In January 2025, we traveled to the Canary Islands for a brand new type of fieldwork (for me, anyway). PhD student Jadie Sauerbier, under supervision of Lydian Boschman and me, and our friend Yamirka Rojas-Agramonte, aims to find an efficient way to date the emergence of volcanic islands, and the arrest of volcanism on such islands, which form important but poorly known parameters in the understanding of island biodiversity and evolutionary biology. So we went to the Canary Islands – a series of well-dated hotspot volcanic islands in the Atlantic Ocean offshore Morocco, to see if we can reproduce the ages in just a few days of sampling. Nature has been so friendly to erode the volcanoes and bring the minerals that we can date in them – especially zircon, but also apatite or titanite – through rivers to the beaches, where they become enriched in the sand due to natural ‘gold panning’: the heavy minerals stay behind on the beach, and the lighter ones are brought to sea. We collected samples from beaches and rivers – about 15 kg per sample – and then did mineral separation by panning on the beach. In the end, we only brought a few hundred grams of heavy mineral extract back to the lab, where we will test whether we can date the volcanoes, and how bad contamination by wind, or human activity is. Below a field impression!