Kakadu National Park

6/30/2008

Darwin

What an incredible weekend. We’re now moved back into our hotel in Darwin after returning last evening via long bus ride from the watering holes we were swimming at. I got some amazing exposure to the aboriginal culture while we were away and feel like I understand much better their culture even though I’m sure I just got the tip of the iceberg.

Last week, after our second day of class, we took a tour of a liquid natural gas plant outside of town. A chemical engineer talked us through the plant, their gas recovery process, and the business side of things. The offshore gas field that they pull from produces a couple products, some of which are directly loaded on a tanker at the near the platform, and the rest comes through a pipe laying on the sea floor to the plant outside Darwin. The plant is owned mostly by ConocoPhillips, and contains a couple areas where their industry secrets lie. There are three big white boxes where the operators know what goes in and what goes out, but not what or how things work inside. In the presentation, it was obvious that the guy didn’t care for the “greenies,” the people making sure they didn’t have adverse effects on the environment. There was also an area on their property that was undeveloped, still forested, because there are still unexploded bombs and mines there from WWII. The LNG plant felt like it brought real industry to the Northern Territory, and was proud of its role in bringing money to the area. They have a LNG storage tank that got struck 300 times in one hour by lightning. And, bringing me back to my days at the chemical plant in Augusta, the record for climbing to the top of it was 48 seconds.

On Friday, we left Darwin and our first stop was a crocodile cruise, a chance to see some crocs up close. They had some big pythons that they brought out to the group before we boarded the bus, I was surprised to see how many people were afraid of them as well as how many had never touched snakes. We then got on the boat and had an awesome view of some huge living dinosaurs. What they did was drive down the river and look for some crocs that were interested in eating and the guys standing on an overhanging balcony would lower some buffalo meat on a string into the water to bring the animal closer to the boat. They had a no jump, no eat policy with the crocs, which meant when they would get close to the food, the guys would raise the meat above water and make the crocs do a tail stand in order to get the food. With the crocs just on the other side of the glass lunging out of the water, it was pretty incredible. It was a great way to not only be able to see the anatomy of them, but also to see them in their natural environment. I was curious how many tours this company ran a day, though, because I didn’t like the idea of crocs hanging around so they could get some food from a passing boat. As we went down the river, they started feeding some of the birds that were flying nearby. They would throw small bits of meat into the air and these birds would come swooping through and catch them with their talons. They were amazingly coordinated, and they are a rare species in that they eat their catch on the fly, so we could see, after they caught the food, the birds reaching down to pick the meat of the bone as they flew to shore. Very cool.

Next we stopped at the Ubirr Rock Art trailhead, where we learned a lot from our guides about the history of the paintings on the various rocks around. Kakadu is a unique park because it is a World Heritage site for both natural and cultural reasons. These paintings were similar in some ways to the petroglyphs I’ve seen out west. Most of the paintings were of animals and highlighted the fatty areas of the animal, I guess to show the best parts to eat. Some of the most interesting things about the culture: longest continually running form of communism in the world, the ‘sick areas’ that the people knew to stay away from were found to be those with high uranium deposits, they use controlled burning to clear the bush land helping to promote growth and encourage wildlife, they have distinct anatomical differences in skull shape from their supposed relatives in Africa. I was intrigued by the way they learned to live off the land, and many still do so to this day. The evidence of the presence of fire is everywhere in the countryside. Darwin and the surrounding country are supposedly the most lightning intensive places in the world, and I assume that the native people used controlled burning much in the same way that lightning would do naturally.

The camping setup was nice, lots of two man tents set up in a small field. The first night we had kangaroo, crocodile, and buffalo burgers for the meat portion of our meal. The kangaroo was a dark brown, tougher meat that was delicious. The crocodile was a softer white meat like chicken. We learned out to play didgeridoos around the campfire, had smores and listened to Johny Reed, our aboriginal guide, tell us about how his people use the plants and trees that we could see around us. He was hilarious. “Took me 20,000 years to get this tan!” They walk around bare foot with no sun screen or bug spray, having none of the problems that kept a lot of the kids uncomfortable in the camp ground.

The next morning we went to Mary’s Place, an aboriginal woman who’s an artist and opens her home up for people to see how things run. She showed us some pictures of her and her family gathering food in the traditional way. The most interesting one was that of her, her husband and kids gathering file snakes from the river. Apparently the snakes are harmless to humans and are usually fat and slow. So they go into the edge of the water and feel around with their hands and feet in the mud, exploring roots and holes to find the snakes. When they find them, they bring them up, stick the head of the snake into their mouth, bite down, and pull, killing the snake. Pretty hard core to see a woman grab a snake, put it in her mouth, kill it and move on. We got some more lessons on the didge while the girls made bracelets out of pandanas leaves. The kids who lived there were pretty amazing at the didgeridoo – the hardest part about the instrument is learning to do circular breathing. I started to catch on but moreso just learned to appreciate how good they are at it. Coincidentally, there was an installation team there finishing a hybrid solar/diesel electricity source. Our professor went to talk to them and found one of his previous students doing the install, so we got an impromptu walk-thru of the solar setup. It was interesting to hear Mary talk with such little fear about the three dogs they’ve lost to crocodiles in her back yard in the past year.

After leaving Mary’s, we went to a billabong (pond) where we ate fresh pineapple while learning about the geological history of the area. This was to kill some time before our tour started at Ranger Uranium mine. This is a really unique and controversial area because the uranium was found before the creation of the national park, so there’s actually a uranium mine inside a national park because the park was made around privately held land. That being said, it is one of the most environmentally monitored mine sites in the world because it operates in such close proximity to preciously protected wildlife. They mine 10% of the world’s uranium out of that mine and are halfway to the bottom of their pit. Learning about how they take the uranium in dirt form to 400 kg barrels that sell for $80,000 a piece was really amazing. It was most intriguing to learn that while those barrels are 99% pure uranium, only 5% of each barrel is used after enrichment in the fuel rods in a nuclear power plant because in our current design, we only use U₂₃₈ and most of what’s in the barrel is U₂₃₅ . I don’t know much about the specifics in nuclear degradation, but it seems like a ridiculous amount of effort to extract that small amount to make power. I understand that a lot of electricity results from that small percentage, but it’s crazy how much work it takes to get there. I’m skeptical as to the optimistic projections for how little they impact the environment, and how their profit of $50 million a year is giving back to the area at all. There are some interesting things about the place – the power for the facility is created by 5 huge diesel engines, burning 23,000 liters of diesel each day, all the water that leaves the facility does so by evaporating into the air through natural evaporation from their holding ponds, they have gamma ray scanners that determine each truck load’s uranium content, they have 16 of those colossal dump trucks running around the clock. Our tour guide seemed to have some holes in his logic but had interesting things to say about the role of his plant in the world’s energy future. He made a connection to the Bronze and Iron Age to today’s uranium use, saying that bronze and iron were first used to make weapons, then found to have useful purposes outside of weaponry. He countered that point with the fact that even after the finer uses of bronze and iron were found, weapons continued to be made out of those materials. Obviously both statements apply to uranium today. His viewpoint was that the Baby Boomers (him included) were the ones who created most of the problems we have now, but it’s our generation’s job to figure out how to fix it. After leaving the plant, we dropped by another billabong called the Yellow River area, a beautiful lake with teaming with wildlife. We saw a couple crocs in their natural habitat, some neat birds, and a beautiful sunset.

Yesterday, we drove a couple hours to Gunlom Falls, our last stop for the Kakadu trip. We hiked up the ‘escarpment’ (as they refer to the mesa-like mountains in the area) to some natural rock pools in the river. It was incredible – nice cool water on a hot day, natural smooth rock pools at the edge of a 200 ft. waterfall into a lower plunge pool, looking out across the valley under a cloudless sky. There were a couple water monitors (as in iguanas) there that were definitely the largest lizard like animals that I’ve ever seen in the wild. I could have easily spent all day there, but unfortunately we only had time for an hour or two. The upper pool, that I went to while the group was packing up, was fed through a passage that reminded me of pictures I’ve seen of the wind-carved sandstone caves in the American southwest. It was awesome to be swimming in a deep creek with narrow rock walls shading the sun, terminating with a waterfall that you could swim under. When we hiked back down the escarpment to swim in the lower, much larger plunge pool at the bottom of the falls, people got a little unnerved when our guide, Jacky, said that there are ‘freshies’ (freshwater crocs) in the place that we’ll be swimming in. She said generally they don’t bother people but she couldn’t guarantee anything. Then she jumped in and asked who wanted to come with her to the other side of the lake. With no apparent danger, just about everybody followed.

Jacky is a brave woman. I talked to her a lot during this trip because I knew that she knew a lot more about the land than she cared to tell in the group setting and I wanted to see what more there was to learn. She was 30 and had been guiding up there for 6 years, has been adopted into an aboriginal family in a nearby area, studied environmental science, was a definite free spirit and traveled around the world for 3 years before she went to the ‘Uni’ (they refer to college as the university). Anyways, the reason I say she’s brave is because three years ago, on the UNSW trip, they were swimming at a different place called Jim Jim Falls when she spotted a snake in the water. It was swimming toward some tourists that weren’t part of her group but didn’t see the oncoming danger. So Jacky cuts off the snake from getting to the people, kind of trying to herd it off, staying about 15 feet away from it as people swim to shore behind her. Chaos I’m sure was breaking loose as she was trying to keep people calm but people on shore were yelling SNAKE!! As it swam closer, she grabbed it behind the head as it wrapped its tail around her arm. She wasn’t sure what kind it was but had a couple of guesses, hoping it was the non-poisonous guess. She grabbed just barely too far behind its head so it was able to reach back and bite her twice on the hand. She tried to remain calm and tell herself it wasn’t poisonous, the two bleeding fang marks on the area between her thumb and first finger said otherwise. She had to swim 50 meters back to shore with the snake and there here fellow guide identified the snake as a Western Brown snake, one of the most poisonous in the world. They immediately laid her down, bandaged her arm up and went for help. The helicopter arrived an hour later, taking her to the nearest town, Jabiru, which is the town that’s next to the Ranger uranium mine. There, she waited 5 hours until the medical evacuation helicopter arrived to take her to Darwin. While she was fine for the first couple of hours after the bite, she started having some difficulties in the coming hours. As the doctors in the medvac copter tested their general anti-venom on her, giving her 3 mls to start, she felt fine. They boosted the vaccine to 90 mls, accidentally pushing her over the edge and putting her into anti-fallactic shock. The next couple hours she was unconscious, with not a whole lot of options for treatment. Johnny Reed (who I mentioned earlier) is the traditional owner for Jim Jim Falls, and was really upset that this happened under his watch on his land. He was telling me around the fire that we were looking a living legend, the living dead. She did just the right things in order to be alive today, nearly losing it. She said there was some numbness for the next couple weeks in her arm but has otherwise recovered. The central nervous system is a delicate thing to mess with, and when a natural poison that goes straight for it gets in the mix, there’s not a whole lot you can do. I could tell Jacky was a little hesitant to tell the story again, as I’m sure she’s told it many times, but it was an incredible story. She’s definitely one of the coolest people I’ve ever met. I got some advice from her while we drove 5 hours back to Darwin for the rest of my travels in Australia. I think she’s convinced me to go to Tasmania on one of my free weekends in Sydney. She also was pushing the freedom of being on the road, not needing to be confined by tradition as far as getting out of school and getting a job immediately. Hm…I’ve got some ideas brewing but we shall see.

Maybe you’re asking yourself “Is this kid actually doing any school work while he’s there?” Well, the answer is yes and no. Class has been incredible so far, we’ve finished our time with our first lecturer and have been getting acquainted with our second, as he was on the weekend trip with us. Iain, our first lecturer, deals with energy policy foremost, trying to aid the people who make the big decisions in seeing all parts of the picture. It is an incredible challenge to be knowledgeable and understanding of all the different aspects that affect alternative and renewable energy. You first look at the infrastructure that we have now. Then you think of ways to change that or clean it up so the adverse effects are removed. The hard part is that doing so involves an incredibly complex economic system, a system of ethics that governs the need to protect our environment, provide electricity for those who don’t have it, the fairness in doing so, the psychology of the general population in changing a mindset to prevent further disaster, forecasting of resources and changes based on the use of them, etc. etc. etc. There are so many complicated and interdisciplinary issues that I would have to say that I think this is one of the most difficult problems that engineering could be associated with. Uncertainty in the numbers is such a huge question mark that we can’t sit around and wonder how accurate they are; it’s time to move. Unfortunately, changing a system that seems to work wonderfully is going to be hard work, and due to human nature, there’s not much chance to get everybody on board unless it somehow affects large numbers of people. It becomes quite obvious that we’ve got to change something when you realize how unsustainable the current system is. I guess you could use a simple analogy of a car: works wonderfully until it runs out of gas, at which point it is of no use. There are so many caveats and counter points to every issue, it is absolutely fascinating to discuss. I thought it was humorous that in the seasonal changes in the Top End (northern part of Australia), there is a period at the front of the rainy season where a type of cloud called ‘political clouds’ move in, bringing lots of promise but no results. Of course, that’s followed with two meters of rain in about a month’s time, but funny nonetheless. It is currently winter here in Darwin, a chilly 80 degrees F. In the summertime, it gets over 100 degrees with almost 100% humidity. They literally call that suicide season. Fortunately, we’ve come at the right time of the year because there’s still residual water left over from the last rain (in March), but it’s cool enough to actually do things. Anyways, back to the school part. We’ve got our first out of class assignment, a simple 300 word opinion paper. Otherwise, our classes consist of a four hour lecture that is both informative and introspective, helping us learn the background of the problem so we can be adequately prepared to learn about the technologies that are becoming part of the answer. Our professor for this week, Alistair, specializes in photovoltaics (solar panels) and energy efficiency. So we’ve gotten our base, now it’s time to build. One of our classes is going to be centered on what you can do in your house to cut energy use to bring the amount down to an amount that can be supplied by renewable energy. Definitely looking forward to that. Otherwise, I don’t feel like I’m in school much because I don’t really have homework, we don’t have any tests, our information is presented in slide form so we don’t have to read extensively, and our professors are curious about our personal interests to they can tailor their teaching towards those things. Certainly not used to any of those things, but I like it.

Our accommodation has been interesting, it suits me quite well because I have a mattress but there are vast differences between the setup in the types of rooms different people have. The kids of the entire summer program are situated in two different hotels, a couple minute walk apart. The smaller programs (imaging, wildlife) have a nice hotel where the rooms have washer and dryer, kitchen, living room, and multiple bedrooms. Our hotel, the other one, has two types of rooms: the one that I’ve been fortunate to get with a small kitchen setup, bunks and a bathroom, the other is room with bunks and a bathroom. So some people have to pay for laundry, some can’t cook in their rooms, some have ants, some have 5 to a room, others have 3. Everybody paid the same amount for the program, so I guess it’s just fortune whether or not you get the shaft (as some of the girls said). Overall, things are pretty organized but are casual enough to feel like they could have planned things out a little more. All's well here though!