About

I have been investigating the chemical environment of climbing anchors at crags across the world since early 2017. In particular I was intrigued by the fact that some marine locations were quite benign, whereas others rapidly destroyed stainless steel hardware through stress cracking.

I owe much to a burst of enthusiasm shared with Martin Roberts of Titan Climbing, and Alan Jarvis of UIAA Safe Com, which saw Martin, in December of 2016 swabbing down rocks in Railay and testing with pH paper and an aquarium test kit. The results were not what I expected, and I was immediately hooked on looking into the issue in greater depth.

I was fortunate to receive funding from UIAA Safe Com which has enabled me to buy the laboratory consumables necessary for a project of this type.

However, much of the project is funded from my own pocket. I look on it as a hobby that might actually provide useful results. I have no interest in publication, and reports take a lot of time to put together so will be few and far between. The idea of this website is to get results out into the public domain where people can make of them what they will.