Geology Fieldwork in Estonia, June 2006
Mark A. Wilson (Wooster Faculty)

With funding from the American Chemical Society Petroleum Research Fund, I was able to visit Estonia and do fieldwork in the Ordovician with Olev Vinn and Mare Isakar from the University of Tartu. It was a wonderful trip which greatly expanded my concepts of the Ordovician and the Calcite Seas which were present at that time. There are no student Independent Study projects in Estonia yet, but I hope we can have some in the coming years. It is an excellent place to do geology, and the rich culture and deep history is fascinating.

This webpage is primarily a means to convey photographs from my Baltics expedition. In time I will link to the research results from my field and laboratory work. The images are currently sorted by days:

June 18: I traveled to Estonia from Poland, where I was doing fieldwork with Elyse Zavar ('07) and Michal Krobicki. I spent one day in Vilnius, Lithuania, on the way and took these photographs. I found the remaining Soviet statues and architecture fascinating, especially since this was my first visit to a captive state of the former USSR.

June 19: I also spent a day in Riga, Latvia. It was a national holiday and you'll note that I have photographs of the president of Latvia and her husband laying wreaths at the famous Freedom Monument in the center of the city.

June 20: My first day in Estonia. I arrived by bus from Riga. The first thing my hosts did was give me a grand tour of the old city of Tallinn. It began with the tatty Academy of Sciences building and quickly became much more picturesque.

June 21: On the second day in Estonia we took a small fishing boat out to the Estonian island of Osmussaar and camped there for two days. The Ordovician geology of the island is fantastic, and very well exposed. The history is intriguing. The original settlers were Swedes who farmed the island for at least 10 generations. In 1940 the Soviets expelled them, fortifying the island. It was bombed by the Germans in 1941, evacuated by the Soviets, and then reoccupied and made into a secret Soviet base in 1945. It is now a haunting nature preserve littered with relics of its past.

June 22: More photographs from Osmussaar. We left the island in the afternoon, later examining the Cambrian-Ordovician sections on the Paldiski Peninsula (the last five photographs).

June 23: After a night in cabins deep in the Estonian forests, we visited old quarries cut into Ordovician limestones, and then went to the University of Tartu for two days.

June 24: This set begins with photographs of Tartu in the morning. During the day we drove from Tartu to the north, spending considerable time in the Ordovician oil shale quarries. (I've never seen a rock like this intensely fossiliferous material.) We spent the next two nights at a manor house built by a "Baltic German" in the 19th Century.

June 25: More quarries in Ordovician limestone and a surprisingly unlithified Neoproterozoic clay, a brief visit to a crusader castle, and then another manor home.

June 26: My last full day in Estonia began with short visits to quarries full of interesting fossils, and then an afternoon in Tallinn as I waited to leave very early the next day.

The Ordovician section on the northeastern point of Osmussaar Island, Estonia.