When you cross the border from Chile into Argentina, you see this sign:

If you aren't familiar with "Las Islas Malvinas," that's because they go by another name in English. Perhaps the detailed map will help clarify the location? The sign refers to the Falkland Islands, currently held by the United Kingdom. So the sign translates to, "The Falklands are Argentinian." The British and the Argentinians faught a war over the Falklands in 1982. The UK won, but Argentina maintains their claims of sovereignty. And as soon as you enter Argentina, they remind you of it. I think they hope you will take pictures of the sign and post them on your geology blog so the world is reminded of what they consider to be an imperial injustice.

The bus ride from Puerto Natales to El Calafate was long -- something like five hours. It went through some very empty country:

As we headed north, with the mountains to our west and wide-open plains to our east, I was reminded of Montana, specifically the Front Range southeast of Glacier National Park. It was very familiar feeling.

The landscape was semi-desert, as the eastward-moving air is drained of its moisture as it crosses the Andes. The rainshadow effect leaves this an area of steppe. The golden grasses draped on the dry hills bring to mind similar landscapes in Mongolia or Africa.


And there are even some birds that you might mistake for African species:

That's our best of many lousy pictures of the Lesser Rhea, also known as "Darwin's Rhea." It's a ratite bird, related to ostriches, emus, cassowaries, kiwi, and elephant birds (the last of which are extinct). The coolest rhea sighting we had was a family of little ones following their mom. The little ones look just like scaled-down miniature adults: Comical!

We stopped at an estancia (ranch) before entering Parque Nacional Los Glaciares, and Lily made friends with a horse there:

She used to have a horse on Hawaii, so this was sweet to see. When we walked off towards the rhea, he followed along, looking for more lovin' from his new American girlfriend.

We were in Argentina to see the massive Perito Moreno Glacier. It is the #1 tourist attraction in Argentina, and is located in Parque Nacional Los Glaciares ("The Glaciers National Park"). Here's our first view of it:


Now here's a test to see how true-blue your geological inclinations run. When you looked at that last picture, did you think to yourself, "What's up with those strata in the lower right? Are those turbidites?"

Yes, indeed. They are:

Alternating sand (blocky) and mud (weathered into low relief) remind us of the Magallanes Basin, which (like most geology) does not stop at the border...

Um, there's two clear joint sets there too.

Around the corner we saw some bivalve fossils and a few clastic dikes ("injectites"). Here's a small clastic dike:


When I brought up clastic dikes the other day when discussing Torres del Paine, Brian responded with some injectite photos of his own. You should check those out. Here's a bigger one from P.N. Los Glaciares:


I've got a ton of photos of Perito Moreno Glacier to show you, but it's really worth saving them for a second post. For now, let's just say: "We went and looked at the glacier for several hours and were very impressed." ...More on that tomorrow.

Then we were bussed back to El Calafate, the town which serves as the main access point for the park, and walked from our hostel towards downtown for some dinner. Along the way, we saw this cool outcrop:

That's very-poorly-lithified silt, peppered here and there with a few cobbles and boulders. The clasts bear scratches, suggesting they are glacially-delivered. The town of El Calafate is on the shore of a big lake called Lago Argentino, and I interpret this outcrop to mean that the lake was much larger and deeper in the past (perhaps dammed by a moraine which has since been partially breached?). In this deeper, earlier version of the lake, icebergs calved off of Perito Moreno Glacier and floated out to melt and drop their sedimentary loads in the offshore sediments. The big boulders and cobbles are therefore dropstones, though I wasn't able to confirm this diagnosis by looking for squished or truncated sedimentary laminations beneath them. (Given that this is earthquake country, I didn't want to be standing underneath those boulders for longer than it took to snap a photo!)

That evening, we had a really world-class meal. Salads and breads and fine Argentinan wine (we skipped the Mendoza stuff and got the Patagonian label, "Saurus." (Yes, as in lizards -- as in "giant, fossilized, terrible lizards"). And for the main course? Well... let's just say that if you're a vegetarian, you should probably stop reading at this point.

The Patagonians herd a lot of sheep, and so they eat of lot of lamb. They have one particular method of cooking this lamb which I was very keen to try because it seems so utterly brutal. Meat is murder, as they say: delicious murder. I am quite aware of the loss of life that comes with the consumption of meat. I have hunted, and I have killed animals in order to eat them. Many people opt not to think about this, and to access their meat in a box or a bag. But to the Patagonians, the death of their animals is both obvious and inoffensive. They slaughter their lamb, gut it and skin it, and then (this is the part that's brutal) they string it up to an iron cross, which is then tilted over a campfire so the lamb can roast slowly. They call it "crucified lamb."

It was delicious -- though the photo may appear shocking to some readers. But, hey: Catholics claim to eat crucified flesh every time they take communion, right? (Apologies in advance to all the transubstantiationists that I just offended.) ...Back to the lamb: I have a special place in my heart for the taste of mutton (I served in Peace Corps Mongolia in 1998-1999), and that familiar gamey tang was present here as well. But it was so much more tender, and served with a garlicky oregano olive oil-based sauce. Oh man, it was good. (Mongolians could learn a lot from Argentinians about how to spice their lamb.) I devoured it, and Lily had to roll me down the street, back to the hostel. Mmmmm....

Okay -- tomorrow you'll get some glacier photos.

Labels: argentina, birdies, england, food, joints, maps, mongolia, national parks, patagonia, sediment, south america, travel

This pizza-ite clearly passed into the brittle-ductile transition while it was vertically-oriented. This event translated coherent ingredients downward, presumably along less competent flowing cheese/dough/slush surfaces. High-contrast olives serve as good marker units for detecting the overall kinematics: note their greater concentration at the paleo-bottom of the pie (also bottom of this photo). It is inferred that these olives were originally dispersed across the face of the pizza-ite at approximately equal distances. The overall pie has strained from an original circular shape to an elliptical one, and detached from the basement cardboard along a major fault. The "top" of the pizza-ite may therefore be regarded as an overall extensional regime, while the "base" of the pie is compressional. The highest-pressure zone at the base appears to have metamorphosed up some new substances, including an ice/cheese amalgam (darker yellow).

Subsequent to this photograph being captured, the pizza experienced a high-temperature, low-pressure event which has been theoretically located to the second rack of my oven, and then was broken into eight ~equal area terranes separated along a radial series of fractures. An episode of physical weathering pulverized the pizza-ite, followed by chemical disaggregation in a low-pH medium. The energy released by this process was sufficient to power the typing of keys on a keyboard, and ultimately generated a new entity: a blog post. Through the twin miracles of digital technology and structural interpretation, we can work out that the protolith of the blog post was the deformed pizza. Careful dating of this blog post reveals it passed through closure status at 7:45am on November 15, 2009.

Labels: analogies, food, humor, structure

Today's science seminar went well. There was a reasonably full house (maybe 150 or 200 people?) and most of them looked reasonably awake all through it. Afterwards, I had some new folks express interest in my Rockies field course for next summer. Additionally, a bunch of the audience stuck around to look at some rock and fossil specimens I had brought along. When I got back to my office, there was a nice note in my in-box from the provost, who had attended and complimented the talk. And then I got a free lunch with three of my colleagues! Chinese food... makes me sleepy, but dang, it was good.

Here's the slideshow I gave, via SlideShare.net (The embedded version below doesn't seem to be working for me, so here's a direct link to the PPT on SlideShare):

Labels: food, fossils, geology, grand canyon, meetings, travel

Baked goods occupy a central role ("roll?") in my style of teaching geology. In honor of National Pie Day and Accretionary Wedge #5, I hereby offer a run-down on my favorite baked-good analogies. As the pie chart above conclusively demonstrates, some baked goods are more versatile teachers than others and get therefore merit more class time.

I invoke pancakes to describe oblate shapes in deformed clasts (cigars, which are not a baked good, exemplify prolate shapes).

Muffins (especially the pop-over variety) are squat stand-ins for laccoliths.

Snickers bars offer a terrific way for students to grasp the concept of differential weathering. In class, I pass out to little bite-sized Snickers, and ask students to suck on them. (No chewing! We're trying to demonstrate chemical weathering here, not physical weathering!)They quickly learn that some ingredients are more stable than others.

A pint of Ben & Jerry's gets drawn on the board every semester in Physical Geology when we discuss the carving of alpine glacial landforms. Everyone has had the experience of buying a pint of Ben & Jerry's and finding it too hard to eat. As they wait for it to thaw, people insert their ice-cream scoop (or their spoons) into the top of the pint and carve downward and outward, towards the edge of the container (where the Chunky Monkey has lost more heat and is therefore easier to carve). Working around the container, repeated scoops leave a point of hard ice cream in the middle, surrounded by curved scoop surfaces. This is a lot like a glacial horn, surrounded by the headwalls of several cirques.

I mentioned raisin bread in Tuesday night's Historical Geology class, when discussing the principle of relative dating by inclusions. If you're going to bake raisin bread, which of the following seems like the better recipe? (A) Bake a loaf of bread, then grow some grapes, dry them out, & teleport them individually to positions evenly distributed throughout the loaf of bread. (B) grow some grapes, dry them out, and mix the raisins into the dough, THEN bake it into bread. Well, my teleporter's always in the shop, so I'm going with the second recipe. The raisins have to pre-exist the bread in order to be included in it.

Bob Lillie of Oregon State University gave me this idea: Oreo cookies are composed of a stack of three layers with brittle/ductile/brittle rheologies. This can serve as an analogy for the lithosphere, asthenosphere, and mesosphere. You can even break up the upper cookie bit and slide the pieces around on the white filling. If you're clever, you can produce rift zones, subduction, and even crude mountain building this way.

Chunky cookies (like these classics from Pepperidge Farm) offer a nice contrast between cookie and ingredient. You can tell where the cookie starts & stops, but you can also tell within the cookie where the chocolate starts & stops, and where the pecans start & stop. The analogy is an important one that I draw early on for my Physical Geology students: the difference between a mineral and a rock. Minerals are like the ingredients (chocolate chunks, pecans, etc.). Rocks, being an aggregate of many mineral grains, are like the cookie. Minerals are the ingredients that make up rocks.

And that brings us to cake, by far the most frequently invoked baked good in my introductory geology lectures. Cake is good for so many reasons. First off, there's the stratigraphy of cake: frequently it's a layered structure. Second, broken cakes are not doomed: they can be stuck back together by sealing fractures with frosting. Third, the different rheology of the frosting layers versus the cakey layers makes them ideal for explaining thrust faults that travel over a "greased skid" of less competent rock. (This is my favorite way of explaining the Blue Ridge Thrust Fault, for instance.)

Ironically, pie itself has not so far merited inclusion in this cavalcade of calories. Can you think of a geologic concept that pie helps illustrate? If so, leave your suggestion in the comments area below.

Labels: food, teaching