Field Work - Monchique

I never though I would ever return to Monchique - as a scientist - personally it's still one of my favorite places in the Algarve, and I tend to go there every time I'm around. However as a scientist I thought I never wanted to have anything to do with Monchique ever again... but as the saying goes "never say never"... and Monchique came to me 20 years after my first work for the MSc thesis, this time in the form of a field monitoring project on fluid-earthquake interactions with my good friend Heiko Woith from GFZ - just too intersting for me to resist!

The field work was very tough, the local institutions were not keen at all on having the local water springs monitored, and I spent hours on the phone and talking on site to people - the kind of work I hate the most :( And we could feel the depressing ambiance after the big fire in early August, people were suspicious and discouraged with what happened and how the fire situation wasdealt with, and it was not a merry sight at all...

Anyway we could still see some green coming out of the ashes, and in terms of field work I think we did what was possible given the constrains we had. I think I could have organized things better, and I also need to improve the notes-taking process during field work, it was a bit more messy than I would like. Although it was an exhausting week, I think above all this field work was a good learning experience, scientifically, and also personally - I'm very different from my 20-years younger me, but (I think!) in a good way :)