Erasmus exchange to the East
It was finally possible to travel east to Åbo in Finland again. The Erasmus cooperation with Åbo Akademi could be re-activated. The two-weeks course “Introduction to Geophysics” has become more and more popular with time and attract students from the Finish university “Turun yliopisto”, too. This year I had more than twenty students of which about 60% came from the Finish university. Everything worked perfectly and the teaching assistant (TA) Axel did a fantastic job. This was his second time as TA. On Wednesday (20th of October) I could abandon the students in Axel’s care and visit Pargas. The limestone company Nordkalk has their Head Office and storing facilities in this place. Kenneth Fjäder, an old acquaintance from the Nordic Volcanological Institute in Iceland, works at Nordkalk and he succeeded in finding drill cores from the Impact crater, Lumparen (Fig 0). I was interested in the layers of sandstone situated between the crystalline impact breccia and the Ordovician limestone. We found some sandstone, which we sampled. On Saturday, Kenneth and I visited a former Nordkalk geologist, Ritva now retired. The next day Joffi (Olav Eklund) (Fig. 1) and I went on an excursion to Nådendal (Naantali) northwest of Åbo. We visited the syenitic complex named Kopparberget (fig 2) as it got a reddish color in the sun. This complex hosts several carbonatite dikes (fig 3). In the late afternoon Joffi and I picked up his wife Lena and went to the restaurant “Peppurimylly” in Åbo. The teaching continued the next week and on the second last day I gave a talk about geologists in movies. On Friday I left Åbo after a successful course and now there is only the exam left.
