 'expert' that said any marks would be removed after a seismic survey is surely pulling someone's leg. He likely has never met either juggies or drillers.
Foy
Resident Geologist
AWG_Pics said:
Never met juggies or drillers- ain't that the gospel truth.
My deaf drillers could only hear one thing---thunder. With up to 300' of steel in the ground and a 30' mast above the surface, and no safety grounding, our SOP was to come out of the hole and lay the mast down at the first sign of an electrical storm. Good old Ed, who probably hadn't heard a conversational word in years, could hear the low frequency sound of thunder a good 30 minutes before the rest of us. We all thought he was sandbagging to get us to call a rainout until we realized he was right the great majority of the time. When Ed heard thunder, the storm would show up a while later. We used the three drop rule to call a rainout: when weather threatens, draw a circle in the dust on the truck's hood. When the 3rd drop lands inside the circle, it's time to go to the house.
Doddlebugging for a living, in whatever form, was, to steal a term from Ray Wylie Hubbard, cooler 'n hell.
Foy
I was hoping for ETs but great story all the same.
Maybe the "footprint" of some space traveler.
Frank
Maybe the "footprint" of some space traveler.
Frank
I learned right off to pay attention to the tool pusher. Those guys ranked next to the all-mighty when you were making hole. When they say jump, you best jump.Foy said:
On the other hand, juggies are the sheetrockers of the oil exploration world.
And yes, that doodlebugging life would probably kill me in a month if I tried it now. But it sure was cool back then!
Lighthawk
Weekend warrior
Okay, you geo types need to provide a Driller's Dictionary.
What'sa juggie? 'Cause I certainly know where sheetrockers rank in the construction world I inhabit.
What'sa juggie? 'Cause I certainly know where sheetrockers rank in the construction world I inhabit.
craig333
Riley's Human
I was kind of hoping for a dictionary myself 
Foy
Resident Geologist
When running a seismic line, there is an array of receivers deployed to pick up on the shockwave vibrations created by the propagator of the waves. In the beginning, dynamite was used to create the waves, thus requiring the drilling of numerous fairly shallow holes called shot holes. Nowadays, "thumper trucks" are used. Thumpers travel together in twos, threes, or more, and at carefully spaced intervals, a big pad deployed from under the truck raises the entire truck a few inches off the ground and an oscillating device within it blasts vibrations into the surface beneath the pad. The receivers referred to above are called geophones or jugs and they are deployed by the hundreds to thousands along the line of planned shots or thumpers to pick up the reflected waves from the shots. The jugs are placed into shallow scraped spots right at the surface, just below any organic matter/tilth. The geophones are electrically connected with one another by miles of lightweight cable and the connections all lead to the receiver apparatus located in a buggy, a truck, or a small shack helicoptered in to a point along or close by the line. Wherever the receiver apparatus is located, it's called the doghouse. To deploy and pick up & move the many geophones and their cables requires lots of manual labor from jug-runners, or juggies. There was not a great deal of academic rigor behind the training needed to carry huge coils of cabling, dozens of jugs, and lay them out along the line in the shallow scrapings, but a considerable degree of strength and stamina was needed to do so over hill and dale, mesa and butte, in all kinds of weather. Enter the late teens/early 20s outdoors-loving hippies of Tony's and my field days in the late 1960s and early 1970s: Crews of a couple or three dozen juggies putting them down and picking them back up, dozens of miles or a helicopter ride from base camp or town, through very long days. They were the type locality for "work hard, play hard". You didn't want to stand idly in between the juggies and the beer at the end of the work day. They'd run your butt right over.craig333 said:I was kind of hoping for a dictionary myself
Drillers are the survivors of several years working as helpers or roughnecks and they run the machinery as hands on heavty equipment operators. Their primary responsibility is keeping the string rotating and making hole, everything else is secondary. With that, they tend to run the equipment hard and put it away wet, including their helpers.
Tool pushers are the survivors of years as a driller of and are the field supervisors for groups of drillers. Think Chief Petty Officers and you have an idea of their aggressive pushing of drillers and helpers to keep the string turning and hole being made.
Theoretically "in charge" of our little squadron of shot hole rigs (not used for seismic shot holes but instead to test for lignite in the subsurface) was the field geologist. His responsibility was accurate location of the hole on a topo and airphoto, logging the cuttings which the helpers laid out every 5' of depth, supervising the completion of downhole geophysical testing which produced an immediate strip log of the density, resistivity, and other properties of the strata penetrated by the borehole. The field geologist also supervised the plugging of the hole with a couple bags of cement and a small galvanized cap looking a lot like a British Army helmet. The field geologists were typically recent graduates from bachelors programs and were often looked upon as educated idiots by helpers, drillers, tool pushers, permit men, and geophysical borehole loggers. And to the greatest extent, we were exactly that. How else can one explain a rookie field geologist taking off in a cloud of dust to hurry over to solve the big problem at Ed's rig over in Section 37? And yes, we worked hard and played hard, as well. It was the 1970s, after all.
The Intertubes, particularly YouTube and Facebook, are full of videos and collections of snapshots of seismic exploration data collecting, normally referred to as doodlebugging. They're pretty much fun to scroll through, especially if you like seeing what old era off-highway vehicles looked like 50-60 years ago.
Foy
Foy
OP
OP
A great explanation, Foy. I so appreciate your stories and memories, especially the ones from section 37.
Catching up on WTW and this has been very interesting. Would love to be in camp with Foy and Tony just to hear the stories.
I am sure Foy and I would be happy to share, but part and parcel of that experience would be your need to wear at least hip waders, if not chest waders. Two geologists telling stories is guaranteed to serve up at least 3 versions of every event or 'known fact'.Ted said:
craig333
Riley's Human
I have a shovel. Bring it on
Foy
Resident Geologist
Dang, Tony, don't go and show them the secret handshake! But yeah, I'd say chest waders would be best.AWG_Pics said:
Truth be told, most of the stories about my brief (6 year) career in mineral exploration are just about getting stuck. Exactly 100% of my field days were in the Southeastern US Piedmont and Blue Ridge, the Gulf Coast states of East TX, LA, and MS, Michigan's UP, and Maine. All typified by the ubiquitous presence of mud. Lots and lots of mud. Acres and acres of mud. Miles and miles of mud. I probably spent half of my career with my own truck or one of a half-dozen trucks or buggys under my "supervision" being stuck. Did I mention it was muddy pretty much everywhere and all the time? It got to where a great day in the field was one in which the temperature didn't exceed 80 deg F (no A/C in beater field vehicles) and I never locked the hubs. Those days were rare. It was much more often a constant fight against the mud.
Foy
searching for nowhere
Senior Member
Often when I look at aerials of the west I see dots. I've always assumed they are from a geologic investigation, but it puzzles me that I don't see any tire tracks. Can you enlighten me on why I don't see tire tracks? Helicopters were used? The vegetation has regrown?
An example is below. The yellow line is 400ft long. The location of these dots is at: 39°46'42.71"N 116°29'31.72"W
An example is below. The yellow line is 400ft long. The location of these dots is at: 39°46'42.71"N 116°29'31.72"W
Foy
Resident Geologist
While I spent a wonderful 6-7 weeks in Montana during Field Camp, I never once did mineral exploration work in the mountain west/Great Basin/desert southwest, so nothing I offer is anything more than a SWAG, and right much more of the WA than the S.
I can't envision any tightly spaced soil sampling grid on what looks like the lower slopes of an alluvial fan which appears to have formed on the E-facing slopes of Buck Mountain. Explorationists typically start with a baseline having cross lines at evenly-spaced intervals and pull samples on evenly spaced intervals along the cross lines. The whole effect then looks like a grid in plan view, thus facilitating plotting of data points from geochemical analysis of soil samples or digital or analog geophysical data which then facilitates drawing contour lines to form a map of the geochem or geophysical data. The dots do not appear to be on a grid pattern at all.
My guess is spoil piles from varmint burrows. The finer stippling looks like low sagebrush or other low cover, and there's a "spattering" look about the larger dots such as might be expected when a ground dwelling varmint disposes of his spoil hither and yon.
The other thing I see is that the finer and larger stippling (larger being the "dots") is all over a wide ranging area up and down that E facing slope, but it does disappear to both north and south. My guess about that is that a particular horizon within the alluvial fan is more readily excavated by varmints and is thus the preferred residential real estate. Looks like maybe the vegetation (sagebrush?) prefers the same soil horizon.
Geologists and soil scientists home in on both vegetation patterns and faunal distribution patterns for inferences to soil types and underlying bedrock types and to find fracture zones or obscured faults. Show me a line of sugar maple trees perpendicular to strike on a E-SE facing slope along the west side of the Shenandoah Valley in northern Virginia and I'll show you a major fracture or cross-fault with at least minor springs along its surface trace. We'd peruse the USDA Soil Survey stereoscopic airphotos looking for lines of maples identifiable by very light-colored trunks or by distinctly lighter leaves if the airphotos were taken in summer (few were, as wintertime photos provided vastly superior soil analysis). We could line up "sets" of intersecting fractures and small cross faults in order to develop targets for water well drillers. My mentor and employer was Dr. Robert S Young, a jack of all subsets of geological knowledge and a master of all of them. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, while on the faculty at the University of Virginia, Young co-authored some classic geomorphology papers with the venerable John T Hack of the USGS. They had a lot to do with finding exceptional high volume groundwater production well sites throughout the Great Valley of VA, MD, and PA and also found some pretty decent zinc-lead prospects by analysis of joint sets first seen with airphoto analysis.
Foy
I can't envision any tightly spaced soil sampling grid on what looks like the lower slopes of an alluvial fan which appears to have formed on the E-facing slopes of Buck Mountain. Explorationists typically start with a baseline having cross lines at evenly-spaced intervals and pull samples on evenly spaced intervals along the cross lines. The whole effect then looks like a grid in plan view, thus facilitating plotting of data points from geochemical analysis of soil samples or digital or analog geophysical data which then facilitates drawing contour lines to form a map of the geochem or geophysical data. The dots do not appear to be on a grid pattern at all.
My guess is spoil piles from varmint burrows. The finer stippling looks like low sagebrush or other low cover, and there's a "spattering" look about the larger dots such as might be expected when a ground dwelling varmint disposes of his spoil hither and yon.
The other thing I see is that the finer and larger stippling (larger being the "dots") is all over a wide ranging area up and down that E facing slope, but it does disappear to both north and south. My guess about that is that a particular horizon within the alluvial fan is more readily excavated by varmints and is thus the preferred residential real estate. Looks like maybe the vegetation (sagebrush?) prefers the same soil horizon.
Geologists and soil scientists home in on both vegetation patterns and faunal distribution patterns for inferences to soil types and underlying bedrock types and to find fracture zones or obscured faults. Show me a line of sugar maple trees perpendicular to strike on a E-SE facing slope along the west side of the Shenandoah Valley in northern Virginia and I'll show you a major fracture or cross-fault with at least minor springs along its surface trace. We'd peruse the USDA Soil Survey stereoscopic airphotos looking for lines of maples identifiable by very light-colored trunks or by distinctly lighter leaves if the airphotos were taken in summer (few were, as wintertime photos provided vastly superior soil analysis). We could line up "sets" of intersecting fractures and small cross faults in order to develop targets for water well drillers. My mentor and employer was Dr. Robert S Young, a jack of all subsets of geological knowledge and a master of all of them. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, while on the faculty at the University of Virginia, Young co-authored some classic geomorphology papers with the venerable John T Hack of the USGS. They had a lot to do with finding exceptional high volume groundwater production well sites throughout the Great Valley of VA, MD, and PA and also found some pretty decent zinc-lead prospects by analysis of joint sets first seen with airphoto analysis.
Foy
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