The 2016 Field Campaign of the Volcano Group of Lab G-Time

The group arrived in Manila, Philippines in batches from Brussels starting with myself, on July 16, followed by Prof. Alain Bernard and PhD student Katharine Maussen on July 17 and same night but at a later time, Julien Robic and Djenan Ratkovic, both masters students at DGES in ULB.

The group conducted fieldworks in Taal Volcano, which is south of the capital and Cagua Volcano, which is north of the Philippines from July 21 – August 12, 2016. The purpose of the fieldwork in Taal was to install new instrument called gastropod that measures dissolved CO2 gas in the Main Crater Lake of Taal Volcano. This was also the study area of Katharine where she was working on CO2-degassing in Taal Volcano. In connection with her dissertation research, the group took turns in measuring the CO2 flux coming out of the lake using a gas accumulation chamber. Katharine has been in the country many times already. Typical day for the group was to climb the volcano, starting the day with a 30-minute boat ride to the volcano island, then a gentle ascent to the crater rim and descent to the crater for about an hour (depending how fast your pace was). The group spends the entire day inside the crater doing all the necessary work that needs to be done.

The second half of the field campaign was a trip to the northern part of the Philippines. The northern part is blessed with several volcanoes, one of these volcanoes happened to be still on the main island. The remaining volcanoes are either a four- to six-hours boat rides in the open seas. This volcano is Cagua Volcano. It is an active volcano and has some active solfataras with boiling pools of hot acidic water or mud. This is volcano is part of my dissertation research and the masters students research project. The volcano is about 1,200 meters high. We climbed the volcano early in the morning of August 10 and reached the crater rim after an hour and a half walk through some thick vegetation and tropical flora and fauna. On top of the crater, we can look down to see the solfataras and opposite that view was an amazing horizon with the silhouette of Camiguin de Babuyanes, the closest volcano to this one in this group of volcanoes.

The group then proceeded to climb down to the solfatara areas where each of us sampled the boiling mud pools and the acidic hot springs littered around this area. After some four hours of work in the solfatara area, we all headed back to the crater rim to start our climb back to our base camp.

We were lucky enough to have a very gracious host. She was the mayor of the town of Gonzaga, Cagayan Valley, which is the town that has the administrative / political jurisdiction over Cagua Volcano.

Overall, the 2016 field campaign was a success and we are all looking forward to the 2017 field season in the Philippines. We welcome any interested people from G-Time, maybe there are some meteorites in the Philippines.