French-German Field Trip to the Pyrenees
The Pyrenees: a geologically interesting and unique mountain range. It was therefore all the more educational for us, four Potsdam Master's students, to have been there on a field trip from Sep 23 to Oct 02, 2024 as part of the ‘Thematic Field School’ course.
The field course was offered by Prof. Eline Le Breton (University of Rennes) as part of the professorship ‘Earth System Environmental Sciences’ (University of Potsdam/ University of Rennes), funded through the German-French University (DFH-UFA). There is already an exchange with the University of Rennes within the EDUC Alliance (European Digital UniverCity). The current project was initiated by Professor Peter van der Beek at the University of Potsdam. One of the aims of the exchange is to propose joint field trips with other universities, in this case with the University of Rennes. This not only promotes academic exchange, but also gives us students the opportunity to meet other students. It was also interesting for us to see how identical the course content is despite the different university concept and thus different teaching methods. Our participation was also made possible thanks to generous support from the Potsdam International Office (https://www.uni-potsdam.de/en/international/contact/io).
Twelve French students from Rennes took part in the excursion and together we got to know the Pyrenees better. The excursion was organised and carried out by the team of Eline Le Breton, Marc Poujol and Thierry Nalpas.
Thanks to the different specialisations of the teachers (geochronology, sedimentology, tectonics), we were able to observe and understand the Pyrenees from different perspectives.
We spent the first four days on the north side of the mountain range, in Tarascon sur Ariège in France, and then five nights on the Spanish south side, in La Puebla de Roda, which enabled us to better understand various tectonic and sedimentological events.
The Pyrenees were formed by the collision of the Eurasian Plate and the Iberian Plate. They can be divided into the North Pyrenean Zone on the north side and the Axial Zone and South Pyrenean Zone on the south side; these are separated from each other by the North Pyrenean Fault.
A main topic of our field trip was to study resources. Not only did the teachers show us well-known resources such as talc, lead-zinc-rich minerals, albite, gypsum or bauxite, but we also talked about potential resources such as oil and water.
In the Isabena Valley, an almost completely exposed depositional system from alluvial fan to lower offshore (turbidites) can be seen along a road section. Another special feature of the excursion was that we were able to identify both magmatic rocks (including lherzolite and granite) and sediments (including sandstone, limestone with and without fossils) as well as metamorphic structures (slate).
We learned that the folding and tilting of structures in a panorama can be better understood by drawing it from a distance. The excursion was very helpful in reviewing various topics and, above all, in recognising and interpreting the theory we had learned in an outcrop.
Many thanks to everyone who made this great excursion possible!
Author: Tabea Reitemeier, Student of the Master`s Program in Geosciences
