Not every day in Libya was blue skies and calm, it’s just that I didn’t take my camera out so much when the wind was blowing as in this blustery day photo.

The tent is the surveyors supply tent that has obviously seen better days. We used to import these from India and Pakistan.

The brand new ones would go first to the labor force. As they suffered wear and tear to the point they were no longer habitable, like this one, they’d be recycled to store tents and eventually they’d be disposed of.

This wouldn’t count as a sandstorm, those things would strip the paint of the vehicles. No, this was just one of those annoying days where sand would get everywhere, including in the food!

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A good desert sunset was a rarity, best I can recall, but every now and then a cloud formation would be in the right place to produce something special, such as that in today’s photo.

The wires are a short wave radio antenna. These were pretty lousy at the best of times but I generally found home made ones to work better than these commercial offerings. We were licensed in Libya for three different frequencies. trying to tune an aerial to work well on all three was next to impossible.

Listening to the short wave radio was an art in itself. Many newbies on the crew couldn’t even make out any words cutting through the noise, myself included when I first arrived back in 1984. With experience and practice it became a lot easier. The best aerials in my view were the specially made whip antennas for our long range Land Rovers and supply trucks.

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Today’s photo is a view about 135° anti-clockwise from yesterday’s. It’s of a recording flycamp in western Libya in 1990.

I can tell it’s a recording flycamp because of the two trucks on the left and the number of tents. The two trucks were the trucks the line labor rode to work and back every day and the recording crew had the largest labor force.

Base camp was elsewhere. Base camp would have looked the revers with fewer tents and more trailers. We must have decided that the effort of moving base camp was too much – we probably didn’t want to pack up all the mechanic’s equipment.

Located in a depression behind a gravel berm, the location would serve to protect the camp from some of the wind. The trailer behind the 2500 gallon water tanker on the left is the kitchen. The two trailers on the right, arranged at right angles is the senior staff camp.

I can’t figure out where the showers are so maybe they were one third of the kitchen trailer or maybe there weren’t any. The few camps I lived in that didn’t have showers were never pleasant! You just could never get the sand out of the places you never even expected it to be in the first place!

Since I wasn’t part of the recording crew I’m struggling to remember why I was even here.

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I spent a fair bunch of time trying to title today’s photo before settling on ‘approaching sunset’.

This was taken somewhere in western Libya in the first half of 1990. Running across the photo are a number of water courses. I’ve some (not very pretty) photos in the sequence preceding this of rain in the desert.

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Four in a Row is an expanded view of yesterday’s photo (and also the photo I processed in the soon to be released Topaz Clarity).

On the crews I worked on in Libya, Tunisia and Oman we had six vibs (seismic vibrators). Typically, one was in camp for maintenance, one was on the line as a spare and the other four were in service. In South Africa, depending on the client, sometimes we’d only have five.

Patterns were usually similar though some clients liked to get more experimental. Here the four vibs were running in echelon. They’d take a sweep, lift the pad, move forward a few meters, drop the pads and sweep again, over and over. By adding all these sweeps together the echoes back to the geophones were added on top of each other to produce a louder signal. Sometimes the pattern meant that the distance between swweps was always the same and sometimes the pattern was such that there’s be a longer drive between stations to the next start position.

Just as the geophones were arrayed in a pattern, so was the vib pattern. The net effect was to assume that the energy was being put into the ground at the center of the vib array and being detected at the center of the geophone array.

Given all these approximations, and then my hatchet job of static corrections to eliminate the variations in the surface terrain and the 10 cm shortening of the pegs I mentioned in this post would not have been noticeable, except we were being paid to place the peg within 1 cm. I always found it curious that we’d accurately position the peg and then the geophone arrays and source arrays were all approximated, and neither were centered on the peg.

With these tires the lead driver would figure out the count of treads on the tires that would pass his door frame for the distance he’d have to travel. The other drivers would line something up on their vib with the lead vib to keep their station in the echelon and an observer would check to make sure they weren’t drifting off pattern.

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