Expedition

Ask any geologist about their worst nightmare in fieldwork and it will likely be that they have lost the compass. Or else, the aerial photographs. Pretty interesting, huh? I know. 

That's a story even before we have Google Maps. I borrowed the novel Beyond Sleep for my Norwegian trip. Think about an insomniac expedition of a young geologist to the mountains of Norway's Arctic north. That can be freezing. He had never been able to procure his set of aerial photographs for his research and route planning.  

The story makes more sense to me after visiting the Norwegian Aviation Museum today. The history of civil flight in Norway goes all the way to the late 1800s, when Francesco Cetti experimented with balloon flight and aerial photography. Few invention brought advances in quite the same way as Norge, Norway's first balloon. No mapmaking, glacier monitoring, or archaeological surveying would have been possible without aerial photography.

The tragedy of the geologist without aerial photographs doesn't need further explanation.