Well... after a week in Parque Nacional Torres del Paine, it was time to head out of the wilderness and back to the relative civilization of Puerto Natales. We woke on the seventh day, and were pleased to see that the sun was hitting the Cuernos del Paine in a pleasing fashion:


Our tent in the foreground of the Cuernos del Paine:


We made our last batch of camp coffee and our last batch of oatmeal, and then started hiking out. As we walked along, we saw some interesting geology.

Here's a decent little weathering rind. Notice how the initially rectangular profile of this clast is being weathered towards a progressively more bread-loafy shape:


A small dextral fault offsetting turbidite layers:


Looking up into one of the valleys we passed on our way east, we saw an intact glacial end moraine sealing the valley shut.

I'm used to seeing these depositional features bisected by streams, but this one looked just like a wall built perpendicular to the valley trend. Erosion hasn't yet undermined it.

We arrived at the Torres area and fortified ourselves with Snickers bars dipped in peanut butter, then strolled on. There were a great many people there: somewhat shocking to the dirty backpackers...

As we hiked out from the Torres campground/village/tourist extravaganza to the entrance station at Laguna Amarga, we turned around and saw the Torres themselves, namesakes of the park, faintly through the misty distance:


Several kilometers on, we approached the Laguna Amarga Ranger Station, which is situated next to a lovely syncline in the Cerro Toro conglomerate:


Another view, from lower elevation, and closer to the axis of the fold:


Our time in Torres del Paine was unforgettable. Backpacking the Grand Circuit was a travel experience I would recommend to anyone with the ability and temperment to camp and hike in such gorgeous surroundings. It had been the primary goal of our trip, but we weren't done travelling yet. We headed back to Puerto Natales on the bus, and gorged ourselves on pizza that evening. We did laundry, got showered up, and slept like hibernating bears. In the morning, we boarded another bus, one that would take us across the border into Argentina...

Labels: chile, glacial landforms, national parks, patagonia, south america, structure, travel, weathering

You'll recall that our sixth day in Torres del Paine National Park had us hiking east from the Paine Grande Lodge. We hiked up over a ridge dividing Lago Pehoe from another turquoise-colored lake, Lago Nordenskjold:


At the so-called Italian Camp, we dropped our packs, and went for a small side hike. We turned to the north, and hiked up the French Valley:

The object of this day-hike was to see some glacier calving. The French Valley is famous for this: you sit back and watch, and big chunks of ice spall off the glaciers, crashing hundreds of feet below onto the rocks. A few seconds later, a sound like thunder reaches you: it was this that we came to experience.

Anybody seen a glacier around here? Rumor is that it was JUST here!

[The line demarcating vegetation above from bare rock below shows former height (and presence) of the glacier.]

Here's a look at the amphitheatre where our glacial show would be performed:


As the clouds cleared a bit, we could see an astonishingly thick cornice of snow/ice atop the mountain peaks. All the valleys up top had been filled in and smoothed off, and there was this white rim atop the black rock. The cornice is probably 40-100 feet thick in this photo:


An annotated photo of the area where we were observing the action:

What happened here was that a much larger glacier (see the vegetation line back a few photos) ablated away, splitting into two upper disconnected feeder glaciers, and a lower glacier which is now semi-buried in rocky debris (talus) and ice spalled off the upper glaciers.

A closer look at the annual growth layers revealed in the lower part of the glacier:


We soon saw some calving events. They were quite cool. Big booming noises, ice explosions seen through binoculars, eating chocolate and almonds. We were happy. Then we heard a roaring noise, like an airplane going overhead. We looked at the glaciers: nothing. What was making that noise? Then, from above, we saw it: coming down out of the clouds was a huge billowing white mass. Apparently, it was coming down from the cornice of snow atop the mountain. An avalanche! An honest-to-goodness avalanche! I have never seen one before; I was giddy at the spectacle. It looks just like a turbidity current, people, but it is white!

It was a magical thing to witness: watching it spread out and poof outward in hundreds of little round turbulent vortices. Everyone in the valley cheered: "YEAHHHH!!!!!"

Tough act to follow... but: Just east of us were the rugged Cuernos del Paine, a series of glacial horns made more photogenic by the pink stripe running through their middles, like a WWF Championship Belt:


This pink stripe is a granitic intrusion, approximately 12 Ma (Miocene*). Here is another photograph of the Cuernos, where the granite is very obvious:


We walked along the north shore of Lago Nordenskold towards the Cuernos campground...


Across the lake, some nice folds were visible:


The Cuernos campground is in this little nook. A lovely place to spend an afternoon and our final night in the park:


And it has very nice views of the Cuernos del Paine:


Seeing the Cuernos was the fulfillment of a decades-old dream for me. I think I saw them in an REI catalog (or perhaps a Patagonia catalog, hmm?) back when I was in college, and thought, "Wow. There's a place on Earth that really looks like that? I gotta go... someday." What I didn't expect then, and was pleased to see now that I was there, was the excellent evidence of stoping, one of the processes by which magma chambers enlarge their size and intrude into other rocks. Stoping is where chunks of the wall rock ("host rock" or "country rock") are broken off by inquisitive fingers of magma, and the liberated blocks (now xenoliths) drop into the magma chamber. Here, you can see (white arrows) some of these splurtles of granite working their way into cracks at the top of the magma chamber:


If these fingers of granite connect up, they separate the block of rock beneath them from the country rock (a form of physical weathering, like root wedging!). More dense than the surrounding magma, the resulting xenoliths sink. If the magma is still rather fluid, the xenoliths may now pile up on the floor of the intrusion. If it's getting to be mushy and semi-crystalline, their downward flow may be retarded, like a slice of banana trying to sink through thick oatmeal. As the granite crystallizes into rock, those xenoliths will be trapped somewhere between the ceiling (source area) and the bottom. Check out the diversity of xenolith positions (white arrows) displayed on this Cuerno:


Great looks at stoping here: some have fallen, some are still beginning to fall. I could easily have spent another two days just hiking along this contact, looking at this intrusive relations.

We spent our final night in the park enjoying the sounds of a nearby waterfall, nature's white noise machine. Only one more day in Torres del Paine...

Labels: chile, glacial landforms, glaciation, granite, ice, igneous, miocene, national parks, patagonia, south america, travel, weathering, xenoliths

Good timing! National Geographic's new issue (which we got yesterday) discusses many of the same regions of Patagonia that I've been describing here over the past two weeks. You won't find any graded beds in their pages, but they do have some spectactular imagery of the Grey Glacier (via NASA) and the Chilean coast. The NatGeo website has a nice slideshow of photos by Maria Stenzel. The story's lead image is... Torres del Paine.

Labels: chile, glaciation, national parks, patagonia, south america

You will recall that the first photo I showed you from Patagonia was this one:


That's from just outside the Paine Grande Lodge, where we stayed for our fifth night in the park. I rose at dawn and was fortunate to have the camera handy for a few minutes of good low-angle pink/orange light. By the time the coffee was finished, the sun had risen higher, and the "golden hour" had finished. The mountain now looked like this:


We began the day's hike, headed east along the southern face of the Paine Massif, aiming for the legendary Cuernos ("Horns") del Paine:


A last look back at aquamarine Lago Pehoe, with a Nothofagus tree in the foreground:


I saw a nice example of plumose structure in this boulder (fingertip for scale, far lower left):


After not seeing any conglomerate since the first day of hiking, we started encountering it again, meaning that we had hiked back sufficiently to the east to re-enter the Cerro Toro formation. The conglomerate was varied, and so in one ravine, I took the opportunity to photograph its many guises...












Nice mudstone rip-up clasts in this one:


One final sedimentary shot for this post: another graded bed, as viewed in cross-section:

I love graded beds. They're a key part of the geologic saga at my favorite DC-area locale (the Billy Goat Trail), and the ones in Torres del Paine were just classic: light-colored sand transitioning gradually into darker-colored mud, with a crisp boundary between each graded bed and its neighbors above and below. As noted before, these primary sedimentary structures are formed when a cascading turbidity current slows down and starts dumping its particles. The heaviest drop out first, the lightest in weight drop out last. Each graded bed = 1 turbidity current.

I've got a lot of other shots from Day 6, but I think I'll save them for a second post.

Labels: chile, national parks, patagonia, plants, primary structures, sediment, south america, structure, travel

On Boxing Day morn (Dec. 26), we woke at Refugio Grey, and took our camp stove outside. Just for a lark, we walked over to the shore where an iceberg had beached itself, and popped off a chunk to melt and make coffee:

You haven't really had coffee until you've had coffee made with water that's been locked out of the hydrologic cycle for 14,000 years!

With warm coffee and a granola bar apiece, we walked over the small peninsula where Regugio Grey is located to the bay on the other side. There, a flotilla of icebergs had rafted up against the peninsula. We decided to spend a little bit checking them out, before heading out on the day's (short) hike to the next refugio. We had it all to ourselves:


The icebergs varied tremendously in size, shape, color, and texture.


So, presented with a wealth of icebergs like this, what would you do? If you answered "put one on my head!" then apparently you think the same way that we do:


Silliness expended and coffee consumed, we grabbed our packs and hit the trail again. Today's destination was the Paine Grande Lodge. It wasn't an especially long hike, and it was essentially parallel to Lago Grey for most of the distance. Here's some more icebergs, further down the lake:


One geological site that really caught my attention was this sweet outcrop showing gorgeously folded turbidite layers. To give a sense of scale, each of those green bushes is about 1 meter in diameter:


Here's (white arrow) the Paine Grande Lodge, on the shore of a new lake (you can tell by the color), Lago Pehoe.


Closer in shows the detail of this nice, modern facility:



It was our second night indoors, and while it was a bummer that we had to share our room (6 bunks) with 4 other people, one 'up' side was that the Paine Grande took credit cards, which mean that the pisco sours were on Callan and Lily!

This is the lounge, with a nice woodstove and great views of the landscape for birdwatching or just sitting back and feeling satisfied. We spend a while hanging out here, particularly as a few rain squalls moved through.

The usual routine followed: dinner, bed, dawn, coffee, hiking... on to Day 6!

Labels: chile, glaciation, ice, patagonia, south america, structure, travel

Christmas day in Torres del Paine National Park: We packed up our gear at Paso Campground, and hit the trail in the rain. It rained on us for about an hour as we walked south, parallel to the downstream flow of the Grey Glacier, a huge gleaming presence to our right. Occasionally, the trail exited the forest as we had to cross deep ravines, like this one:


Snowmelt coming off the Paine Massif carved these ravines, and the park service had placed ladders in a few key locations, like this one:


Some people didn't like the ladders very much:


Once we got far enough along, we could see the terminus of the Grey Glacier:

Umm, wow.

Slightly different photo composition, with a tree in the foreground:


Nothing but terminus:


Looking south-ish, down the axis of Lago Grey:

Our destination for the evening was Refugio Grey, located on the far side of that first little hook-shaped peninsula.

Iceberg in Lago Grey:


Refugio Grey:

This was our first night spent under a roof on this trip. After three nights in a tent (me with a flat Therm-a-rest), it was quite luxurious to indulge in hot showers and a mattress! We also had a superb Christmas dinner behind those plate-glass windows, eating pork loin and drinking Gato and watching icebergs float by. It was pretty freaking cool.

That afternoon, we went for a walk down the beach, checking out the rocks. There were nice sedimentary structures and nice tectonic structures. Here's some trace fossils seen on one of the bedding planes of the turbidite strata:

I saw a fair amount of bioturbation in the turbidites, but this was without question the best exposure I saw.

Here's a tight little anticline:


Callan takes a nap in a little synclinal bed:


Flame structures with palimpsest glacial striations:


And another set, a few feet over to the right (same bed):

There appear to be some burrows here, too (the little circles of sandstone in the mudstone below the main sandstone contact).

We slept well that night. I was especially pleased by the fact that it rained for half the night (since I was sleeping indoors).

Labels: chile, fossils, glaciation, ice, patagonia, primary structures, south america, structure, travel

The final segment of day 3 in Torres del Paine National Park was crossing through John Gardner Pass and heading down the other side, being treated to our first view of the Grey Glacier.

Here's me huffing and puffing up the final snowfield below the pass:


...And then we were there! This is the highest point on the Grand Circuit. An "iron woman" trail runner took our photo atop the Pass:


The surrounding scenery spoke very clearly of recent glaciation, like these horns:


And it was here that we first got a look at the immense Grey Glacier...


Annotated panorama shot of the Grey Glacier:
It is an impressive thing, this massive tongue of ice. Sourced in the South Patagonian Ice Field, the Grey Glacier is the largest in Torres del Paine, and effectively divides the Paine Massif from the main chain of the Andes (visible on the other side). I've noted a promontory of bedrock poking up through the ice (a "nunatak") at left, and the position of a tributary glacier at right. I was quite struck by the 'deflation' of the Grey Glacier, as marked by the disparity between the current top of the glacial ice and the line where vegetation begins.

A closer look at the tributary glacier:


Crevasses galore, and a 'blue hole' where a stream is feeding into the base of the glacier:


A few more shots. It's very photogenic. I don't have anything to say about these. Just enjoy:








Peaks of the Paine massif enconced in ice and snow:


We camped that night at Paso Campground. It was Christmas Eve, and we drank some Gato vino tinto and made a delicious fish stew for dinner. We went to bed at dark, but our campground neighbors did the European / South American thing by staying up late celebrating with one another. At midnight they sang their final song and drank their last swig of whiskey, and then there was peace and quiet... so at least half the night was silent!

Labels: chile, glacial landforms, glaciation, ice, national parks, patagonia, snow, south america, travel

After our explorations of the Los Perros Glacier, its moraine, and the bedrock it has scraped so deliciously clean, we headed on up the trail, towards the highest point on Torres del Paine's Grand Circuit: Paso John Gardner. Here's a look back at the valley we've been hiking up from Refugio Dickson... Note the Los Perros moraine and the edge of the lake:


First graded bed of the day. I photographed this one for the lovely scours into the underlying muddy (dark) layer:


Another turbidite clast. Is that a clastic dike on the left?


I thought this was really cool, too. It's a vein: a fracture filled in with a mineral deposit. I really like here how you can see little shreddy flakes of the mudrock (dark) peeling back and flexing in the fracture's void space (prior to being locked in place by mineral deposits):

I interpret this to indicate that the fracture opened in a transtensional fashion, with the top to the right.

A ravine revealed this blind thrust:


Can't see it? Here's an annotated version. The thrust fault below morphs into a fold further up:


A sand-dominated series of graded beds:


Annotated below. Some of the turbidites I saw were a meter thick!

...and what's up with those rotty-appearing rusty spheres? (like the one left of my boot) I saw them several places... hematite concretions? (???)

Brace yourself. Here is possibly the most spectacular boulder I've ever seen:


Annotated version below. This boulder shows a series of graded beds (sand = light colored; mud = dark colored). The direction of gradation shows us that the boulder is upside-down relative to original depositional orientation. A couple of small flame structures reinforce this interpretation. It has been gently folded into a broad anticline (remember, it's upside-down!) and there appear to be some small "parasitic folds" superimposed on the broader fold (at boulder-bottom; depositional-top). Additionally, the turbidites are cross-cut by a small fault which has offset the layers. If I could choose just one boulder to be airlifted from Patagonia to the front of the Science Building at NOVA, this would be the one I would choose.


We keep hiking. We cross several snowfields and other bouldery alluvial aprons, interspersed with fingers of forest reaching up towards the hills. Looking up at the peaks, we can see turbidite layers intensely folded. Check out the straight-limbed anticline (left) and syncline (center) on this mountainside:


Looking up ahead -- there at the left center (between the two peaks) is John Gardner Pass:


We cross through a few more stretches of forest. This one really struck me: "Creep much?"

Besides the freeze-thaw soil-shoving action of creep, I think another factor for the J-shaped (or even L-shaped) tree trunks in this forest is the thick blanket of snow they get each winter: this tamps down the whole forest in a downhill direction.

Look! On the left! Another glacier!


...Shift the perspective a bit, and something else pops out. Once the hammy glacier is off-screen, you can see the wallflower in the background: A mountain composed of pink granite rather than black turbidites.


We keep climbing. Higher up, another opportunity for gazing down the valley we have climbed. The Los Perros Glacier moraine and lake are readily distinguishable even from this distance:


Up in the snow, we trudge higher and higher, and eventually reach the Pass. But for that, and for what we saw on the other side... I'm going to make you wait for Part III.

Labels: chile, glaciation, mass wasting, patagonia, primary structures, south america, structure, travel

Day 3 of our backpacking tour in Torres del Paine National Park (Chile) was an especially rich one. There's so much material to share that I'm going to divide the day up into three chunks: (I) the area around Los Perros Glacier, (II) the area on the east side of John Gardner Pass, and (III) the area west of John Gardner Pass, including the Grey Glacier.

We begin in Los Perros. As you will recall from our last installment, Lily and I had put in a long day of hiking, essentially pulling double duty by hiking all the way from Seron to Los Perros, and skipping Dickson in between. Because the park only allows camping in certain designated areas, trekkers are often put in the position of either hiking less than they want on a certain day, or more than they want. Day 2 was more than we wanted. We slept heavily, and woke to a drier world. We made coffee (we tried out those new Starbucks "Via" instant coffee packets on this trip and found them reasonably acceptable) and decided that before the day's slog, we should backtrack a bit to the Los Perros Glacier and check it out in more detail. As we were hiking in to camp the previous evening, we only had a 5 minute window of decent weather to view the glacier and its surroundings, so we wanted to see what we had missed.

It was a good call. I really enjoyed poking around there. To start with, check out this perspective view down the valley we had hiked up the previous day, the horseshoe-shaped glacial moraine, and the gray-colored glacial lake backed up behind the moraine:


A closer look at the till making up the moraine:


...And in another direction, too:


Composite stitched together of the moraine-dammed lake, using both of the previous two photos plus three others:


Looking down the axis of the lateral part of the moraine (perspective is towards the glacier, though the ice itself is hidden by the bedrock ridge):


"Lil on till":


We walked towards the glacier, checking out the accumulation of icebergs up against the moraine:


A closer look at the terminus of the glacier:


It was a cool place to look at rocks, too. Everything was so fresh, since the glacier had so recently scraped them clean. In this photo, looking across the lake, you can see the line where the vegetation abruptly stops, showing where the glacier was until relatively recently, when it receded to its present position.

A little lateral moraine clings to the walls of the valley. Where it has been eroded away, you can see details of the bedrock, like the granite dike visible on the left.

If you look carefully in this photo, you will see a large vertical granite dike. Follow along in the direction I am pointing. Hopefully you will be able to find it:


This dike continued out into the space where the glacier eventually carved the valley where the lake now sits. But in the middle of the lake is an island, and right along strike from the big granite dike, you can see a granite dike cutting across the rock of the island:

I'll bet it's the same one.

These dikes had some cool details revealed in the area around Los Perros Glacier. Here's an explosion of dark xenoliths in one intrusion. This is clearly intrusive, because it cuts across several turbidite layers, but I was confused about the texture. I expected granite, but it really looked kind of like... sandstone.

I know there are some clastic dikes in the area, and this may be one of them. I've never seen clastic dikes before, but I guess this is what I would imagine they would look like.

...and how about this???

I think that's two clastic dikes cross-cutting a turbidite bed. A nice relative dating exercise, eh?

Some Z-folds reconfigure quartz-filled tension gashes:


I also found a cool little chunk which showed a nice set of concentric ribs:


Classic slickenlines, lacking those gaudy crystal fiber lineations you usually see on fault surfaces. This is gouging, pure and unadulterated and simple:


Such geological goodies! It's better than instant coffee for perking a fellow up in the morning hours. Energized and invigorated, we headed back to Los Perros Camp for our packs, and hit the trail, heading further up the valley. More on that in part II!

Labels: chile, glacial landforms, glaciation, granite, igneous, patagonia, primary structures, sediment, south america, structure, travel, xenoliths

Rested up from Day 1 in Torres del Paine, we were pleased to see that day 2 dawned bright and sunny.

Lily takes a morning break to shed layers:

The weather in Patagonia was really variable, as was the trail. This meant that all day long, we were stopping to put on layers or take off layers as we got cold or hot. It was kind of a pain. Whine whine whine.

All day, clouds scudded along, but we didn't get any rain until late in the day. The main part of the Paine massif was coming into view. Here's a shot from noon-ish:


Here's a shocker: ...We saw more rocks!

Here's another graded bed:


And a little plumose structure, showing a nice twisty hackle fringe:


When I first saw this outcrop, my brain's pattern-recognition center peeped: "CRINOID STEMS!"

...But upon closer examination, they lacked pentameral symmetry, and were some were kind of lumpy. And considering the main rock here is Cretaceous-aged, crinoids could be present, but they aren't as likely a candidate for fossilization as they would have been if these rocks were Paleozoic. So I think these were concretions of some kind. Chert? I shared this image with Patagonia geology expert Brian Romans, and he pointed out something I hadn't noticed in this image: the flame structure in the lower left. That indicates this boulder is upside-down, relative to its original depositional position.

Here's another concentrically-zoned jobbie, which I interpret as a concretion. Overall, this thing was like a pig-in-a-blanket, but on steroids:

I think it's a flint nodule. Brian hasn't seen any crinoids or any concretions in these rocks, so I'm at a loss to offer further explanation.

I was flummoxed by this one, too:

This time, the pattern-recognition center wanted it to be a trilobite, but that's impossible (or, strictly speaking, not impossible but history-re-writing-able) in these aged rocks. Brian tells me it's almost certainly an inoceramid bivalve. That works for me.
(...Or could it be... pseudosegments???)

We walked on, through fields of little white flowers:


Angling towards the main massif, more gnarly peaks came into view...


One thing you can see well in this shot is the contrast between the color of the darker Cretaceous-aged sedimentary host rocks (turbidites) and the light-pink-colored granite which intruded them around 12 million years ago (Miocene).


A bit further on, we could get a decent look at the intrusive relations (through binoculars):

(In this annotated photo, "T" is for "turbidite," "Gr" is for "granite.")

We dropped down off a moraine towards Refugio Dickson, where we made tea, rested a bit, and pushed on again...


At the head of Lago Dickson was an impressive looking glacier, dropped down out of the South Patagonian Ice Field and into the lake:


It was around 1pm when we got to Dickson. We were tired, but the day was only half over. We decided to push on, and essentially do two days' hiking in one. Next stop: Refugio Los Perros!

We hiked on through PRIME Magellanic woodpecker habitat, and it just KILLS me that I didn't see one there, though I did see a few other new birds. Then the rain started, and we started to get tired. But we were committed at this point... We pushed on, and on, and on, and on, climbing up through a forested valley, until finally we popped out on fresh glacial moraine, and saw this:

That's the Los Perros Glacier! A short distance further up the valley was the campground. At this point, the rain had morphed into snow, blasting us in the face as we slogged along, really looking forward to dinner and sleep. Maybe not in that precise order. Eventually, we got there.

Fortunately, the clouds parted for literally 5 minutes, and we were able to have our portrait taken by a doctor from Santiago, who was hiking there for Christmas with his family. They were literally the only Chileans we met who were in the park as tourists (i.e., not park employees or concessionaires) our entire trip. I think we look happy to be in such a special place, don't you?


Next up: Day 3, when we cross John Gardner Pass and see the Grey Glacier for the first time!

Labels: chile, cretaceous, fossils, glaciation, granite, miocene, mountains, patagonia, primary structures, sediment, structure, travel

Remember how I was lamenting the carbon footprint of my globetrotting?

Here's a nice summary of that issue in an image:

Smoke from the engines of the M.V. Evangelistas drifts across the terminus of the largest valley glacier in South America.

Labels: chile, climate change, CO2, environmental, glaciation, global warming, patagonia, south america, travel

From Puerto Natales, we took a bus with other backpackery types north to Torres del Paine National Park, the main object of our trip. It was a bit rainy when we left the bus and walked off into the park, aiming to complete the Grand Circuit, a 7-day, 100-km hike around the Paine Massif. Heading down the trail:


Google Map of the Paine Massif, the main focus of the national park:

It's a little offshoot of the main Andean cordillera, a relatively isolated block of mountains rising from the Patagonian steppe. The park is named for some towers ("torres" in Spanish) in the eastern part of the massif. The word "paine" ("pie-nay") apparently means "light blue" in the pre-Spanish native language. This is apparently because many of the lakes (so prominent in these maps) are light blue in color due to the large influx of suspended glacial "milk."

Here's the specific route we took (approximately) in blue:

We hiked in a counter-clockwise direction.

So we started off over in the eastern part of the park, headed north by northwest. We were hiking through steppe, with the snow-covered mountains rising to the west:


...But wait, what's that on the horizon?

Guanacos! These are camellids -- related to the better-known llamas of Peru.

Thumbs-up for guanacos!


The rocks of Torres del Paine are mainly Cretaceous-aged turbidites (shale, graywacke, and conglomerate), intruded by granitic magma in the Eocene. All along the whole trip, I was drooling over the many beautiful graded beds I saw. Here's the first photogenic graded bed I found, with the paleo-top of the bed at the top of the photograph:


These rocks of the Cerro Toro Formation were deposited in the Magallanes Basin, a Cretaceous to Paleogene retroarc foreland basin. Brian Romans of Clastic Detritus shared some information with me before I went down to Patagonia, and I am indebted to him for the insights I gleaned from that sharing. However, any errors in identification or interpretation are my own. According to the model of Romans, et al. (2009)*, a fold and thrust belt was operating to the west, and an elongate north-south oriented submarine trough flexed downward east of that during the Cretaceous. Mud and sand and gravel flowed into this sedimentary basin mainly from the north in three phases which can be contrasted readily with one another in terms of depositional style and confinement of depositional area. These three phases of deposition correlate to different facies, and are exposed well in the area north of Puerto Natales due to subsequent deformation and uplift (not to mention recent deglaciation).

I'm a structural geologist, and deformation is what I am all about, but I honestly didn't expect to see much structure when in Torres del Paine. (I was eagerly anticipating the graded bedding, though!) So it was somewhat shocking to see some very deformed turbidites on that first day of hiking. Here's me standing on the edge of the Paine River, surrounded by tilted turbidite strata:


...And this stuff was really messed up:


Zoomed-in, you can see some severe folding and faulting having shuffled up these rocks:


We hiked about six or seven miles that first day, and camped at a place called Seron. The park has set up these dozen or so campgrounds where you are allowed legally to camp. Some are free, some cost a few bucks. Seron cost about $8 per person to camp there, but we got hot showers with that cost: Nice! The sun set on our first day, and we slept well.


More soon, on our second day of hiking...
____________________________________________
* Romans, B.W., Fildani, A., and Hubbard, S.M., 2009. "Controls on Deep-Water Stratigraphic Architecture," in Stratigraphic Evolution of Deep-Water Architecture: Examples of controls and depositional styles from the Magallanes Basin, southern Chile, SEPM Field Guide No. 10, p. 7.

Labels: chile, cretaceous, eocene, mammals, maps, national parks, paleocene, patagonia, primary structures, rain, sediment, snow, south america, structure, travel

Here's a few shots in and around Puerto Natales, Chile, the point of our disembarkation from the M.V. Evangelistas (Navimag ferry).

Arriving in port:


On the waterfront, we see Black-necked swans (!!) with some Chiloe widgeon:


While I was looking up the duck in my field guide, a mylodon (giant ground sloth) snuck up behind me:


...Just kidding. It's a statue, not a real mylodon. They went extinct along with the rest of the Pleistocene megafauna. There's a cave near Puerto Natales where mylodon remains have been found. A scrap of hairy skin made its way to the home of Bruce Chatwin, inspriring him to eventually travel to Patagonia and write the classic book In Patagonia as a result. This book was a fundamental source of inspiration for me to travel to the region. I re-read it during my trip there this winter, and so I was pleased to see Mr. Mylodon.


Puerto Natales has capitalized on the mylodon. All the street signs have a little silhouette of him rearing up. At the statue, Lily pulled on his tail:


The foundation for the mylodon statue had a lot of interesting rocks incorporated into it. By the ground sloth's left foot, there was a nice collection of spherical concretions:


Aside from birdwatching and mylodon-harassment, we spent the afternoon organizing our gear and buying food for our backpacking trip. From Puerto Natales, we took a bus up to Torres del Paine National Park...

Labels: birdies, books, chile, concretions, fossils, mammals, patagonia, pleistocene, south america, travel

OK, time to start showing some photos from this winter's trip down to Patagonia. Today, I'll talk about our journey south from Puerto Montt, Chile, to Puerto Natales, Chile. We took a ferry, the M.V. Evangelistas, operated by Navigaciones Magallanes, better known as Navimag. We flew through Santiago, and had to spend a couple hours laying over in that airport. During that time, we checked out this tower of luggage that had been set up in an otherwise-unused space:



Black-fronted ibis (see full bird list here) in Puerto Montt:


The Evangelistas in port, prior to our departure:


Steaming out of Puerto Montt, we got good looks at two volcanoes. The smooth white one on the left (north) is Volcan Osorno, and the craggier one on the right (south) is Calbuco:

Heavy cloud cover prevented us from seeing Chaiten the next day, which was a bummer considering all the press it got for its eruption in 2008.

A few shots to show the scenery typical of the next three days as we sailed south towards Puerto Natales:










A ship that ran aground in the 1960s:


We passed a lot of the time in birdwatching. Peering over the deck with binoculars pressed to your eyesockets is a good way to attract other birders. So we made friends with Rory and Leann, a South African couple on a month-long tour of South America. That's Rory in the red jacket:


Doing this, I saw my first penguin, dozens (hundreds?) of albatrosses, and the flightless steamer duck, which is, as Rory enthusiastically pointed out, "a f#%king flightless duck!"




When I see a new species, I note the date and location in my bird guide:


One day, we made a detour to go check out the "Pio XI" or Bruggen Glacier draining into the ocean from the South Patagonian Ice Field (fourth largest ice sheet in the world, after Antarctica, Greenland, and the Elias-Kluane ice field in Alaska and Canada). The Bruggen Glacier is the longest in the southern hemisphere, outside of Antarctica. It is the largest glacier in South America. And it is named for a Chilean geologist!


Here's a satellite view of the area, courtesy of NASA's Earth Observatory:

On the way over to the glacier, we saw the first iceberg of the trip:

Note all the sediment in that ice: it's dirty stuff!

Getting closer:


Closer still, and a medial moraine becomes visible as a dirty stripe running through the middle of the glacier:


Happy tourists:


Continuing south, we encountered more and more islands, and in many places the channel through which the Evangelistas sailed was quite narrow.




At one point, we squeezed through this NARROW gap:


Finally, we approached Puerto Natales, a small town that serves as the main access point for Torres del Paine National Park:


Looking in the opposite direction, I was pleased to see a broad syncline screaming out from the mountainside:


More on Puerto Natales this weekend...

Labels: birdies, chile, glacial landforms, glaciation, mountains, oceans, patagonia, satellite imagery, south america, structure, travel, volcano

I'm a birder. Birds were my first professional interest, before getting turned to the Dark Geology Side. I still carry my binoculars on most of my trips, and have a shelf full of bird field guides from dozens of regions of the world. Chile was a lot of fun for me, birding-wise. The ferry trip from Puerto Montt to Puerto Natales gave me access to dozens of pelagic bird species I've never seen before, including hundreds of albatrosses. As a birder, you have to love a country that has both flamingoes and penguins! Chile also isn't overwhelming in terms of huge numbers of bird species (unlike, say, biodiverse Ecuador). It was pretty easy to see a significant number of the native species in two weeks. However, I confirmed a couple of these with better looks subsequently, during my brief time (4 days) in Argentina. Here's my list of identified birds for the whole trip:

Silvery grebe
Royal (or maybe Wandering?) albatross
Northern giant-petrel
Black-browed albatross
Sooty shearwater
Magellanic penguin (my first wild penguin!)
Peruvian pelican
Red-legged cormorant
Neotropic cormorant
Rock cormorant
Imperial cormorant
Darwin's rhea (my first wild rhea!)
Great egret
Black-crowned night heron
Black-faced ibis
Chilean flamingo
Black-necked swan
Coscoroba swan
Kelp goose
Upland goose
Flightless steamer-duck (one of the world's five species of flightless duck)
Crested duck
Yellow pintail
Chiloe widgeon
Red shoveller
Andean (ruddy) duck
Turkey vulture
Black vulture
Andean condor
Black-chested buzzard-eagle
Cinereous harrier
Southern caracara
Chimango caracara
American kestrel
White-winged coot
Red-gartered coot
Red-fronted coot
Southern lapwing
Magellanic oystercatcher
South American snipe
Parasitic jaeger
Chilean skua
Kelp gull
Dolphin gull
Brown-hooded gull
South American tern
Rock dove
Eared dove
Austral parakeet (WTF? A parakeet next to a glacier? I love Chile!)
Chilean flicker (sadly, I did not manage to see the Magellanic woodpecker, and that makes me quote sad. I think I'll have to go back...)
White-throated treerunner
Thorn-tailed rayodito
Magellanic tapaculo
Dark-faced ground-tyrant
Spectacled tyrant
Austral negrito
Fire-eyed diucon
White-crested eleania
Tufted tit-tyrant (yes, really!)
Rufous-tailed plantcutter
Austral thrush
Austral blackbird
Yellow-winged blackbird
Long-tailed meadowlark
Patagonian sierra-finch
Mourning sierra-finch
Rufous-collared sparrow
Black-chinned siskin

...That's 69 species of birds, mostly brand new to me. Plus there were a bunch in Buenos Aires that I have no idea about... Oh well.

While I'm at this listing business, here's a list of wild mammals I saw:
Guanaco (a llama-like camelid)
Bottlenosed dolphin
Sea lions (sp?)

...Significantly shorter list, eh? That's why people go into birding so obsessively... and why you never hear about anyone going "mammaling."

Labels: argentina, birdies, chile, mammals, patagonia, travel

Just got back to DC, and I'm pleased to report that I had a great trip. I hope you enjoyed the posts I set to publish automatically in my absence --- just like I was never gone! You'll be hearing much more about my time in Patagonia in the days to come... ...but for now, here's one image to whet your appetite:

Labels: chile, clouds, glacial landforms, mountains, patagonia, travel

So I'm in Patagonia right now, doing the thing I love to do most: travel across my home planet, checking out its less explored corners. Chile and Argentina are my 20th and 21st countries to visit. It is my second trip to South America. I've also travelled twice to Africa, four times to Asia (including my stint in Peace Corps Mongolia), and extensive travels in North America. I've only hit North Atlantic island nations as far as Europe is concerned. I've been to Australia once. I have not been to Antarctica.

So why am I listing all of this?

Because I'm a freaking hypocrite. I'm very concerned about how humanity is altering atmospheric chemistry, and what that's going to do to our (shared) planet's natural systems. Because I am convinced that we are releasing carbon into the atmosphere at a faster rate than natural systems can remove it, we are endangering ourselves (or at least some of ourselves) and also endangering the ecosystems that we depend on. I recognize the role the individual can/might/should play in reducing their personal carbon emissions through efficiency and lifestyle choices. I drive a Prius, use energy efficient light bulbs, recycle my cans and bottles and paper, serve on the College's "Green Committee," and teach (and blog) about the science underlying environmental issues, like climate change. I'm spreading the word, see?

But I really love to travel, and travel is a high-carbon endeavor. The best thing I could do for the world would probably be to stay home, but home gets stale. The world is big and diverse and full of landscapes and people and food and culture and birds and all kinds of interesting things. And there is nothing like getting out there and experiencing it firsthand. My time on this planet is finite, maybe close to half used up (assuming an average lifespan). What am I going to do during my time here? I figure I should live morally, attempt to improve things a bit, and enjoy myself. And I enjoy travelling more than anything else. I don't have kids (or an interest in having them), I'm not a religious person, I'm not tied down to a garden or a dog or a network of people that can't live without me. There's little to keep me in town when the opportunity for travel arises. And I have a career which gives me three and a half weeks off each winter and three months off each summer, plus a week of spring break. I have chosen my career in no small part because of the tremendous amount of free time it grants me each year. (Having a third of the year "off" makes up for the fifteen hour days I work during the fall and spring semesters, I reckon.)

My philosophy of life is essentially to facilitate and accrue a suite of fond memories and cool experiences. My goal is to enjoy my limited time here. Secondary goals: be a good person, help others out, learn as much as possible about the world I will spend my life in, share this perspective by spreading an understanding of the natural world, be creative, be responsible (but not so responsible, CO2-wise, that it cripples Goal #1). I am aware that this is a fundamentally self-centered approach, and I accept it.

So I know that there is a tangible global negative to my jetsetting habits, but the personal positive is what sways me. I'm going to keep travelling, because although environmental concerns mean a lot to me, experiencing the world means even more.

So that's my philosophical postcard from the austral hemisphere. ...Wish you were here!

--Mr. Hypocrite

Labels: argentina, chile, climate change, CO2, energy, environmental, global warming, patagonia, science and society, south america, travel

...from Google Maps:







The last one is where I am today, as this post automatically publishes. With any luck at all, I'll be over there by the glacier in the northwest. Merry Christmas from Patagonia, all!

Labels: art, chile, maps, south america

Here's a Google Map I made up to show you where I'll be for the next few weeks. Hopefully, by the time you read this, we will be arriving in Puerto Montt, Chile. Tomorrow we get on a ferry and sail down the Chilean coast.

Zoom in on the southern area to see our hiking route (red) around Torres del Paine National Park. More details available by clicking on the different bits. I'm very excited.

Labels: argentina, chile, patagonia, south america, travel

Lola helps me plan a winter break journey...

She goes berserk for large expanses of paper... A few minutes after I took this picture, the little brat punched a hole in the map and ran off in a sprint. Sheesh.

Labels: argentina, chile, lola, maps, patagonia, south america, travel