The Ice Road Fresh snow falls and falls upon high,
On an ice mountain nestled in the sky.
Funnelled in between these high peaks,
On a slow journey downward it seeks.
Compacting, slipping in its mountain vice,
Five miles of hard sculptured ice.
Its slow weight compressing it hard,
Below ancient rock is cut and scarred.
A vast blue eternal ice train,
Shunting forward to the glacier moraine.
Gold When the Earth is pushed up and snowy mountains appear,
Rock crock, split and fold forming channels far and near.
From the deep they are filled with quartz and some gold,
Weathering sets them tumbling downward in the cold.
Bashed to and fro in a vibrant mountain stream,
Gold flecks fall out from the quartz boulders clean.
In the calmer sandy stuff of a river bed mud,
Gold accumulates deep to beat the panners blood.
In cold water fresh but with freezing hands,
They test the riverbed with their prospectors' pans.
A bucket of dirt is reduced to a few flakes,
The gold light gleaming is the best of effects.
Weeks and weeks for just a few grams,
A bag full of gold powder is the prospectors' plan.
The Seismograph It's a terrible thing when the Earth rocks and rolls,
Earthquakes spread out and chaos unfolds,
All things are impermanent that much can be seen,
From atoms to mountains just part of the shifting scene,
A bridge swing motion is not difficult to detect,
But shifting granite and bedrock even explosives neglect.
West Coast Treasure On Cullery Track in the winter rain,
Treasure is what we set out to gain!
On a Punga Island by a large wet log,
We start our search in the gravely bog.
A water u-tube and an estimate best made,
A metal detector, hope and a rusty of spade.
THE CREATIVE SCIENCE CENTRE
Dr Jonathan Hare, Physics Dept., The University of Sussex
Brighton, East Sussex. BN1 9QJ