Ennis woman changes the face of Alpine geology

LIVING alone and far from civilisation without electricity or water 2,000m high up in the Alps is about as far from Ennis as you could get. But that is exactly where Lorraine Duffy, of Drumadrehid, made an important discovery dating back approximately 100 million years that will lead to a revision of what was known of the geology of the Alpine area.

Lorraine, now based in Munich, has been conferred with a doctorate in geography/geology at the Ludwig Maximilians University.
While working full-time as an investment banker, she began alpine soil research in 2004, spending her summers in the German and Austrian Alps. During her research, she located a bauxite formation from the Cretaceous period, which had not been identified or mapped before in the Berchtesgadener Alps.
Her discovery explains why the soils are red in colour, from the high iron content of the bauxite. Neither German nor Austrian geologists had identified the finding before.
A former student of Coláiste Muire, Lorraine, a mother-of-one, is the daughter of Kathleen and Denis Duffy. After studying European Studies and Insurance in the University of Limerick, Lorraine moved to Germany 15 years ago.
It was while working there full-time that she decided to study physical geography in Munich.
“I often went on mountain tours in the German and Austrian Alps and was completely fascinated, yet at the same time frustrated when seeing the different rocks, trying to identify them and understand why they were there,” she explained.
As part of her studies, she took annual leave and unpaid leave from her job to carry out her mountain research. She lived alone in the Alps from June through November over three years in an alpine hut. “The hut was without water and electricity and there were days on end where I didn’t meet or speak to a soul. However, I always went down off the mountain after three weeks, necessary for the soul, spirit, to shower and buy food.”
Her only connection to the outside world was an old-fashioned walkman radio so she could hear weather reports. In order to get drinking water, she had to walk 20 minutes over mountainous terrain to the well, bringing back 40 litres in one go.
She recalled, “In order to get food, I would go down off the mountain and have to walk four to six hours back into civilisation. I would normally weigh the food in the supermarket, picking packet soups, lots of chocolate, very thin bread as I had to carry it back up again. At weekends, some people came up to visit me and would bring me something special as well, for example meat or fruit.
“In order to shower, or better said wash, I would have to collect the rain water in a trough and use this. The exciting thing about this was the fact that the cattle on the mountain neither had any water to drink as it was a karst environment and the battle between the cattle and myself was great. In order to cook, wood had to be chopped or gathered to get the range going – it was the same range we had at home in Ennis so I was well able to get a pull on her to get her going.”
She explained living alone in the Alps is “a very dangerous thing, especially when you do not have a mobile with you”. The biggest threat were thunder storms, which occurred almost nightly. 
“You are sitting at 2000m in the thunder cloud itself – the thunder is unreal. I was always in the hut during a storm. However, one night, the storm was so intense the entire hut lit up in a neon light; it was not hit by lightning, it was simply the energy.”
Poisonous adders were another risk. “Little did I know that one had nested in beside the range under the wood, it was great luck that I never found nor saw her, I just noticed there were fewer mice in the hut,” she smiled.
Lorraine was also warned by the National Park Authorities to take extra precautions, as a wolf was on the mountain. “Wolves are not at all common to Germany so as you can imagine, to be warned that an animal is on the go up there wasn’t the best news at all. He had escaped from a zoo apparently but I was lucky enough never to see him.”
During her research, she took soil profiles and rain samples at different locations around the mountain, sometimes spending up to eight hours moving there and back.
Speaking about her discovery of the bauxite formation, she said, “I was very proud of myself. Firstly being an Irish geographer, secondly being an Irish woman on German and Austrian territory and being the first to identify the finding. No German nor Austrian geologist had identified the bauxite before.
“My professor in Munich had likewise been working for years on the mountain and explained the occurrence of the red soils were due to high levels of Sahara dust being deposited by the wind. I always doubted this theory as the iron levels were too high and my work has proven that the red soils are a result of the high haematite content being extracted from the bauxite deposits, which have been trapped in karst hollows and deposited on the limestone of the Triassic and Jurassic period. This process, however, occurred in the Cretaceous.
“The point is, of all the people that had been working in the research area before over the last 150 years, nobody looked close enough. I saw the bauxite lying on the surface, put it in my pocket and brought back to the lab for analysis. When I had the chemical analysis results, only then did I really understand what I had in front of me. I too also wondered why nobody has seen this before but there is no explanation. I merely opened my eyes and followed up on it. I have in the meantime spoken with the official geological mapping authorities in Bavaria and they were very interested in the findings.”
Now working with a European institution handling patents, Lorraine is currently lining up her next geological project. No matter how busy she is though, she regularly finds time to return home. “I miss Clare every day and manage to get back once a year for a few weeks. I cannot miss out on Craiceann, the bodhrán workshop on Inis Oírr but I am playing music these days in the bodhràn scene in Germany, which is indeed very big.”