Final report for the DAAD RISE Worldwide Scholarship for an internship at the University of Valencia in the Department of Geology (30.06.1014-05.09.2014) 1. General Part: Travel and Accommodation: Valencia has an airport outside the city with direct connections to Frankfurt and Düsseldorf. From the airport the metro takes 25 minutes to the city center and costs about 5 Euros while a Taxi can cost up to 30 Euros. Valencia itself has a well-developed public transport system that includes busses, an underground as well as trams. The tickets have the form of rechargeable cards and it is charged per ride of 40 minutes. I always ought a 60 rides ti ket for 40 Euros, so it s heaper tha i ost Ger a ities. Also bike sharing is quite popular. In the city center and near the main University Campus there are numerous station, where you can get a bike. Getting a Taxi is also cheaper, especially as there is a fixed price for the inner city ring. Valencia is connected to its surrounding villages via trains or buses. While the train system is easy to use, the bus system is a bit more complicated, when not speaking sufficient Spanish. But nevertheless, we always ended up in a nice village even if that was not where we intended to go. Finding an apartment in Valencia over the summer was very easy. Valencia gets a lot of exchange students, which are mostly not there in the summer months, which means there are a lot of empty rooms in shared flats. The rents for rooms in shared flats are cheaper than in Germany, costing around 250 to 300 Euros everything included (Check for functioning air conditioning!). I lived in Benimaclet, a student area with many bars and restaurants. It has good tram and train connections taking about 15 minutes to the beach and 25 minutes to the city center by foot. The Campus I was working on, was a bit outside the city, but easily reached with the tram. I would recommend living close to the center like I did, that s where ost of the life takes pla e a d it is closer to the beach.
Climate: Valencia has nearly a tropical climate and for me it was hard to get used to it in the beginning. Nearly all days had blue skies and temperatures between 30 and 35 degree. The humidity is high, but I had hardly any rain. During the night the temperatures never dropped below 20 to 25 degrees, which makes it difficult to fall asleep when there is no air conditioning. The Mediterranean Sea had perfect temperature of about 20 degrees to go for swims. I nearly went every day after work. Life and Food: The Spanish have a different daily routine than Germans. As most of the life takes place at night, work starts later. A normal day includes 5 meals. At home for breakfast it is mostly a small coffee and a small croissant, at around 9:30/10 there will be a proper breakfast. Lunch break takes place around 14/15 o clock and at around 18 o clock people will eat another snack. Dinner is usually not before 21 o clock and corresponds often a three course menu. In general Spanish people like to eat a lot. If you go out for dinner outside the tourist areas the portions are very large and comparable cheap. A big three course menu can be as cheap as 10 euros. Most of the Spanish night life takes place on the street. Every restaurant and bar has tables outside and even clubs have areas outside. Large picnics in the parks are also very common. In general, Spanish people like to go out with a large circle of friends rather than with a few people. The City and its surroundings: Valencia is a very nice, old city. I enjoyed living there. When living close to the center everything can be reached by foot. I would recommend a stroll through the older parts of the city and the central market. The Turia is a former river that was changed into a park. It goes around the city center and there are always people around. It has several sports facilities and at night it is packed with runners. I would also recommend going into the Oceanográfic. It is a huge aquarium and they have a cool dolphin show. In the south of Valencia there are beautiful beaches that can be reached by bus and on a boats trip on the Albufera lake one can see a lot of birds. I also visited Xátiva, which is an hour by train. It has a beautiful city center and an old castle overlooking the city from a close by mountain. There is also a good connection to Barcelona or Madrid with the train.
2. Subject-specific part: I spend 10 weeks in Valencia completing my internship at the University of Valencia. The University has nearly 60.000 students and three different Campuses located around the city. I was working in the Department of Geology, which is located on the Campus Burjassot, the natural science campus. It is a bit further away from the other two Campuses and the city center, but has a direct tram connection. The Project: My internship was in the area of Paleontology, the study of fossils. More specifically I worked with conodonts a type of microfossils. I focused mainly on their relevance for a globally valid Bio- and Chronostratigraphy of the Devonian, but was also dealing with taxonomical aspects. Chronostratigraphy deals with the relative time relations and ages of rocks, while Biostratigraphy uses the distribution of fossils in the stratigraphic record and the organization of strata into units on the basis of the present fossils (taken from the International Commission on Stratigraphy). The goal of the research project I helped with is to analyze conodont elements (microfossils) from the Lower Devonian from selected Pyrenean outcrops and evaluate their potential for worldwide correlations. This is important as there is not yet a globally valid and internationally approved Chronostratigraphic timescale for the Devonian established. At the moment two different Chronostratigraphic scales are used as there exist two contrasting facies in the sedimentary record for the Devonian. This makes correlation also from different data like geochemical data difficult. In general there existed three large continents during the Devonian, Gondwana in the south, Siberia in the north and Laurasia in between those two. During the Permian (130 million years later) these three would form the supercontinent Pangea. During the Devonian one could find different paleo environments on Laurasia due to its size and its position. This lead to the formation of different kind of rocks containing different for flora and fauna remains. Conodonts were marine vertebrates inhabiting all of the world oceans from the Cambrian to the Triassic. They can be used as an indicator of marine conditions as different types can occur along the water column. Furthermore, conodonts are used as index fossil to define different geologic periods. As they evolved rather fast and thus are found in great amounts globally, the time resolution for the bio stratigraphic record is detailed. It is possible to get a time resolution as precise as 10,000 years. If the same conodont elements appear in different beds around the world, those beds very likely were formed at the same time. With this time frame available it is possible to correlate geochemical or
geophysical data with it. This can help to get detailed information on environmental conditions that existed at different places around the world during the same time period. My tasks: During my internship I gained insight into different working steps that are necessary for fulfilling the goal of the project. Definitely the highlight of my internship was a one week fieldtrip to the Pyreneans. We drove to an outcrop out of Devonian rocks. My supervisor had been working in the area for a long time using the outcrop to identifying the borders of different geological ages within the Devonian with the help of evolutionary changes within the conodonts. The main task was to further take samples from the layers that had not been sampled so far. On average 5 to 10 Kilos rock were taken from each layer. Also we created a stratigraphic log of a part of the outcrop, which included describing rock layers and for example measuring their dip angles. After that the layers were numbered and will be sampled in a field trip in the future. The next working step included treating these samples in the lab. I worked with samples from earlier field trips that needed to be analyzed. The rocks are put in plastic baskets and a mixture of formic acid a d water is filled i. They are the kept like this for a out a weak, a d as it s all ar o ate ro ks, they will dilute. The residue was a mix of sand, silt size grains and fossils that needed to be washed out, which would decrease the silt amount, which again would make the following sorting with the help of a microscope easier. The residue was then dried in an oven, so that in the end a small container with sand was left. With the help of a microscope I sorted the conodont elements and other microfossils out of the residue, this was the most time consuming work. Afterwards I would try to identify and categorize the found conodonts with the help of literature, which was really hard due to lacking knowledge from my side. But my supervisor was happy to help me out and he explained how distinguish between different species. The last step was the literature review. With the help of various papers and books I created a table containing findings of different conodont elements from the Lochkovian age (belongs to the Devonian) at different locations in Europe. This is needed in order to see if the same conodont species would appear at different locations at the same time, which would make them a good index fossil. I also composed a summary table with their main characteristics of different conodont species as described in papers from different authors. Overall, I was able to take part in every step of a process that would need to be done to get proper results in research.