This is my first visit to the campus of Phayao University. It is a new campus built on a hillside, far from the city. As usual, the campus is very large, and students take a free bus to get around.
From Chiang Mai, I did not fly (there is no airport in Phayao), but drove. I spent the morning for transportation, and just after arriving in the afternoon, I went to the high school building on the campus. After dropping off my luggage, I was going to give a lecture to the students and teachers in the hall of the university. It was a very busy schedule.
It is a very large hall, but there are only about 60 students. I gave a talk for about two hours, including my own story, "What is science? In particular, the M6 students who came to listen to my talk were very impressed by my proposal for a science project using a very simple method, which I also gave at the symposium, and asked me to take a picture with them at the end.
This is the building of the Faculty of Law. This is a relatively new national university, and all the buildings are beautiful. The university is built on a plateau carved out of a mountain, which is an ideal location for seismic observation, as I will explain later.
The next day, I taught 60 M4 students (high school freshmen) full time from the morning to afternoon. In the morning, I talked about the analysis of the seismograms in this photo. In the afternoon, we observed thin sections and conduct flower fault experiments. The school printed out the data in color on A3 paper, as I had specified. Here, black and white on A4 paper is the norm, so the staff took a lot of time and effort. Thanks to this, we were able to do a full course of processing, including the rather difficult M (magnitude) measurement.
I brought a 3D seismocity maps and 3D glasses as a gift. As usual, I ask the students to think about the principle of these glasses by themselves. It may be a little difficult for first-year high school students.
The principle of seismographs and the difference between horizontal and vertical pendulums were explained using a demonstration seismograph that we had brought with us. The real-time display of the actual ground motion on the desk was also very interesting to the students.
The explanation of seismographs starts with soot paper, the history of seismographs, the subsequent black-boxing of modern seismographs. So I told them that my seismographs are developed to show the inner mechanism of seismograph.
Then, the seismogram shows the North Korean nuclear test waveforms captured by my first Thai seismograph system(installed at KVIS in 2017). The differences are explained in terms of fault and explosion mechanisms. This explanation is to lead to the next fault experiment.
The students were surprised when I told them that the world's first standard seismic network(WWSSN) was actually not for scientific purposes, but for military and political purposes to detect underground nuclear tests.
This is the start time in the afternoon that I am showing students rock thin sections using my polarization units I brought. I encourage them to look at the rocks with the naked eye and not with their phones at first.
They took beautiful micrographs with his phone. Later, I sent them an STL file of the adapter that I made to make it easier for them to take pictures with their smart phone.
The last part is a fault experiment as usual.
However, they had already made beautiful acrylic cases with a laser cutter. I was surprised at this.
It even comes with a push plate. Everything is perfect.
Here, too, we have a nice fault experiment like this. This example shows a beautiful conjugate fault. It is very rare, but it is wonderful.
After explaining that the relationship between principal stresses and other stresses results in three different fault forms and showing pictures of the San Andreas fault, which is a lateral strike-slip fault.
The last question is, as usual, what is not reproduced in this model while the nature has. This question led the students to think about the weathering and erosion are caused by solar energy. And the next question is why the mountains still rise today. It leads to the existence of the Earth's internal energy and to the magnificent plate tectonics
At the end of the class, I was thanked by all the students, and the exhaustion of a strenuous schedule was wiped away. After all, we visited four universities and high schools, and I could tell that I was getting better and better at conducting conversations. I will use this as a reference for the next time.
The first and second days of the tour ended without incident. This is the view from the 7th floor of the hotel, which is located on the shore of a populated lake near the city, away from the university where we stayed. It reminds me of the scenery of Lake Shinji in Shimane Prefecture. It seems to be a resort area.
Breakfast is optional, but I had them make me an omelette. Fruits are plentiful and I always have to be careful not to eat too much.
The last class day is a geological field trip as usual. All 60 students take two university buses to Geo-Park near the town of Lampang, 50 km away. This is a limestone cave named after the locally famous King Rama VII.
At the entrance of the cave, a guide explains about the caves. Thailand is a country with many limestone caves, which are located in various places and have become tourist attractions. In the south, limestone caves on the coast and islands such as Krabi are also famous.
A sink hole was open just outside the entrance. Here we talked a little about ancient human fossils. As you can see, animals and fossilized human bones are often found buried in the Ca rich soil below.
The next stop is a place where paintings, said to be 3,000 to 4,000 years old, remain on a limestone cliff of tremendous height. The local people are selling fruits and other products, and the students are buying them.
I was given steamed corn by a student here. It was the first time I saw such a sticky thing like rice cake. The student told me it was sticky. It tastes very good.
Dr. Chatchawat is a university faculty member who has been accompanying on my classes and tours. He looks mischievous with his tatoos and piercings, but he is a biologist with a PhD degree from an Austrian university. He is a very talented person who also served as Vice President of the university. He was the first person who contacted me, and I was really impressed by his personality. He was always in high tension behavior and it was worth coming to Phayao just to meet him.
This limestone cliff is amazing! It is one of the best three cliffs I have ever seen among the world. According to Dr. Chatchawal, it used to be a military training site, but it became famous as a geo-site after the discovery of the painting I am going to introduce next. He also said that the limestone cliffs here were once the site of a joint battle between the Thai army and the former Japanese army against the Burmese army. I also heard that military swords of the former Japanese army were found on the cliffs like this one.
This is a painting left on the cliff. They seem to have been painted using red iron oxide. It is resemble to the paintings on the sandstone layer of Ubon Ratchathani, the first place we visited. But the main difference is the base rock; here is limestone.The signboard in the foreground explains the paintings, but can you tell from the rock wall?
It is hard to see, so here is a magnified photo. A cow and a man attacking it are drawn with fine lines.
Here is a video to show you how amazing the overhanging cliffs are. It is amazing that it continues for hundreds of meters. The trail seems to go halfway along the cliff. It is difficult to see the bedding surface, but it seems that there are places where the cliffs are bedding plain vertical, such as between calcareous conglomerates along the way. I will look for more information after I return to Japan.
The next stop in the afternoon was the Geological Museum in Lamparn. Here the students visit the exhibits and participate in a rock and fossil workshop. It started to rain a little. The weather in Thailand during the rainy season is very unstable, and there were several days when it rained heavily at night. Fortunately, the weather held up in the morning, which was a blessing for the tour.
http://yossi-okamoto.net/KVIS/2017/Photo_diary_Part3.html
I found a very nice rock exhibit outside the museum. It is a basalt with peridotite xenoliths in it, which was collected in the neighborhood. It may be the same rock I saw in the Chiang Mai University petrographic garden. The museum staff later told me that it was a very recent lava containing sapphires and rubies, so it might be the same age as the basalt I saw in Chanthaburi 2017.
http://yossi-okamoto.net/KVIS/2017/Photo_diary_Part3.html
This is a magnified image of Xenoliths on peridotite. It is very similar to the one seen at a sphire mine in Chanthaburi near the Cambodian border. It is relatively new, from a Quaternary eruption.
The inside of the museum is filled with model exhibits like this one, instead of the actual rock exhibits. This one shows a giant insect from the Coal Era, but I think the size is a bit exaggerated.
At the trilobite exhibit, I explained why they are called trilobites. The students were looking at it very attentively. It seems that this school only lightly touches on geology in the geography class and Dr. Chachawal's class. The students read the explanations of the points and put their stamps on their own notes.
The head of a rare sea lily, but it does not seem to be from Thailand. I wish there were more rocks and fossils on display for highschool students. Maybe it is aimed at children.
A special exhibit of ammonites was being held at the time. However, the Mesozoic in Thailand was dominated by fluvial deposits, as is famous for the dinosaurs of the Korat Plateau, and the distribution of marine strata from which ammonites emerge was quite small.
Here is a workshop in which the students sorted the rocks and put them on paper; they had to find 12 different boxes of rock specimens by themselves and put them on the front of the rock in question. The explanations were all in Thai, so I did not understand them very well. Fossils were also displayed in a separate room, where explanations and fossil-guessing quizzes were given.
Students are divided into two courses and take both in turn. This is the final form of the rock course. It took quite a long time, and it was well past 5 p.m. when we finished, so we had dinner at a shopping mall in Lampang on the way.
On the way back to the bus, Dr. Chatchawaｌ asked me to explain the bedding plain of the conglomerate sandstone layer. But the students not tool geology in their school, so my explanation seems to them a little bit difficult.
Dr. Chatchawal shows off his antics at a Starbucks in a shopping mall in Lampang, where we had dinner. It seems that the science teachers at this university are supposed to do 80% university work and 20% high school work. I thought the students were lucky to be able to attend his exciting and high-tentioned classes.
As I wrote in my diary the other day, I arrived back at the hotel around 9:00 p.m., and I had no time to recover from the fatigue. The next day was my flight back to Bangkok. A view of the lake from the corridor of the hotel in the morning.
I left Phayao in the morning and was driven to Chiang Rai airport to catch my flight. We had some time before our afternoon flight, so we stopped by the famous white temple on the way into Chiang Rai city. This temple was built by a famous local artist as his own work. It was really amazing.
The secret of the white shine seems to lie in this small embedded mirror. Furthermore, this temple is a place for artists to exhibit and sell their works. It is surprising that the temple is maintained with the money from the sales.
I flew back to Bangkok on Thai Smile Airways. It was quite an arduous round trip and I was a little tired. At the request of the professor over there, I decided to make and donate a set of seismographs. I expect to get good records because the site is close to where earthquakes occur in the northwestern part of Thailand and Myanmar, and also because the site was carved out of a mountain. I will make another set after we return home immediately.