Crete Field Trip

Part two of my geological journey to small parts of Greece...

We took the night ferry from Athens to Crete, which was a lot more luxurous than I was expecting. I mean there weren't gold plated bathtubs or anything but our cabin looked like any land based hotel room and the ship was so big I don't think I felt a single wobble the whole night. Sadly the ship still arrived before 7am though, so no lie in!

We spent 10 days on Crete, all of which I enjoyed greatly. I am sure part of this was to do with the existence of precious, precious clouds and even on one occasion rain! Also one huge advantage of Crete is that it has big (up to 2500m) mountains so there are some upland areas which are also cooler!

Crete is much bigger than I realised, over 200km long, and in 10 days we only covered parts of the western half of the island. The scenery changes dramatically, in keeping with the varied geological units and tectonic history that has affected the island and continues to the present day. There are high limestone mountains with folds on all scales, broad bays with sandy beaches, precipitous terraced areas and switchback roads aplenty. Big height changes are common, driven by the differences in erosion between various rocks combined with huge numbers of faults uplifting and downthrowing different segments. Best of all there is lots and lots of coast, leading to beautiful exposures of structures in full 3D.

The traces of earthquakes were everywhere for the trained geologist. A fault scarp is the exposed surface of a fault which breaks the surface as one side is thrown up and the other side is thrown down. These really are fantastic s
tructures, you can feel with your hands the scratches and mineral lineations which display the most recent movements of the fault for all to see!

This 50m high cliff is a fault scarp!! Note that it would not have been exposed in one event though, that would be an utterly huge earthquake.

We stayed in a varied selection of towns in Crete, ranging from a 'proper' town where many local people seemed to live, to a town which was completely swollen with beach tourism, to a village with barely 40 houses nonetheless entirely (and I mean this) occupied by german holidaymakers. All of these offered fantastic food, which is best experienced by ordering as many small dishes as possible, even though one waiter was convinced this was 'not the greek way' (he would have had a fight with the serifos waiters who were pretty sure it WAS the greek way!).

All in all an excellent trip, after years more or less out of the field, and a limited field experience at university, it was more than useful to get some quality time on the rocks with a whole buch of students and some excellent field geologists, most of whom were discovering the outcrops for the first time themselves, lending a very excited atmosphere to the whole proceedings...

There's a whole other half of crete to explore someday, I guess!

Until then, here's the gallery of photos from the half I did see...

Der Tom