Geology Fieldwork in Poland, June 2006
Mark A. Wilson (Wooster Faculty) & Elyse Zavar (Wooster Senior)

We had a wonderful trip to Poland in June 2006 as part of Elyse Zavar's Senior Independent Study project and Mark Wilson's faculty research. The trip was supported by an American Chemical Society Petroleum Research Fund grant and the Henry J. Copeland Fund for Independent Study. Our host was the energetic Michal Krobicki, a geologist at the AGH University of Science and Technology in Kraków, Poland. Our goal was to explore the diverse Jurassic sections in the southern part of Poland, testing various paleontological and sedimentological hypotheses concerning the "Calcite Seas" hypothesized to have existed at that time. (Here is a link to a recent paper on Calcite Seas.) We were shown wonderful carbonate hardgrounds, diverse encrusted and bored cobbles, and unusual stratigraphic transitions.

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

June 12 : Arrival in Kraków. Images of the city as we work to overcome our jet lag. The first photo is of Michal Krobicki in his office at the AGH University of Science and Technology.

June 13: These photographs begin with a view of the Pollera Hotel, where we stayed in Kraków, and then continue through our first day of fieldwork in southern Poland. Notice the gorgeous weather.

June 14: Zalas Quarry near Kraków is our most important locality for the diversity of fossils and carbonate rocks, and for the critical exposure of the Callovian-Oxfordian boundary, which is the subject of several photographs here.

June 15: The day begins with views of the Grunwald Monument in Kraków, which was destroyed by the Germans in 1940 and reconstructed in 1972-1976. We then visited the German concentration and death camps of Auschwitz-Birkenau.

June 16: More fieldwork in quarries, this time exposing Jurassic fine-grained siliclastic units with many encrusted and bored cobbles.

June 17: Our last full day of work in Poland was in Michal's laboratory at the university in Kraków. In the early morning we visited the old Jewish ghetto in downtown Kraków, and at night had a final dinner with Michal and his wife Barbara. Elyse met her mother two days later so that they could explore Kraków and Budapest together for the next ten days. I continued north through the Baltic States for fieldwork with Olev Vinn in the Ordovician of Estonia.

Elyse and Michal Zaton, another Polish geological colleague, collecting encrusted and bored cobbles from a Jurassic clay mined to make bricks. Where we actually worked was rarely attractive, but the surroundings were always beautiful.

The countryside around the Zalas Quarry in southern Poland.

Poppies were everywhere. The Poles refer to them as drops of blood shed by Polish patriots over the centuries.