Just to get all the Patagonia trip stuff in one easy-to-access reference location:

Birds

The ferry ride from Puero Montt to Puerto Natales

Puerto Natales

Torres del Paine National Park:

Day 1
Day 2
Day 3, part I
Day 3, part II
Day 3, part III
Day 4
Day 5
Day 6, part I
Day 6, part II
Day 7

Argentina: assorted photos

Argentina: Perito Moreno Glacier

Buenos Aires: cemetery & exotic trees

Labels: patagonia, south america, travel

This is the final post about my trip to Patagonia. Our final stop was in Buenos Aires, the capital of Argentina. There wasn't much of geological interest that I saw there, but you might like to check out these images of the Recoleta Cemetery, a famous cemetery there. It's full of charming masoleums which are unique in design, and in various states of repair. (Eva Peron is buried here, which is what draws in most visitors.) Here's a view down one of the labyrinthine alleyways:


This masoleum looks like a miniature cathedral:


Several had art noveau details:




This one had an awesome stained glass onion dome bulging out the top:


Two-faced angel statue:


This caught my eye:


The grave belongs to an Argentinian surgeon, Francisco Muniz, who was also into paleontology:


Muniz apparently discovered the first glyptodont (though was not the first to publish it), and corresponded with Charles Darwin. There's a neat little review of his life here, at a website documenting the people interred at Recoleta Cemetery (a great resource if you ever visit it yourself).

Rising from a prominent intersection of pathways in the cemetary was this prominent Araucaria, which I think is a monkeypuzzle tree:


Monkeypuzzles are native to Patagonia, though other members of the genus may be found in New Caledonia, New Guinea, Norfolk Island, and Australia. I love monkeypuzzles: mainly for their awesome name, but also because they look like my idea of what prehistoric plants should look like. Here's one in El Calafate that someone decorated for Christmas:


Closer in, to see some details of its scaly leaves:


Perhaps this is a good image to close out the Patagonia series with, considering it blends the exotic monkeypuzzle with lovely old traditional holiday spirit (at least in my culture). What do I take from this?...

...Amid the prickly hazards of travel, you can find some exceptional gifts.

Labels: argentina, art, fossils, geologists, in-memoriam, patagonia, plants, south america, travel

Yesterday we looked at some other aspects of Argentina's Parque Nacional Los Glaciares (and the nearby town of El Calafate). Today, some pictures of ice.

Let's orient ourselves first, courtesy of some satellite imagery via Google Maps:

You can see the bright blue of Lago Argentino, including its southern arm, the Brazo Rico. Separating the Brazo Rico from the main part of the lake is the Magallanes Peninsula. And poking out from the white mass at left (the South Patagonian Ice Field) is a nice big valley glacier, the Perito Moreno Glacier. Notice how it pokes right into the Magallanes Peninsula, like a pin approaching a balloon. Occasionally, it surges forward and smooches the opposite shore, cutting the Brazo Rico off from the rest of the lake. When this happens, some spectacular collapses can occur.

The Perito Moreno Glacier is remarkably stable, due in part to its large catchment area and relatively narrow zone of ablation. This means that a bunch of park infrastructure has developed on the Magallanes Peninsula: viewing platforms and docks. The glacier moves forward at the same rate it loses ice through calving/melting: very consistent. We started off with the boat trip up to the glacier's terminus. Here's a view of the boat from above:


...And a view of the glacier's face from the boat:




Ice meets bedrock (plants watch warily):


Looking north from the viewing platform:












A little panorama (two shots spliced together):


So, at this point, I hope I have established that Perito Moreno Glacier is very accessible and very photogenic. It is also a lovely shade of blue. Thank you very much.

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

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

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

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

My friend Noah's classic "leech on the eyeball" story is detailed in National Geographic:

Labels: invertebrates, philippines, travel

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

Holy cow... Have you seen this?



I found a reproduction of this lovely map in the pages of this month's Discover magazine. It is a map of the most remote places on our planet, as defined by their distance from major cities (and also shipping channels). The scale at the bottom shows you how many hours (or days) it would take to get from pixel A to the nearest city. The darkest spots are the most remote ones.

The map was produced by Andrew Nelson of the Global Environmental Monitoring Unit of the European Commission. It is available here in a bigger form. They grant authorization to reproduce it, so long as you attribute them as the authors. Amazing work, Mr. Nelson; Gorgeous!
The Sahara, the Amazon Basin, the Australian Outback, New Guinea, boreal Canada, Greenland, the Rub' al Khali, northern Siberia, the interior of Borneo, and the Tibetan Plateau all jump out as remote locations. I post this map today because this evening I'm getting on a plane and heading for another remote location, the dark spot down at the southern tip of South America. Lily and I are spending the holidays in Patagonia. I'll be there for the next two and a half weeks, and I'll be back to DC and NOVA in the new year. To keep you amused in the meantime, I've scheduled posts to appear here on the blog while I am away. Enjoy your holidays!

Labels: maps, patagonia, science and society, south america, travel

After Magma Cum Laude, who did it after Woman Scientist...

January: Ecuador


February: Shenandoah Valley, Virginia


March: Washington, DC


April: West Virginia


May: Petrology of Maryland


June: Williamsburg, Virginia (toad in the College Woods:)


July: Montana




August: Adirondacks and Oswego, New York




September: Owens Valley, California


October: Yosemite, California and Portland, Oregon




November: North Carolina Blue Ridge


December: Patagonia (Chile and Argentina) -- leaving in a mere 56 hours!
Image from Wikipedia; I'll supply a few of my own in the New Year!

Labels: travel

The other day, I mentioned the lineated granite gneiss we saw when hiking in Hickory Nut Gorge State Park on Thanksgiving Day (hey, maybe it's not quite up to the standards of last Thanksgiving's hike, but I'm cool with that). The next day, we headed to Chimney Rock to check out the scene there.

Here's a Google Map of the site (satellite view):


...and a zoomed-in view where you can see the tan ellipse of Chimney Rock itself:


Chimney Rock is located right at the Blue Ridge mountain front, where the mountainous terrain underlain by Grenvillian basement complex (Mesoproterozoic) gives way to the multiple metamorphosed oceanic terranes of the Piedmont province (like the metavolcanics mentioned earlier this week). Here's a view east across this physiographic (and geologic) boundary:

This boundary is called the Brevard Zone, a fault/mylonite zone of complicated structure. I don't know much about the Brevard Zone, but those Carolinian geologists are all over it. It's something I'd like to learn more about. If you have any particular expertise to contribute, please leave a comment telling us more (and giving us outcrop recommendations!).

Here's the star attraction of Chimney Rock Park:

You can see from the bridge and the flag that it has been developed, and much of the park exhibits "improvements" from the natural state.

Before climbing up to the Rock, we decided to hike out to the waterfall upstream. Chimney Rock projects from the wall of a deeply incised canyon carved by the Broad River. A tributary of the Broad flows over the lip of the canyon, providing a lovely waterfall. This scenic location was the spot where they filmed the final scene in the movie version of Last of the Mohicans:


Here's a view across the gorge (from underneath an overhang), looking towards the north:


At the site of the waterfall, I was intrigued to note that the rocky walls were exhibiting "onion skin" weathering (exfoliation jointing) that in my experience is more typical of granites (say, like those in the Sierra Nevada):


Here's a smaller version of the same phenomenon: a flake parts with its source rock, leaving the source rock more spheroidal than it was before. Oak leaves provide a sense of scale:


The rock exposed in Chimney Rock Park is a gneiss. I didn't see any here that was noticably lineated, but it had a pronounced horizontal foliation. The rock varies quite a lot in its texture and degree of deformation. Here's some photos:


Penny for scale:


Penny for scale:


In places, the metamorphic foliation has been deformed. Mainly this is evidenced in charismatic, high-contrast folds, but there is also some small-scale faulting visible, and some boudinage. Here are some images of the folds:


Isoclinal fold. Penny for scale:


Penny for scale (bottom):








Lily points above her head at some parasitic folding:


Here, Lily appears to hold up a big ellipse with an axial ratio of 6 or 7:

This is a section through an isoclinal fold, so that the fold axis is transected once on the left and once (on a differently oriented surface) on the right.

Finally we approached Chimney Rock itself, a looming monolith whose presence was indicating by a loudly flapping flagpole. When a gust of wind came along, the sudden clatter of the flag whipping in the wind was quite disconcerting. From below, it sounded a lot like a rockfall had initiated somewhere up above us. Note how the shape of Chimney Rock appears to be a compromise between the ~horizontal fissility of the gneiss and the spheroidal weathering associated with exfoliation:


Little wooden walkways and staircases are draped all over the face of the mountain, including a catwalk out to Chimney Rock itself:


Atop Chimney Rock, we found these little holes which were filled with water. I forget the name of these things - can someone remind me in the comments section below?

Essentially what's going on here is a self-perpetuating focusing of weathering. A small initial divot in the rock face allows water to accumulate. That water facilitates additional weathering through freeze-thaw action and chemical breakdown of the minerals in the gneiss. This weathering enlarges the size of the depression, which allows more water to accumulate, which triggers more weathering. It's a nice example of a positive feedback loop: a small initial perturbation auto-catalyzes itself into a much larger final effect. I've seen similar structures atop many mountaintops.

Labels: blue ridge, metamorphism, movies, north carolina, piedmont, structure, travel, weathering

I have shown you tafoni/metate photos from this site, and I have shown you petroglyph/meander photos from this site. But I have not yet shown you the real reason that field forum leader David Ferrill brought us out to the site. Hopefully this picture will convey some of the structural wonder of this location:


You're looking down the axis of a horst, a normal-fault-bounded block of rock that has had normal-fault-bounded blocks of rock slide downward on either side of it (called grabens, from the German for "grave"). The collection of automobiles provides a sense of scale: this is a pretty skinny little horst.

In miniature, this site shows the processes that are playing out on a larger scale in the Owens Valley (itself a graben), the White Mountains (a horst), and the Basin & Range province in general.

I used Photoshop to stitch together a panorama looking along the graben marked "#1" in the annotated photo above:

(Click here for a BIGGER version.) That's the Sierra Nevada in the distance, and the Owens River at far left, with the skinny horst at the far right. I like how you can see some of the welded "Ig2" layer right where the graben meets Chalk Bluff (far left), while it's buried beneath sediment in the rest of the valley. That same layer is the resistant one that caps the horst (atop which I took the photo).

I'm not sure I had ever consciously stood atop a horst before. Yeehaw. Giddyap!

Labels: california, faults, rift valleys, structure, travel

Shall we return now to the volcanic tableland north of Bishop, California?

Yes, let's shall.

Today's topic: cooling columns in the Bishop Tuff. Like all volcanic rocks, the Bishop Tuff erupted hot and cooled off as it "set." This change in temperature led to a change in volume, and the upper welded layer, known affectionally to its friends as "Ig2," lost enough volume and was stiff enough that it developed a set of polygonal fractures, which propagated downward, mostly vertically. This divided up the Ig2 into blocky columns, which now topple over where exposed along normal fault scarps:

View is to the south/southeast. White Mountains in the distance. Simon Kattenhorn for scale.

Here's a Google Map of this locality. It's just north of where that syn-deformational drainage channel flows down a relay ramp into a graben.


Up atop the footwall block, you can see some of these columns separating from one another, opening up zig-zag-shaped fractures as the columns nearest the scarp rotate outward into the graben. The resulting gape gets filled in with sediment, like a rift valley in miniature:


A close look at the columns themselves (next three images along the fault scarp) reveals some of the lovely smaller structures that serve as decoration and fodder for the structural geologist. Consider, for instance, this delectable "crack panel" showing the arrest lines as the fractures which define the column propagated downward a few inches at a time:


A closer look: the arrest lines are ~horizontal on a ~vertical column:


Also, this caught my eye:

I think what we're seeing here is two intersection "hackle fringes" on the corner of a block of Bishop Tuff Ig2. I don't think they're arrest lines, so they don't appear to have anything to do with columnar jointing. The prominent "ruffley" set of hackles on the left appear to have all formed as part of a single episode of jointing. That joint apparently cross-cut an earlier joint which left the less-prominent hackle fringe on the right (hackles at a ~10 degree angle to the first set of hackles). At least I think that's what's going on here... Would anyone else care to offer another "read" on this outcrop?

Labels: california, faults, joints, meetings, structure, travel, volcano, weathering

A couple of other cool stuff, not directly related to the theme of the GSA Field Forum, that we saw at the site of the tafoni and the metates:

First, some petroglyphs. These are carved into the clay/oxide/biofilm layer known as "desert varnish," revealing the pink Bishop Tuff beneath:


And if you walk to the edge of the bluff, where the Owens River has chewed away at the edge of the volcanic tableland, you can see this:


That's the Sierras in the distance, the Owens River in the middle ground, Chalk Bluff Road, and then the south slope of the volcanic tableland. The Owens River is near its local base level here, and has produced some lovely meanders. You can see the current batch of meanders, plus older, cut-off loops here:


...And did I mention they have some fault geology there too?

Labels: anthropology, california, conferences, rivers, travel, weathering

Okay, so maybe you recognize that. No? Take another look:



That's tafoni, peppering the Bishop Tuff on the volcanic tableland north of Bishop, California. I went there in September as part of a weeklong GSA Field Forum. Tafoni is a distinctive weathering pattern presumed to be caused by salt weathering, often in sandstones. This particular example wasn't in a particularly salty location, and the rock being weathered was the Bishop Tuff, a welded volcanic ash deposit. But it's clearly the tafoni pattern:



Here's some tafoni resources from the geoblogophere:
Through the Sandglass 1
Through the Sandglass 3
Tafoni from About.com 1
Tafoni from About.com 2
The Dynamic Earth 1
The Dynamic Earth 2
A previous mention here on NOVA Geoblog



And one more... ??

...Just kidding. This last one is a metate, a Native American grain-grinding depression. There were a couple of them at this location, too. Like the tafoni, it's a hole in the rock. Unlike the tafoni, it's man-made. Would you believe we didn't go there for the metates or the tafoni, but some normal faults instead? ...I'll have to share them in a future post.

Labels: anthropology, california, conferences, history, travel, weathering

This image, published earlier this week on NASA's Earth Observatory, reminded me that I haven't finished blogging up my time in the Adirondacks this summer yet:

Labels: mountains, new york, travel

It's been a while since I last posted about my time in Bishop, California, back in September, when I attended a GSA field forum on the structural and neotectonic evolution of the volcanic tableland.

For reference, here's a list of the previous posts about that trip:
...Faults of the volcanic tableland
...The Bishop Tuff
...The flipping fault

So, picking up where I left off, I thought it would be worth a post to mention the gorgeous drainage channels one sees etched into the top "Ig2" welded layer of the Bishop Tuff. These channels are interpreted as being Pleistocene in age, when the area was wetter than it is now.

Here is a photograph of the most spectacular of these channels, as viewed from the rim:

We visited this vantage on our second day in the field. A hiking path at the bottom of the dry channel imparts a sense of scale.

Here's a Google Map of the area from the perspective of a hawk:

Where the road comes most closely tangential to the canyon is the point where we stopped to take a look at it, and where the above photograph was captured.

Further upstream along the channel, we find it broken by normal faulting. Check out the view across this graben (a graben is a normal-fault-bounded valley, downdropped relative to the highlands next to it). There, you see the distinctive crescent-shaped profile of the drainage channel, but offset along several fault scarps:

There are three scarps on the far side of the graben, and an additional one that Peter is standing on, on this side of the graben. Just behind Peter, you can see a broken relay ramp, too. View is to the northwest; those are the Sierras in the distance.

Here is a Google Map of the area, showing the drainage channel crossing the graben. This conclusively shows that the channel must be older than the faulting which produced the graben.

This Google Map shares its southeastern corner with the northwestern corner of the first one I showed. You can see this for yourself by dragging either one in the appropriate direction. They both share the white-knuckled place where the road goes straight down the fault scarp, rather than sensibly down a relay ramp. That wasn't my favorite thing to drive.

Here's another drainage channel, similarly bone dry, that we visited in our fourth day in the field. Perspective is to the east: those are the White Mountains in the distance:


The Google Map shows a more interesting relationship this time. Instead of the faulting cross-cutting the channel's orientation, this channel approaches the graben to the southeast, curves around (deflecting from its original downhill course) and drops down the relay ramp to the northeast, into the graben (breaking up into multiple channels en route). There, it resumes its original downhill trajectory to the southeast:

This suggests that at least some of these faults were rupturing the "Ig2" layer at the same time that water was flowing over the surface (i.e. before the Owens Valley's climate dried out, post-Pleistocene). The stream's course and the faulting were coeval.

So what was the source of these streams? Did they originate on the volcanic tableland, or were they derived from the Sierra Nevada, prior to incision by the Owens River (which makes a deep canyon a mile or two west of here)? Fred Phillips, of New Mexico Tech, holds up a piece of evidence:

That is not a rounded cobble of the Bishop Tuff. That's a rounded cobble of granite. While the majority of cobbles in these channels are locally-derived chunks of the Bishop Tuff, there are also clasts which originated elsewhere, beyond the volcanic tableland itself. This suggests a source area with a granitic outcrop. One candidate location is Casa Diablo Mountain, north of the (south-sloping) volcanic tableland. Another possibility is the Sierras, to the west.

Another possibility entirely is that the source of the cobbles could be anywhere, and they were brought to the volcanic tableland not by streams but by paleoindians, who used them as grain-grinding stones in their metates.

Labels: california, conferences, faults, granite, pleistocene, rivers, travel, volcano, weathering

I'm in the office this morning, taking care of a bunch of last minute details before I depart this afternoon for the Geological Society of America's annual meeting. It's held this year in Portland, Oregon, and I'm pleased to be going in spite of the many responsibilities I'm temporarily putting on hold back here in DC and NOVA. Meetings like this are a great opportunity for professional scientists to catch up on the latest ideas both inside and outside their specialties. I'm also going to be participating in a field trip to the awesomely-named Boring Volcanic Field tomorrow, and maybe doing a little self-guided tour of Portland's geology on my own. I will be presenting a paper of my own (on the role field trips play in geology education*) on Monday. I'm looking forward to meeting many of my fellow geology bloggers Monday night, and not looking forward to the red-eye flight back to DC Tuesday night/Wednesday morning... and then going straight back to work. Fortunately I think I've got all my stuff set for next week, so it should be "plug and play" upon my return... but I've got a hunch I'm going to be pretty tired, regardless.

So... take a deep breath, Bentley... here we go!
______________________________________
* subject of my MSSE capstone research project.

Labels: meetings, oregon, travel

As noted earlier, I had the good fortune to spend last week in Yosemite National Park, celebrating the wedding of my friends Jason and Lindsay, and in general poking around in one of the coolest places around. Below, a summary of the three-day trip:

Friday:
Lily and I flew to Modesto, California, and rented a car. It took about two hours to drive up to Evergreen Lodge, where we checked in and then headed out for a short hike in the Hetch Hetchy area. Hetch Hetchy was dubbed "Yosemite's sister valley" by John Muir in an attempt to keep it from being dammed. But the city of San Francisco had been destroyed in 1906 by earthquake-induced fire, and the call for a reliable water source was an important force in overpowering Muir's conservationist ideals. Ken Burns apparently explores this saga, the first instance of "development vs. conservation," in the second episode of his new National Parks series. (I saw the first episode, but haven't caught up on the rest of it yet.) The valley was dammed in the 1920's, creating the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir:


Here's the O'Shaughnessy Dam, named after the chief engineer of the project:


I didn't find it as spectacular as Yosemite, but it was sure a pretty place. Walking along the north side of the reservoir, I reaquanited myself with some fine Sierran granites and granodiorites. Here's a sweet little xenolith (or maybe an MME; how can you tell an MME from a mafic xenolith?):

Back to the Evergreen for the rehearsal dinner (Oktoberfest theme!) and then bed.

Saturday:
Up early, got some coffee, drove an hour to reach the Yosemite Valley. I liked how quiet things were compared to the throbbing pulse of summer. This view of El Capitan, for instance, is typically mobbed with tourists. This day, we had it to ourselves for five minutes or so, then shared it with one other car:


Time to stretch the legs! We decided to hike up to Vernal Falls. On our way up, the base of the falls was still in shadow, with low-angle morning sunlight dramatically illuminating the upper reaches of the falls:


Looking back down the valley we had climbed up... I like the dark shadow of the cliff merging with the dark shadows of the trees below:


But if we set the camera's F-stop a bit differently, we can see what's going on in all that shadow. There's the trail we climbed up, with fellow hikers for scale:


Up top, photographing the waterfall:


On our way back down, with more of the falls illuminated as the sun rises in the sky:


Looking north across the valley from where we parked our car, marvelling at the huge exfoliation joints there: rounding these exposed plutons into granite 'domes.'


... or Half Domes, as the case may be:


A view from further out, again with Half Dome the most striking landform:


Then, we headed back to clean up before the wedding. Great ceremony, amazing meal. Drinks, dancing, rhubarb jam, bluegrass, reminiscing with old friends and new. Ahhh.

Sunday:
Breakfast and coffee with the wedding party, then off to check out some big trees. We drove to the Tuolumne Grove of giant sequoias. It started snowing on the way there, but we didn't let that deter us. On the hike down from the parking area (where, by the way, they had closed the Tioga Road), we found this nice example of spheroidal weathering in an outcrop of granite:


But the real attraction was the enormous sequoia trees. Here's one:


And a dead one, with a car-sized hole cut through it:


I found these trees very impressive: they were just stunning in their grandeur and immense age. Snow continued to fall as we left. We had to get going to make our flight home. Somewhere on the way down the mountain, Garry Hayes and his wife passed us going up the mountain. Ships passing in the night -- sorry I missed you, Garry! We made a couple of roadside outcrop stops, then got back to Modesto and traded in the car for an airplane. Our "redeye" route back to DC took us through San Francisco and Los Angeles, and I ran into Thomas Friedman in the airport. Got back to BWI at 6am, and headed off to work...

Labels: california, glacial landforms, national parks, plants, travel, tv, water resources, xenoliths

(Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, & 6 of this series...)

Today's episode: The route down the mountain, and the long way back to camp.

After our "summit" of the arete between Hanging Canyon and Cascade Canyon, we begin carefully picking our way back downhill, switching between talus piles and snowfields, and back again:




We popped over the threshold, and started dropping down towards Jackson Hole. As the sun was dropping lower and lower in the sky to the west, we were pretty much in shadow from here on down... but the light still lingered on the highest peaks, like Teewinot Mountain, Mount Owen, and the Grand Teton itself:


By the time we got all the way back down to Jenny Lake, the sun was pretty much gone. However, it was illuminating a tall cloud north of us, sitting atop the Yellowstone area. We joked that this was the big one: Yellowstone had finally blown up and the orange color we were seeing wasn't "alpenglow" but incandescence from the long-awaited eruption of the Yellowstone volcanic center...


It wasn't, though. Just a little jest to take our minds off the fact that we had missed the last ferry across Jenny Lake, and so that meant adding an additional "2" (it sure felt more like 3) miles to our hike. As darkness closed in, we hoofed it along (only Pete had been prepared enough to bring a headlamp). For me, a highlight of this long slog came when Joel and I spotted an animal I'd heard of but never actually seen before: a pika! They are very, very cute animals that live in talus piles and make little squeaky noises. But they're quite elusive, at least in my experience. I've seen plenty of marmots and other alpine rodents, but this was my first Ewok pika.

We eventually got back to the vehicle and rolled back to camp, getting there about 10pm. We wolfed down some dinner, quenched our thirst, and sacked out. What a great day! In spite of being dog tired, I felt mentally rejuvenated and ready to take on the second half of the Rockies trip.

This post concludes the Hanging Canyon series. Thanks for coming along!

Labels: mammals, nova, travel, volcano, wyoming, yellowstone

(Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, & 5 of this series...)

As we were climbing up a steep snowfield, we saw something that made us rush up to the top:


Interpretive sketch:

At first, we thought this was a big isoclinal synform that was cross-cut by a ptygmatically*-folded granite dike, but closer inspection at the "axis" of the "fold" revealed that it was instead just the trailing edge of a big boudin. It pinched down and then swelled again in the downward direction, hidden in this photo by the snowpack. Not quite as cool... but still pretty cool. And I can never say no to ptygmatic* folding, regardless of the setting.

This is also kind of cool:

What you're looking at here is a gneiss, with alternating layers of coarse-grained mafic and felsic minerals. The view of the photo is orthogonal to the plane of foliation, but the boulder has been weathered so that in some places the uppermost mafic layers has been worn away. There's one spot where you can "see through" the mafic layer into the underlying felsic layer (upper right) and another spot where there's a little isolated scrap of the mafic layer where the surrounding material has been weathered away. This reminded me of a larger-scale phenomenon where the same thing happens to thrust sheets: an erosional hole through a thrust sheet into the rock beneath is a tectonic "window" or "fenster" (German for window). An erosional remnant of a thrust sheet is a "klippe." The Grandfather Mountain Window in North Carolina is an example of a fenster. Chief Mountain in Glacier National Park, Montana, is an example of a klippe. So this little boulder gives us a nice physical analogue for regional-scale tectonic/erosional features.

Ahh... what cool stuff to see and think about. But the sun was setting, and we had to head back to camp and the rest of our team... Tomorrow: the story of the long hike home.

________________________________
* Really, more of a "cuspate-lobate" fold, without the parallel limbs that make for a truely ptygmatic fold.

Labels: analogies, art, montana, national parks, north carolina, nova, structure, travel, wyoming

(Parts 1, 2, 3 & 4 of this series...)

Today we'll look at some of the structural geology photos I took in Hanging Canyon, Teton National Park, Wyoming. These are all rocks of the Archean-aged Wyoming Terrane (or "Wyoming Craton"), one of the most ancient pieces of crust that make up the quilt-like North American continent. They include both metamorphic and igneous rocks that have been suffered enjoyed being deformed by tectonic processes.

Labels: archean, igneous, metamorphism, national parks, nova, structure, travel, wyoming

Parts 1, 2, & 3 of this series are at these links.

Today and tomorrow, I'll share some of the gorgeous Archean rocks that are exposed in Hanging Canyon, Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming. Today: the igneous stuff. Tomorrow: the structural stuff.

There were many pegmatite dikes that we saw along the hike. Here's a lovely one cutting across the metamorphic host rock:


A close up of some big muscovite "books" in the pegmatite:


A couple of parallel pegmatite dikes cutting across granite:


Here's the largest single feldspar crystal I've ever seen in the wild. The crystal starts to the left of my boot and continues for over a foot to the left of that. Its color varies between bluish gray and whitish. Where the left-most and most prominent blue stripe is, that's the edge of this monster megacryst:


Huh... Only four "igneous" photos... I guess I'll make up for that with tomorrow's structural geology post about Hanging Canyon... I have about forty photos of folds and boudins and what-not to share...

Labels: archean, granite, igneous, minerals, national parks, nova, structure, travel, wyoming

Part 1 and Part 2 of this series described the journey up from Jenny Lake to Hanging Canyon. Today, we pop up over the threshold of this hanging valley and see what we can see...



As it turns out, there's some snow up there:


We manage a few clumsy glissades:


And what's going on with this hole?


Aha! A dark rock with low albedo absorbs energy from the sun, releasing it as heat and melting the surrounding snow. Cool!


Times like this, I just love my job:


Ken shows off some glacial striations on the bedrock:


Pointing in the direction of glacial flow:


We then opt to climb up even higher, to peer down into the neighboring valley, the much larger Cascade Canyon...



Steep climb, with tarn in the background; Joel appears to be enjoying himself:


Here's a Google Maps "terrain" view of the area, showing the relative locations of Jenny Lake, Cascade Canyon, and Hanging Canyon.


Wow... Once we got up over that last little knife-edge crest, we had a pretty amazing view.


And what did we see along the way? More on that in tomorrow's post (Hint: pegmatites and old folds)...

Labels: glacial landforms, glaciation, national parks, snow, travel, wyoming

Today, picking up where we left off yesterday, some images from the hike upwards from Jenny Lake to Hanging Canyon...

Joel and Ken take a breather:


The approach to the final lip of Hanging Canyon:


A view down over Jenny Lake and Jackson Hole:

Jenny Lake is dammed by an end moraine (which is characterized by pine trees growing on it here, making for a nice dark stripe around the lake).

We could also see across Jackson Hole to the Gros Ventre valley, where the Gros Ventre lanslide scar was readily visible:


...And lastly, the view to the north, over Jackson Lake (with String Lake in the middle distance):


More tomorrow about what we found once we got up into Hanging Canyon itself... (Hint: it's white and cold and fun to ski on...)

Labels: glacial landforms, mass wasting, national parks, nova, travel, wyoming

One of the highlights of this past summer's Northern Rockies field course was an afternoon set aside as a "choose your own adventure" hike in Teton National Park. Some students opted for Cascade Canyon; others climbed Blacktail Butte. Four of us wanted something really challenging, so we chose Hanging Canyon at the recommendation of my friend Amy Manhart, who lives in Jackson and knows the Tetons like the back of her hand.

We took a ferry across Jenny Lake along with the Cascade Canyon Crew, and then started climbing up. A thunderstorm rolled up Jackson Hole, with much ominous booming and lightning, but we didn't get hit with the storm directly. The climb was very steep, but we entertained ourselves along the way with a geological conundrum: We discussed how best to interpret a hypothetical piece of float that is half granite and half diorite: Is it more parsimonious to guess that the granite represents an intrusion or an inclusion? The implications for the relative dates of the two units are huge: if the diorite is an intrusion, it's younger than the granite. If the diorite is a xenolith (an inclusion) within the granite, then it's older than the granite. Consider the possibilities:



Ultimately, there's no answer to this question without finding an outcrop of the rock in situ, which is why it's entertaining to consider when you're slogging up a 2000 foot hillside. My co-instructor Pete Berquist and I upped the ante by each doggedly defending one of the two indefensible interpretations and sticking to it for the sake of argument. Pete was the xenolith man, whereas I came down fully on the side of the dikes. Our students Joel and Ken were "fortunate" enough to listen to Pete and I bicker about the relative merits of our favored interpretations. Rest breaks came whenever either Pete or I found a boulder along the hillside that showed evidence to support our position. We would stop to consider it, catch our breath, and the resume the uphill climb and the argument. The bad weather passed and the day was beautiful. We were unencumbered by the need to reach a conclusion or acknowledge the obvious: the best interpretation is that such half-&-half clasts "cannot be interpreted."

Here's Pete posing with an obvious dike (I forced him! Ha!):


Here's me posing with an obvious xenolith (Oh well, fair's fair...):


We had a similar ongoing "argument" on the trip about the merits of "Tertiary" versus "Paleogene." I think it keeps students amused to see their professors going back and forth over geologic ideas -- surely if these fellows spend this much energy and thought discussing some geologic question, it must be valid and important... ...right?

More on the Hanging Canyon hike tomorrow...

Labels: archean, geologic time, igneous, national parks, nova, structure, travel, wyoming, xenoliths

The Crazy Mountains are a range of mountains in south-central Montana, north of Livingston:

In this Google Map, you can orient yourself from recent posts by finding Bozeman, the Gallatin Valley, and the Bridger Range down in the southwest corner.

The Crazys are an Eocene intrusion, (Ar/Ar dates of ~50 Ma), and they are beautifully expressed on a geologic map as a radiating series of dikes around two central blobs of intrusive rocks (quartz diorites, etc.: dark pink on the map):

These igneous intrusions penetrated the Livingston Group, a series of volcaniclastic sedimentary rocks of late Cretaceous to early Paleogene age (hot pink on the map).

The day before my students arrived in Montana this summer, Lily and I took a hike in the Crazys, entering in the northern part of the range. We saw some cool dikes exposed along the road on the way in. Here's me pointing out the contact between a subvertical dike of porphyritic andesite cutting across subhorizontal layers of the Livingston Group:


Annotated version of the same photograph:


And here's a close-up of the rock making up the dike; mostly fine-grained and gray, but with some lovely big euhedral plagioclase feldspars as well:


That's about it for the geology I saw in the Crazys. Our hike kept us mostly in the forest, so clearly I'm going to have to go back some other time and spend more time there!

Labels: igneous, montana, mountains, sediment, travel, volcano

All photos in this post by Rockies student Charlie Corrick.

Obstacle in the road...


Tetons...


Charlie and Jared on Blacktail Butte:


Luke on Blacktail Butte:


Charlie, Luke, and Jared on Blacktail Butte:


Checking out the fault scarp of the Hebgen Lake Fault, north of Hebgen Lake:


Examining the Grinnell Formation for the first time:


Looking down the St. Mary Valley, Glacier National Park:


Stromatolites in the Helena Formation, Glacier National Park:


Victoria points out the contact of the Purcell Sill with the surrounding Helena Formation (limestone), Glacier National Park:


Callan points out the contact of the Purcell Sill with the surrounding Helena Formation (limestone), Glacier National Park:


Pete and Joel point out the contact of an apophysis of the Purcell Sill with the surrounding Helena Formation (limestone), Glacier National Park. Notice that the sill cuts across stratification down by Joel's legs.


At the Bozeman Airport on the way home, John entertains us with geology songs he composed, which cracked up the instructors:

Labels: glacial landforms, montana, national parks, nova, proterozoic, travel, wyoming

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

Labels: glacial landforms, glaciation, new york, sediment, travel

Last week, I visited the Taconian Unconformity in the Catskills region of New York. I found out about the outcrop via the informative website the USGS put together in 2003 to explain southeastern New York's varied and interesting geology (Click here for a map).

Here's me at the angular unconformity, demonstrating the layering with my forearms:


Here's the same outcrop, sans goofball, avec annotations:


This is a classic angular unconformity. It even graced the cover of the (excellent) GSA publication Excursions in Geology and History: Field Trips in the Middle Atlantic States (Frank Pazzaglia, editor; cover photo by Marli Miller). Why should we care? Because like the "original" angular unconformity at Siccar Point in Scotland (described by James Hutton), this outcrop represents a lot of geologic time. First, during the Ordovician period, the Austin Glen formation had to be deposited as layers of clastic sediment in an ocean basin. Then, during the late Ordovician Taconian Orogeny, those layers had to be deformed: folded and buckled so they stood up on end, and then eroded down to their nubs. Then, on that newly-formed erosional surface, a fresh layer of sediment had to be laid down, in this case, the Rondout Formation was deposited as a layer of carbonate mud during the late Silurian period. Then, that too was deformed, during the Devonian period's Acadian Orogeny. Finally, the whole package had to be uplifted to the surface and exposed (in this case, when a highway roadcut was completed). That's a lot of time!

I'm delighted to have had the opportunity to visit it first-hand!

Labels: devonian, maps, mountains, new york, ordovician, silurian, structure, travel, unconformities

Good morning! I'm in New Paltz, New York, right now, on my way up to the Adirondacks for several days of fun, to be followed by a visit to a geologist pal in Drumlin Land, and then a quick excursion to visit some other friends in Canada. Later this morning I'll visit the Taconic angular unconformity outside of Catskill, New York. I'll try and post photos and whatnot as I go, in the same manner as yesterday's ptygmatic fold post -- my first ever remote post from the new iPhone. But I forgot to bring the iPhone charger, so we'll see how I do... Anyhow, stay tuned.

Labels: canada, mountains, new york, tech, travel, unconformities

Some of the photos featured in my post on Green Sands Beach in Hawai'i have been added to "Hawaii Wow," a website that features intersting information about Hawai'i.

Labels: hawaii, minerals, sediment, travel

It's been busy round these parts. My apologies for the lack of posts this past week.

I leave tomorrow for Montana, and I'll have limited e-mail access while out there. I'll do my best to post when I can, but it will likely be more on the ~weekly timescale rather than ~daily.

On the agenda: (1) Bahama Montana, (2) present and defend my MSSE capstone project, and (3) lead my Regional Field Geology of the Northern Rockies class for NOVA.

More later...

Labels: blogs, montana, msse, nova, travel

Following on yesterday's Namibiferific post, I'd also like to share this image:

Labels: africa, meteors, namibia, travel

Today's NASA Earth Observatory image of the day is of a place that is near and dear to my heart, the Etosha Pan of Namibia:



In late 1996, my father and I took a trip to Namibia to study termite mound gas exchange as part of an Earthwatch expedition, and afterwards we rented a car and went off on a little safari. Up in Etosha National Park, the wildlife was pretty amazing. Here's a leopard that crossed the road in front of us, immediately followed by a second leopard:



An oryx (or gemsbok):


...And an elephant, drinking from one of the watering holes that fringe the main salt flats:


Namibia has been getting a lot of water lately, as evidenced in compare/contrast images like these, also from NASA's Earth Observatory:

June 2007:


Last week:


And that brings us back to the first image:


In this picture, you can see a new package of river water coming south into the Etosha Pan from the Oshigambo River of Angola. This is "fresh" water, but it has a dissolved load of sediments in it. As the water hits the hot, baking expanse of the Etosha Pan, it evaporates, but the dissolved ions within don't have that option. So they become more and more concentrated, and settle out in a chemical precipitate. This is where all the salt comes from: even freshwater is a little bit salty, and when you evaporate it repeatedly in an enclosed drainage basin, evaporite minerals accumulate there.

Labels: africa, critters, floods, mammals, namibia, national parks, salt, travel

Lichens are symbiotic associations between fungi and algae. The fungus provides the alga with a place to live, and the alga photosynthesizes and shares some of the resulting 'food' with the fungus. One provides room; the other provides board. It benefits both species to hang out together, and provides a nice example of two phylogenetic 'branches' of the 'tree of life' merging into one. There are many varieties of lichens, living in a diversity of habitats, but they're easiest to spot in colder zones where they are first in line to colonize raw rock surfaces.

When I was in Ecuador in January, I saw a lot of lichens, and took some photos of them. I'm not a lichen expert, and I won't attempt to name these varieties. I'm more interested in them as aesthetic phenomena. I find them beautiful.

This one reminds me of ripples on a pond's surface, spreading out over decades and centuries:


The orange here is also a lichen:


These wispy lichens were three-dimensional structures that were found all over the ground surface (not encrusted on a rock) in the paramo ecosystem.


They were present in such profusion in Cotopaxi National Park that the ground looked from a distance as if it had a light layer of snow on it:


Other ground lichens:




Lichen-bearded goofball:

Labels: ecuador, fungi, humor, plants, south america, travel

For the penultimate post in my Ecuador travel series, I hereby recount the story of climbing the mountain called Iliniza Norte (16,997 feet above sea level: the tallest peak I've ever summitted).

We began by driving up from the town of Chaupi, where we were staying at a hostel, to the trailhead above treeline in the paramo ecosystem...


We had hoped for awesome weather, but as with our previous peak bagging in Ecuador, the clouds were here too, making a ceiling that we headed up into...




Heading up into the clouds; the valley below fades away...


...and we start to see snow.






We went up a long, steep snowfield for probably two hours... It was frustrating going: take one step forward, slide two steps backward. The snow got thicker and thicker...

Eventually, when we got close to the summit, we got off the snowfield and onto some rocks. I was surprised to feel how my energy spiked at the prospect of rock-scrambling. The long slog up the snowfield was boring and repetitive, but this was totally engaging as a physical/mental workout. Here's Lily and Diego climbing up:



At the summit, there's a steel cross with various doodads attached...


This is the highest point above sea level I've ever experienced. When I stood on the summit, my head was above 17,000 feet in elevation!



Silly video of the summit team making celebratory noises:


Then Diego said, "I think we go down now, because of thunders."

The guy knows his stuff: as soon as he had said this, we heard a ba-boom from off in the white clouds somewhere... Yikes. Okay, time to head down.

Descending the rocks:


When we got to the snowfield, another peal of thunder sounded, and this one was louder than the first one. The snowfield, fortunately, made for easy going -- we essentially skied down it. It was pretty exciting... Flashes of lightning, booms of thunder (sometimes within a microsecond of one another), adrenaline pumping, running/sliding/skiing downhill as fast as we could.

We did not get hit by lightning.

After we got below cloud level (and into a valley where we felt a little less exposed to lightning strikes), we could see that the lower elevations had gotten some frozen precipitation too: a mix of snow and hail:











When we got back to the vehicle, we found it covered in hail:


Now for the adventure after the adventure: driving down a steep, twisting, muddy mountain road that's coated with hail and host to numerous roaring streams of runoff. It was almost as intense as descending the snowfield amid lightning bolts: the vehicle slid and knocked against a mud embankment at one point, and it was all seriously sketchy. Diego said he had never seen anything like it.

Here's some video of a raging torrent of meltwater/runoff flowing over a road surface that's decorated with white hailstones:



We did not crash the car.

Back safely at the hostel, we took hot showers and drank beer and congratulated ourselves for clearly being such daring adventurers. Whew... the next morning, we took our weary selves back to Quito.

One more Ecuador post to go... on lichens... stay tuned.

Labels: ecuador, ice, mountains, snow, south america, travel, volcano

Even if you don't have iTunes, the NOVA-Annandale Science Seminar series will be televised...

Check at our new webpage: http://www.nvcc.edu/annandale/scienceseminar/

Specific video: Dick Pellerin on math's many uses; Me on my western roadtrip.

Labels: geology, meetings, nova, science and society, travel

GeoTripper asks about where should be the top places geologists should visit? Or more specifically: What are the places and events that you think should all geologists should see and experience before they die? What are the places you know and love that best exemplify geological principles and processes?

He's asked this question before, and it set off a satisfying kerfuffle in the geoblogosphere. "Satisfying" because lots of geobloggers chimed and shared their experiences (like me). "Kerfuffle" because it's fun to say... Um, also because the original "Geologist's Life List"was pretty America-focused. A few days later, I posted a series of suggestions for revisions to the list, and now I repost them in honor of the upcoming Accretionary Wedge, with some addenda and modifications:

Specific places

1. Do an Appalachian transect through the following physiographic provinces: Piedmont, Blue Ridge, Valley & Ridge, and Appalachian Plateau
2. Visit the Chalk (England, France, Ireland...)
3. Visit Iceland's Thingvellir Valley to see the mid-Atlantic divergent plate boundary
4. Visit Mt. Fuji, Japan
5. Visit Great Barrier Reef, Australia
6. Visit Ayers Rock (Uluru) Australia
7. Visit the Himalayas (Kashmir?)
8. Visit the Tibetan Plateau
9. Visit the Gobi Desert
10. Visit the Sahara Desert
11. Visit the Sonoran Desert (for the saguaros)
12. Visit the Atacama Desert
13. Visit the Rub' al Khali (Empty Quarter)
14. Visit Beijing or Shanghai (for the perspective on what really dirty air looks like)
15. Visit the big island of Hawai'i
16. Visit Yellowstone
17. Visit the Galapagos Islands
18. Visit Madagascar (for the lemurs)
19. Visit Patagonia
20. Visit the Andes
21. Visit the Alps
22. Visit the Canadian Rockies
23. Visit Wrangell-St. Elias National Park, Alaska (and/or neighboring Kluane National Park in the Yukon Territory)
24. Visit Denali, Alaska
25. Visit the Aleutian Islands
26. Visit Mount Everest, the highest point above sea level.
27. Visit Chimborazo, Ecuador (furthest point from the center of the Earth, due to the equatorial bulge)
28. Visit Mauna Kea, the tallest mountain above its base.
29. Visit Antarctica
30. Visit the Siberian Traps
31. Visit the Deccan Traps
32. Visit the Columbia River flood basalt province
33. Visit Sumatra/Krakatau/Java, Indonesia
34. Visit the South Island of New Zealand
35. Visit the Dead Sea
36. Visit the Giant's Causeway, County Antrim, Northern Ireland.
37. Visit the Great Rift Valley of East Africa
38. Visit the Nile River
39. Visit the Mississippi River
40. Visit the Amazon River
41. Visit the Grand Canyon
42. Visit the Owens Valley, California (or anywhere in the Basin & Range, but the Owens Valley is pretty darned special, and geologically diverse)
43. Visit Gros Morne National Park, Newfoundland, Canada (walk on the "Moho")
44. Visit Siccar Point, Scotland (for the unconformity)
45. Visit Gibraltar, "UK"
46. Visit Vesuvius, Pompei, and the Pompei-to-be, Naples
47. Visit Victoria Falls
48. Visit Racetrack Playa's sailing stones, Death Valley
49. Visit Devils Tower, Wyoming
50. Visit the Moon

Geological features

1. A tectonic triple junction (Mendocino, CA is an example, or northern Burma, or Panama)
2. Tower karst (Guilin, China, or southwestern Thailand are examples)
3. Experience a regional flood
4. Experience a flash flood
5. Experience an earthquake
6. Ediacaran fauna fossils in situ (possibilities include the type locality of the Ediacaran Hills in Australia, or Charnwood Forest in England, the White Sea region in Russia, or maybe the Avalon Peninsula in Newfoundland)
7. Vertebrate fossils in situ
8. Visiting a laggerstatten site (e.g., Burgess Shale, Chenjiang, Sirius Passet, Solnhofen)
9. An alpine glacier
10. A continental glacier (ice cap or ice sheet)
11. A kimberlite pipe (preferably with diamonds, and good luck with that)
12. A coral atoll (take your pick)
13. A meteor impact crater (not a buried one, either)
14. A big river delta (Mississippi, Ganges, Nile, or any of the dozens of others)
15. Barrier islands (Padre Island, Texas, and the Outer Banks of North Carolina come to mind, but I'm sure there are others on other continents)
16. A craton (Canadian shield, Kaapvaal, North China, etc. etc. etc.)
17. A big estuary (Cook Inlet, Chesapeake Bay, Bay of Fundy: all North American examples. Give me some others)
18. See some karst.
19. Kayak (or other boat) through a fjord.
20. See a dropstone.
21. See an ophiolite.
22. Visit a major stike-slip fault (San Andreas in USA/Mexico, or North Anatolian in Turkey, or Tan Lo (sp?) in China)
23. Visit a nappe or thrust sheet (Glarus Thrust in the Alps, Chief Mountain/Glacier NP in Montana, Blue Ridge in Virginia/North Carolina)
24. Visit a really big cave (Mammoth, Lechugilla, or some other that I don't know about on another continent)
25. (#25-29 on this list is derived from Christie at the Cape's post on this topic...) See a famous "big wave" e.g. Maverics or Dungeons, breaking.
26. Watch a glacier calving into the sea.
27. Listen to singing beaches or dunes.
28. Walk across and observe a metamorphic aureole (like the classic Barrovian sequence in Scotland.
29. See a tidal bore.

Activities and experiences

1. A world-class natural history museum (London Museum of Natural History, American Museum of Natural History, and the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History all come to mind.)
2. Meeting of a classic scientific society (Royal Society, Explorers Club, Cosmos Club...)
3. Do some original research.
4. Present your research at a meeting of other scientists.
5. Publish your research in a peer-reviewed scientific journal.
6. Visit an original copy of "map that changed the world" (William Smith's geologic map of England, Wales, and part of Scotland)
7. Experience a big earthquake (greater than 5.0 sounds like as good a cut-off as any)
8. Experience a volcano erupting something other than gases (lava, pyroclastics)
9. Go ice fishing (or just out onto a frozen lake/pond/sea/ocean and ponder the improbable nature of ice and how it freezes from the top down, preserving the living things underneath, like fish. Without this odd property, it would be tough to maintain freshwater lake life at high-latitudes/elevations through the winter months.)
10. Compare and contrast El Nino and La Nina by personally living through both in the same spot. (e.g., Peru, southwest U.S., Papua New Guinea, Australia)
11. Go on an oceanographic research cruise for more than two weeks at sea.
12. Experience a hurricane/typhoon/cyclone (preferably surviving it)

I welcome your additions and comments! Or just tune in for the Wedge when GeoTripper posts it.

Labels: blogs, field trips, geologists, geology, travel

As you'll recall, when I left off with my Ecuadorian travelouge, Lily and I had summited Pasochoa, and then taken a day-hike in Cotopaxi National Park. Next up, a new mountain that has about the same elevation as Mt. Whitney (highest peak in the lower 48 United States): about 14,500 feet. To climb this extinct volcano called Ruminahui (Roo-min-ya-wee), we headed up a ridge between two adjacent glacially-carved valleys.















Me with clouds and background glacial valley:


Diego (our guide) on the trail:


Up on top, there was less vegetation, but more cloud... and snow was falling.

The bedrock was a volcanic breccia that had been cut by numerous andesitic dikes:






You can see some blurry snowflakes in the previous photo. Here's a cold-looking Lily with her boots on an andesitic dike:



Here's a couple of close-ups to show the cross-cutting relationships between the andesite dikes and the volcanic breccia:





Here's a short, not-especially-great video wherein I point out a few things that don't really show up all that well. Still, you get to see it snowing!

A big "thanks" to NOVA's king of digital video, Richard Attix, who helped me rotate this video and crop out some unintended footage from the raw video we shot on the mountain that day.

Cold hikers:



"Sheesh! It's cold up here!":



On the way down, we also took some time to check out the plants. Here's one called "Orejas de conejo" ("Ears of the rabbit"):

Here's one that smells exactly like chocolate!


In fact, Lily was able to harvest this chocolate bar from it!

Okay, not really. It's money that grows on trees, not chocolate bars.

So that's the story of our second successful summit... now there was only one more to go... the legendary Iliniza Norte. Photos from that hike in a couple of days...

Labels: ecuador, glacial landforms, mountains, plants, sediment, south america, travel, volcano

We now return you to our originally-scheduled photo-travelogue...

On the second day of our Andean mountain tour in Ecuador, Lily and I set out from Tambopaxi Lodge, our comfortable accomodation in Cotopaxi National Park:



We were going for a day-hike, checking out the scenery with our guide Diego while we acclimatized for some more serious mountain climbing in the days to come. The official goal of our hike was to check out two naturally-flowing cold springs, where the agua was pura, and safe to drink. Here's the first one, issuing from the base of a lava flow, with me awkwardly twisting around to raise a bottle of the good stuff:



Spring #2, of greater volume:


Some shots of the scenery:







The extinct volcano Sincholagua:


Me with Sincholagua (and lower cloud cover) in the distance:

A look back at Pasochoa, which we had climbed the day before:


And Cotopaxi itself, the charismatic, active volcano which draws most people to the park:


Critters:

A big insect, maybe a grylloblattid?


Feral horses:


We also saw some cool "primitive" plants (plants with ancient lineages):

Liverworts:


Sphenopsids:


Club mosses:


There was also some geology going on...

Here's a handful of loose lapilli (mixed in with some organics):


Stream deposits on the flanks of Cotopaxi Volcano, showing different water energy regimes. The coarsest layer in the middle represents the fastest moving water (capable of carrying larger particles of sediment):


And here's some flow-banding in andesite:


It started raining on our way back to the lodge, but that was okay, because hot showers and warm tea awaited there. Acclimatization, check! Next up, the peak known as Ruminahui...

Labels: arthropods, critters, ecuador, geology, mammals, plants, south america, travel, volcano

Meme bait! Here's the tallest points in each of the 50 United States, with Puerto Rico's and Washington, DC's highest points thrown in for good measure. Elevations are in feet above mean sea level. I've bolded the ones I have personally stood atop:

Cheaha Mt., Alabama 2,405'
Mt. McKinley (Denali), Alaska 20,320'
Humphreys Peak, Arizona 12,633'
Magazine Mt., Arkansas 2,753'
Mt. Whitney, California 14,494'
Mt. Elbert, Colorado 14,433'
Mt. Frissell, Connecticut 2,380'
Fort Reno, Washington, DC 429'
Ebright Azimuth, Delaware 448'
Britton Hill, Florida 345'
Brasstown Bald, Georgia 4,784'
Mauna Kea, Hawai'i 13,796'
Borah Peak, Idaho 12,662'
Charles Mound, Illinois, 1,235'
Hoosier Hill Point, Indiana 1,257'
Hawkeye Point, Iowa 1,670'
Mt. Sunflower, Kansas 4,039'
Black Mt., Kentucky 4,139'
Driskill Mt., Louisiana 535'
Mt. Katahdin, Maine 5,267'
Backbone Mt., Maryland 3,360'
Mt. Greylock, Massachusetts 3,487'
Mt. Arvon, Michigan 1,979'
Eagle Mt., Minnesota 2,301'
Woodall Mt., Mississippi 806'
Taum Sauk Mt., Missouri 1,772'
Granite Peak, Montana 12,799'
Panorama Point, Nebraska 5,424'
Boundary Peak, Nevada 13,140'
Mt. Washington, New Hampshire 6,288'
High Point, New Jersey 1,803'
Wheeler Peak, New Mexico 13,161'
Mt. Marcy, New York 5,344'
Mt. Mitchell, North Carolina 6,684'
White Butte, North Dakota 3,506'
Campbell Hill, Ohio 1,549'
Black Mesa, Oklahoma 4,973'
Mt. Hood, Oregon 11,239'
Mt. Davis, Pennsylvania 3,213'
Cerro de Punta, Puerto Rico 4390'
Jerimoth Hill, Rhode Island 812'
Sassafras Mt., South Carolina 3,560'
Harney Peak, South Dakota 7,242'
Clingmans Dome, Tennessee 6,643'
Guadalupe Peak, Texas 8,749'
Kings Peak, Utah 13,528'
Mt. Mansfield, Vermont 4,393'
Mt. Rogers, Virginia 5,729'
Mt Rainier, Washington 14,410'
Spruce Knob, West Virginia 4,861'
Timms Hill, Wisconsin 1,951'
Gannett Peak, Wyoming 13,804'

A good map and comprehensive list of these high points can be found at geology.com. Which ones have you visited?

Labels: mountains, travel

I went to Ecuador to climb mountains.

After a lovely two days of recovery in the thermal springs of Papallacta, Lily and I began our mountain-climbing tour. We summited three peaks in the central Ecuadorian Andes: Pasochoa, Ruminahui, and Iliniza Norte. Today I'd like to share our experiences climbing the first (and shortest) of those, the peak called Pasochoa. Here it is from the rough road we drove in on:



From a Google Maps perspective, here's the physiography of the surrounding area. Pasochoa is the highest peak of the central volcano in this view:



Once we started hiking, we got above the trees and into the paramo ecosystem, a high-elevation grassland biome that exists between treeline and the bare rocks above where only lichens survive. Another view of the peak, which is about 13,700 feet in elevation:



Once we got up a little bit, we could look down to the Valle de los Chillos, a massive valley between Andean peaks, south of Quito:



One of the most spectacular things that happened on this hike is we saw an Andean condor, which flew by between us and this view, quite spectacularly. We weren't able to get the camera out in time to capture it, but with its black and white plumage, it was unmistakeable. Here's a amateurish Photoshop to show what it kind of looked like:



I pointed out the volcanic breccia to Lily and our guide, Diego:



More of the same could be seen in eroded-out minarets on the flanks of the mountain:




Pasochoa is one tall bit along the rim of a much larger caldera, and when we got up to the edge of that caldera, we got a real sense of its sudden drop-off. Clouds/fog curled up and over the lip, obscuring the view, but we could peer down into them and see that the land dropped steeply away for many hundreds of feet.



Lily gives a sense of scale to the edge of the caldera:



After lunch on top, more clouds moved in, and we decided to decamp back to the vehicle. Here's Diego and I descending the trail towards lower elevations.



Being a guy who had just recently recovered from something akin to pneumonia, I felt pretty good about making the summit of a 13,700' peak. Next up: let's see if we can't find something a little bit taller...

Labels: birdies, ecuador, mountains, south america, travel, volcano

Last month, when hiking Iliniza Norte, a 16,997' volcano in Ecuador, we got up near the summit and began scrambling over the rocks there. Conditions were cold and snowy, and I was pleased to see some beautiful ice formations in protected nooks in the rock. These crystals of ice had a gorgeous branching pattern...



To show this branching pattern close up, here's Lily's gloved hand holding two such crystals (fused together). They look like squirrel tails!



The backdrop of oxidized porphyritic andesite (hosting lichens) isn't bad either.

Labels: ecuador, ice, minerals, travel

Here's a pretty cool outcrop I found as we were leaving Cotopaxi National Park in Ecuador (in early January). I've got two small photos taken laterally on different parts of the outcrop (exposed by a stream), and then I follow those with two close-up crops, showing the details. I've posted the full-size versions of the first two photos on Flickr, so you can click through if you want more details. The zoomed-in shots are displayed here at the same size you'll find on Flickr.





What's going on here? It looks like we've got a series of thinner, relatively fine-grained layers below, topped off with a massive, poorly-sorted layer. The lower layers are all ash- and lapilli-sized grains, each stratum pretty well sorted. The upper layer consists of all kinds of different-sized chunks, including some boulders, "floating" in a really fine-grained matrix. Check it out:





I interpret this as a series of volcanic ash-(& lapilli-)falls that were then buried beneath a lahar, a volcanic mudflow. The lahar's slurry-like consistency was capable of transporting really large clasts, and when it slowed down, it set up like nature's concrete.

I think this is pretty spectacular stuff.

Labels: ecuador, igneous, mass wasting, south america, stratigraphy, travel, volcano

Another artifact from my days as a boy scout...



I'm in the back row, third from the right. Sixteen years old.

The mountain in the background is the Tooth of Time.

Labels: mountains, new mexico, travel

You know what feels really good when you're feeling sick? A hot bath.

And so, when it came to pass that over the winter break, I flew down to Ecuador with a recovering case of pneumonia, my friend Lily and I opted to put our mountain-climbing plans on hold, and go sit in some hot water instead.



From Quito, we took a public bus ($2) an hour east to a series of thermal pools at Papallacta ("papa yacht uh"). This is a lovely resort, nestled in a lovely valley:



Inside the resort (>$2), the architecture was fused with the landscaping in some interesting pseudo-natural ways. For instance, this is in the lounge, where the rocky wall rises up, but then stops some distance below where the wooden ceiling begins. The interval is filled with glass, but the illusion is that the building is open to nature.



They've got nice grounds, too. An organic garden is featured, and they have some neat sculptures. This one is clearly inspired by Andy Goldsworthy.



But there was a mystery... The local river, which carved the valley, was cold:



...So where did the hot water come from? We had noticed some steaming pools on the bus ride over the Andes, at higher elevation. Taking a walk on our second day there, we saw this aqueduct coming down the mountain into the valley:



Aha! It must be that they are pulling the hot water out of the actual hot springs up above, then piping it down to Papallacta for people to enjoy.

Papallacta is just south of the Equator:



At the Equator, Papallacta's elevation of ~10,000 feet (~3300 m) is quite pleasant. A tad chilly when it's dark or overcast, but the snow was at a higher elevation still:



Hiking around in between soaks in the lovely hot water, we saw hummingbirds galore, including the bizarre sword-billed hummingbird, which has a beak longer than its body (Google it to see!) We also saw some cool critters, like this beetle:



...And also some cool plants. Lily's really into plants, but even I can appreciate their numerous and varied forms, especially in as biodiverse a place as Ecuador...



Flower-on-a-stem, within a leaf:



After soaking and resting and acclimatizing at Papallacta, I felt a lot better and we trooped back to Quito to meet up with our guide and start climbing mountains... More on that in posts to come.

Labels: art, arthropods, birdies, critters, ecuador, hot springs, plants, south america, travel

The International Year of Planet Earth may have declared a list of "the Earth's ten most spectacular places." At least that's what they're saying at the Discovery Channel's new Discovery Earth site, where they have a rundown of all ten (with photos). (No mention of it at the IYPE site, though: It may be that the Discovery Channel is just highlighting ten of the many, many U.N. World Heritage sites... their language is unclear as to who decided on these particular ten.)

Regardless, the photos will whet your appetite. With my visits in bold, they are:

• The Giant's Causeway, Northern Ireland (posts on NOVA Geoblog)
• Wadi Al-Hitan (Valley of the Whales), Egypt (Eric's been posting on this recently)
• Lake Baikal, Siberia (deep, big)
• Komodo National Park, Indonesia (big monitor lizards; my friend Kenny has been)
• Grand Canyon, Arizona, USA (posts on NOVA Geoblog)
• Ilulissat Icefjord, Denmark (glacial beauty)
• Wulingyuan, China (quartzite pillars and indigenous fauna)
• Surtsey, Iceland (46 years old this year)
• Central Amazon, Brazil
• Great Barrier Reef, Australia

Labels: antrim coast, asia, australia, china, fossils, giants causeway, glaciation, grand canyon, ice, reefs, south america, travel, water resources

When critters interact with their environment, sometimes they leave behind traces of that interaction. If we're lucky, these traces fossilize and can be preserved through time to tell us interesting things about the past. This past summer, when I rafted down the Grand Canyon with my father and two brothers, I saw some cool trace fossils. In chronostratigraphic order (earliest first), here they are:

The Bright Angel Shale can be found atop the Tapeats Sandstone, and below the Muav Limestone along the river in much of the canyon. The Bright Angel is middle Cambrian in age. For my money, it's one of the most spectacular sedimentary layers there, because it's so varied. The colors of the individual strata range from purple to green to brown to tan, and they are in many places chock full of horizontally-oriented feeding traces. Here's some of those wormy shapes along the trail to a waterfall we hiked to... (sorry, don't remember the name or exact location... I think it was day 4 or so of the overall trip... Hmmm, I guess I should have blogged this in early July when I photographed it...)





Nearby, we saw a spectacular trilobite crawling trace (Cruziana?):



Earlier in the trip (day 1, at lunchtime), and higher in the stratigraphic stack (the Permian Coconino Sandstone, which is a sand dune deposit), we saw these reptile (synapsid?) footprints:



This is a trackway left by an ancient reptile as it was walking up and down the dunes, preserved on the slip-face (which defines the feature we recognize from a side-view as "cross bedding"), and now, 260 million years later, I'm viewing those same tracks from underneath, as the older slip-faces of the dune have peeled off, and only the overlying (younger) ones are preserved in this particular alcove. Pretty spectacular stuff. And it offers some nice lunchtime shade, too... Can't complain about that. Here's another shot, with a sense of scale in it:



You can see the individual toes! Wild!

Labels: arizona, cambrian, fossils, grand canyon, permian, primary structures, travel

I've had a trusty pair of Nalgene water bottles for many years. One of the things I do is collect stickers when I travel, and then slap them on the outside of these water bottles. Here, for example, is one side of the two bottles:


Here's the other side:


The full record of stickers is:

Recreation and Parks program at NOVA
Wilderness Medical Associates (the group that trained me in WFA last May)
Northern Arizona University Department of Geography, Planning, and Recreation
Yellowstone National Park
Sport Rock, a climbing gym in Alexandria, Virginia
Mammoth Cave National Park
Rocky Mountain National Park
Gimme! Coffee, Ithaca, New York
Apple computer
Red Cross' "Give Blood" campaign (I cut up this sticker & distributed its bits across the bottles)
Alaska flag (from the ferry through the Inside Passage)
Pickle Barrel sandwich shop, Bozeman, Montana
Vieques, Puerto Rico
"Certified Organic" from a bunch of bananas
The Red Hand of Ulster (from my time in Northern Ireland)
Puri Saron, a resort in Lombok, Indonesia (I didn't actually go to this one; my friend Kenny did.)
British flag
State Farm Insurance (reflective!)
Mauna Kea observatories (Hawai'i)
KZMU public radio in Moab, Utah
Thyangboche Monastery, Nepal (I didn't go to this one, either. Thanks Kenny!)
"MtP" in an oval: Mt. Pleasant, a DC neighborhood I used to live in, just north of my current digs

There's a lot of personal history there, a sort of visual record of the places I've been. Trouble is, apparently the water bottles themselves were poisoning me. At least that's what they started saying last year; specifically that water bottles containing a substance called Bisphenol A (commonly referred to as "BPA") were not to be trusted. Though I haven't read the studies, they are reported to have found a significant correlation between high levels of BPA and heart disease, diabetes, and high levels of some liver enzymes. Plus, people keep nagging me about giving up my old water bottles, and I'm getting tired of inventing excuses for continuing to drink out of them. So yesterday, I officially retired my old sticker-covered bottles, and bought two new (BPA-free) Nalgenes instead:


You'll notice that I switched color schemes and mouth types (the new bottles have a narrow mouth). And you'll also notice that I've put my first sticker in place on the new bottles: from the Tambopaxi Lodge in Cotopaxi National Park in Ecuador, where I stayed for two nights the week before last. (If you're ever in Cotopaxi, you must stay there: It's really excellent.)

Background fabric for all images is a new tablecloth I bought at a craft market in Quito (for $2).

The old bottles will be hung above the mantle of the library hearth at the Bentley Estate, in commemoration of their usefulness and long history.

Labels: art, ecuador, gear, travel

In Terra Veritas, Clastic Detritus, NOLOGIC, Looking for Detachment, The Ethical Palaeontologist, Geoberg.de, Highly Allochthonous, ReBecca's Blog and Hypo-theses have all recently shown us their world travels. Having just added a new country to my list, I'll throw my map up here too:

visited 18 countries.
Create your own visited map of The World

And here's my US map (all 50!):

visited 50 states.
Create your own visited map of The United States

Labels: blogs, travel

Just a quick note to say: I'm back!

I left Quito this morning at 10am, and just got back to my apartment in DC around 8pm. Feels good to be back home. I had a fun trip, and I'll tell you all about it, but probably not 'til the semester gets underway. First classes are at noon tomorrow!

Labels: dc, ecuador, south america, travel

This is from the tour operators in charge of me this week...
-CB

Day 01. Quito - Pasochoa
Pick up in your hotel. we depart from Quito at 09h00 in the direction to Volcano Pasochoa, where your trekking begins. As you walk up hill towards it summit (4200m) you will enjoy the views of the neighbours peaks such as Antisana, Rumiñahui and Cotopaxi. You will head south on a easy going trail along the crater edge of this extinct volcano, Condors and other birds of pray are often seen before you descend in a green valley. We arrive in a Aclimatization Center Tambopaxi is located at 3200 m. a refugee in the middle of Cotopaxi and Ruminahui volcanoes.

Day 02.- Limpiopungo, at the base of the Cotopaxi Volcano
Today you will explore the Paramo of the Cotopaxi National Park. Here you will visit the Pre-Inca ruins of El Salitre while enjoying magnificent views of Cotopaxi Glaciers. Afterwards you will continue to Limpiopungo valley and lake. Return. Dinner and overnight.

Day 03.- Climb. Ruminahui & Limpiopungo Lake
Today is the longest day of your trekking tour. You will walk along a trail, up and down following the flanks of Ruminahui peak observing birds of prey and in the horizon the mighty Chimborazo, and Illinizas. Return to Limpiopungo where we dirve to the Cuello de Luna. Dinner and overnight.

Day 04.- Illiniza Ecological Reserve
Drive to the north following the route Illinizas reserve until arrive to la Llovisma, another acclimatization center. Overnight.

Day 05.- Climb Illiniza North - return to Quito
Today you can either drive to the parking place of the Illinizas and walk uphill to the settlement of Illinizas and summit the north peak which is rather easy and recommended as training for those who will attempt Cotopaxi. Somewhere in highlands, your vehicle will be waiting to transfer you back to Quito.
_____________________________________________________________

Here's the view of Illiniza Sur from Illiniza Norte:

Oh, yeah....

Labels: ecuador, mountains, south america, travel

Kilauea Iki is the name given to a lava lake that formed in Hawai'i Volcanoes National Park in 1959. It erupted from Pu'u Pua'i, the mound you see in the middle distance of this photograph:

The lava pooled in a pre-existing crater below to a maximum depth of about 400 feet, and has been solidifying ever since. Researchers have drilled though the cooling crust of Kilauea Iki to determine how fast the lava cools. By 1981, a good 200 feet of solid rock had formed at the top of the lava lake.

Here's a view into Kilauea Iki from a different angle, with me rotated about 90 degrees along the crater rim relative to the first photograph:



As you look down there, you'll see that Kilauea Iki does not display a nice smooth surface. Instead, it's fractured, and those fractures have a familiar shape: polygonal and relatively regularly-spaced. They look kinda like the tops of ginormous columns...


When you get down inside, it's pretty flat. You really get the feeling you're walking on a giant layer of soup scum:


...But it's not completely flat. There are cracks and crevices, buckles and upwarps:


Dynamics playing out in this mega-scum layer atop a roiling lava lake are thought to be human-scale analogues of the motion and dynamics of tectonic plates. Here, for instance, two "plates" of cooled lava have drifted towards one another. This meso-scale "convergent boundary" has raised up a mountain range fit for Lilliputians:


Elsewhere, "plates" of lava scum have drifted apart, opening up a "rift" between them. Here, I lie down to bridge the rift:


These cracks are utilized by plants because they offer a shaded nook where moisture isn't immediately evaporated by the sun:


Lastly, I thought I'd point out some neat mass wasting and structural geology I saw there. Here's a shot looking roughly westward across Kilauea Iki, towards the cinder cone of Pu'u Pua'i:

I know it's kind of washed out, but in this photo, you can see a big solidified lava flow that came over the lip of the crater, and then solidified, and then partially collapsed downward.

This sequence resulted in the big talus pile you can see at center-right, but there are remnants of the original sheet (or "tongue") of basalt there.





















Zooming in and cranking up the contrast, let's label a few things:
Up at the top, we can see some fault scarps that have developed as the massive tongue of basalt pulled downward.

A major scarp marks the edge of the cliff, and then below it you see a big slab of basalt with an edge that's just barely in the sunshine, and a bunch of more fragmented pieces below that (marked "breakdown"). Another big slab is seen alongside the breakdown.

What really caught my eye, though, was the en echelon array of pull-apart fractures seen in between the arrows. Here, the stress of the main tongue of basalt sliding downhill sheared this slab of rock, causing it to develop fractures at a ~40 degree angle to the shearing direction. These pull-aparts therefore represent a big surface-condition analogue for tension gashes that can form in subterranean rocks experiencing shear stress.

Labels: analogies, basalt, hawaii, landslide, mass wasting, plate tectonics, structure, travel

What's the tallest mountain on Earth? Most would say Everest, since it's the highest point above sea level. I mentioned this issue as part of my lead-in to my Mauna Kea post, since some folks might claim Mauna Kea as the tallest, since it rises the most above its base on the oceanic crust of the Pacific Plate. But there's a third contender: Mount Chimborazo, in Ecuador.

The planet Earth is not a perfect sphere; it bulges a bit at the equator (about 13 miles) compared to the poles. The result is that if you look at two mountains of exactly the same elevation, one located at the pole and one at the equator, the equatorial one will be 13 miles further away from the center of the Earth than the polar one. That makes the peak of the tallest equatorial mountain (Chimborazo is at ~1.5 degrees south) the point on Earth that is furthest away from the center of the planet. It is 1.3 miles (2.1 km) further away from the center of the Earth than the summit of Everest is. NPR covered this surprising statistic in an entertaining piece in 2007. However, as the commenter on this post-NPR post notes, it's not just the silicate earth that bulges at the equator, it's the atmosphere, too. So it's not like the air is thinner at Chimborazo than Everest. You may be closer to the Moon atop Chimborazo, but you're not closer to "space" due to all that extra thick atmosphere above your head.

Here's a Google Maps "terrain view" map of Chimborazo (high relief peak east of El Arenal):


I had hoped to "auto-post" this while I'm traveling in Ecuador, for about the same time I would be looking at Chimborazo with my own eyes. However, I got sick over the holidays, and the persistent illness forced me to change my travel plans. I'll still be going to Ecuador -- but only for one week instead of the planned two. And I still hope to catch a glimpse of Mount Chimborazo. Hopefully when I get back to DC, I'll be able to share some photos of this superlative mountain. For now, the map will have to do.

Labels: ecuador, maps, mountains, south america, travel, volcano

It's the 50th anniversary of Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, a reminder that things continue to fall apart. Like... rocks. ...and steel. Today, I'd like to share a "compare & contrast" of two kinds of fractures I saw on my Thanksgiving trip to Hawai'i. One is caused by a decrease in volume; the other is caused by an increase in volume.


Type 1: Columnar jointing (shrinkage fractures)









Columnar jointing results from the decrease in volume as hot lava crystallizes into cool rock. The overall shrinkage in the rock's volume is accomodated by fractures that (all else being equal) are oriented at 120-degree angles on the surface of the flow, and then propagate downward into the flow, perpendicular to the cooling front (isotherm of the critical fracturing temperature, which here is subparallel to the surface of the lava flow). Similar fractures form in drying mud, where the volume loss is due not to cooling but to the evaporation of water. Generally, these mud contraction fractures (a) don't go as deep, and (b) experience more volume loss, resulting in wider fractures. These are in the Mauna Lani resort area, on the western shore of the big island of Hawai'i.
_________________________________________________________________


Type 2: Rust blisters (expansion fractures)








Here, we see fractures forming not due to a loss of volume, but the opposite: an increase in volume! Here the metal (steel, presumably?) in the pole is oxidizing, and in completing that reaction, rust is forming. The layer of paint probably got nicked, water (probably saltwater?) got under it, and then the paint kept the water down there, facilitating the rusting reaction. As the rust formed, it swelled relative to the volume of the original metal. It expanded in the direction that offered the least resisting stress (out away from the surface of the pole). As the rust bumps grow, they impart a new stress on the metal/rust, and this causes fractures to form subparallel to the pole's surface. These are near Ka Lae ("South Point"), near the start of the hike to Green Sands Beach.

Labels: basalt, hawaii, structure, travel, weathering

I've got a few more stories to tell from Hawai'i... Today I'd like to share the tale of a backpacking trip that my friend Lily and I took along the northern coast of the big island. From the road's end at the Pololu Overlook, we descended into the Pololu Valley, across its excellent beach, then up the adjacent ridge to the east, down into the next valley, up another ridge (and further east), and then down into the third valley, where we camped.

The route is shown on this Google "My Maps" map:


Here's a look eastward into that final valley:


Descending into the final valley:


The view from our campsite:


The substrate of our campsite: a poorly-lithified conglomerate:


The thing that stands out in my mind most about this excursion was a landslide scar that had cut off the trail at one point. This landslide occured in the middle valley (between Pololu and our campsite valley). The landslide scar is nice and visible in the lower-left of this Google Maps image:


It happened in 2006, triggered by the big earthquake that struck the big island that year. It was one of several landslides that were set off by that shaking. (Wikipedia has a nice "live-action" photo of another cliff collapsing up the coast at Waipio.)

Here's the landslide scar viewed from the east, looking west (on our hike back towards Pololu):


Another shot from the same perspective shows the run-out of debris below the source:


The tricky thing about this was that we had to get past this landslide, since it wiped out the trail. On our way in, we somewhat stupidly climbed down the face of the landslide itself, gingerly picking our way down the steep slope, so we didn't trigger any further mass wasting. Here, for instance, is a poorly-put-together composite photo showing Lily descending into the valley:


(On the way out, we found some ropes in the vegetation next to the slide, and hauled ourselves up those rather than getting on the slide surface again.) But on the way in, when we got to the bottom, we weren't sure where the trail was, and plunged through some dense bamboo forest. I felt like I was in LOST, where the characters are perpetually fighting their way through similar vegetation:


Eventually we found the trail, and continued along. Because of the landslide blocking access, this part of the trail hasn't been used as much for the past two years. Lots of pandanus leaves had been shed off and blanketed some parts of the trail. Hiking across these dried pandanus leaves was a noisy affair:


On the eastern side of the ridge between "Landslide Valley" and "Campsite Valley," we saw this two-inch-wide crack opening up along the trail, parallel to the ridge/valley trend. The edge of the ridge was about twenty feet away towards the east (direction my boot toe is pointing). Certainly something like this portends a future episode of mass wasting...

Labels: hawaii, landslide, mass wasting, sediment, travel

I'm sorry, did somebody say there was a holiday this week?

I've been very preoccupied with the spring semester; putting my syllabi together, taking care of committee work before I leave for Ecuador next week. And they tell me the Christmas is coming up, too... It's been busy!

Does anyone have any travel advice for Ecuador? I've had so little time to plan for this trip that I really haven't made any concrete plans other than buying an airplane ticket into Quito. Because I waited so long to start planning, it looks like I missed out on the opportunity to check out the Galapagos on this trip. Very well: I'll be back!

So it looks like I'll be spending most of my time in the Andean highlands, which ain't so bad. My friend Bridget recommended the South American Explorers Club as being a great organization to join for a network of fellow travelers in the country. They even have clubhouses in Quito, Buenos Aires, Cusco, and Lima...

I'd like to spend my time hiking and geologizing out in the mountainous countryside, but have a comfy roost for the evenings. Any and all advice would be welcome. Either post in the comments section below, or shoot me an e-mail at:

Labels: ecuador, south america, travel

Holy lava, geoblogosphere!

On my recent trip to Hawai'i, I saw a variety of different kinds of holes in the basaltic "lava rock" that makes up the majority of the island. The largest examples were lava tubes, like the Thurston Lava Tube near Kilauea Iki in Hawai'i Volcanoes National Park:

This is a conduit through which molten lava once flowed. Once the source of that lava ceased producing, though, the lava drained out and the tube was left empty, like a cave. (Caves, of course, are holes produced through an entirely different process.) The ceiling of this lava tube is about twenty feet high.

Not too far distant, there's a nice area where you can see tree molds:


These are holes left in the rock as the lava flowed around a tree. The heat of the molten rock burst the tree's cells, releasing water and quenching the lava in a cylindrical tube around the tree. The dewatered tree then burned up, leaving a hollow mold showing the shape of its (former) trunk:


The holes are kinda deep:


Inside the tree mold, you can see the texture of the (in this case, pahoehoe) lava that flowed around the tree trunk:


Looking up the invisible tree trunk, and out the hole towards Lily:


Here's a bigger hole, the Halema'uma'u Crater within Kilauea Caldera:

It's venting a lot of steam, hydrogen sulfide, and other gases.

Google Map for reference on how this hole relates to the even bigger hole that is the caldera:


The photo of Halema'uma'u above was taken from the Hawai'i Volcano Observatory adjacent to the Jagger Museum in the park. Stepping back a bit from the window, you can see that I'm not the only one taking this particular photo... This is the same spot where the Halema'uma'u Crater webcam is filmed. That's what all these cameras are doing in the foreground:


Janet Babb took some time out of her day to show us around the place (thanks, Janet!), and I made sure to sign into the guest book. There, I was pleased to see past visitors, including (I think) Ron Schott's crew from Fort Hays State University Lake Superior State University, the William and Mary crew, and most recently, the NOVA crew headed by my colleagues Ken Rasmussen and Nancy Chamberlain:


Janet let me hold a chunk of recently erupted basalt. This one erupted in early October, I think she said. It was about a month old when I held it -- that's my record for a really recent rock:

As noted in a previous post, this vesicular texture displayed by this sample is one more example of (smaller) holes in lava.

Labels: basalt, hawaii, travel, volcano

Christie asks: What are your top ten geological resolutions for the new year?


For me, the list would include:

1. visiting the Galapagos Islands
2. visiting the high Andes (Cotopaxi, Chimborazo), Ecuador
3. finding a cool outcrop of graded beds in the Martinsburg Formation (late Ordovician turbidites in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia) that Rick Diecchio told me about last week
4. "walking on the Moho" in Gros Morne National Park, Newfoundland (late summer)
5. seeing Snowball rocks and Ediacarans on the Avalon Peninsula, Newfoundland (late summer)
6. visiting Egg Mountain paleontological site, Montana
7. joining my colleague Ken Rasmussen's field trip to the Culpeper Basin, a Triassic rift valley in northern Virginia
8. some cool trip next winter break (2009-10): perhaps Patagonia? Or Antarctica?

I've also got some big teaching resolutions:

1. Running a successful and robust Structural Geology course for George Mason University (spring semester).
2. Running a successful and innovation Environmental Geology course for NOVA (spring semester).
3. Running a successful and safe Regional Field Geology of the Northern Rocky Mountains course for NOVA (summer semester).
4. Preparing and running a successful and groundbreaking Honors Historical Geology course linked with English Literature 242 at NOVA, where the English professor and I will bridge the two subjects with readings of Lyell, Darwin, "A Pair of Blue Eyes," and others (fall semester).

On other topics:

1. Finish my M.S.S.E. degree (July)
2. Buy a house
3. Put together a series of geology 'vodcasts' on local geology
4. Write a few freelance articles
5. Publish one cartoon per month in EARTH
6. Prepping (cutting and polishing) a backlog of rock samples from all over the place
7. Successfully moving the geology department into our new building

Labels: canada, ecuador, geology, msse, newfoundland, nova, south america, teaching, travel, valley and ridge, virginia

Tuesday was final exam day for me. While the students were bubbling in Scantron forms and writing essays, I did a bit of reading (reviewing a book about oil discoveries in Prudhoe Bay for EARTH) and I did a bit of thinking.

I was thinking about that meme we had going around over the weekend and the earlier part of this week -- the list of "100 things every geologist should try and do in their lifetime." Several folks pointed out the Americocentrism of the list, and it occurred to me to try and make a better list. I pulled out my notebook and started jotting down things I thought were worth seeing, places I thought were worth seeing, or activities I thought were worth experiencing to be a fully well-rounded geologist. Geoblogospherians, please take a look at this list and let me know what to add and what's spurious. Maybe we can submit the results as a newer, more-internationalized master list.

A scan of my jottings appear immediately below, and the formal list below that:

Specific places

1. Visit the Chalk (England, France, Ireland...)
2. Visit Iceland
3. Visit Mt. Fuji, Japan
4. Visit Great Barrier Reef, Australia
5. Visit the Himalayas (Kashmir?)
6. the Tibetan Plateau
7. Visit the Gobi Desert
8. Visit the Sahara Desert
9. Visit the Sonoran Desert (for the saguaros)
10. Visit the Atacama Desert
11. Visit the Rub' al Khali (Empty Quarter)
12. Visit Beijing or Shanghai (for the perspective on what really dirty air looks like)
13. Visit the big island of Hawai'i
14. Visit Yellowstone
15. Visit the Galapagos Islands
16. Visit Madagascar (for the lemurs)
17. Visit Patagonia
18. Visit the Andes
19. Visit the Alps
20. Visit the Canadian Rockies
21. Visit Wrangell-St. Elias National Park, Alaska (and/or neighboring Kluane National Park in the Yukon Territory)
22. Visit Denali, Alaska
23. Visit the Aleutian Islands
24. Visit Chimborazo, Ecuador (furthest point from the center of the Earth, due to the equatorial bulge)
25. Visit Antarctica
26. Visit the Siberian Traps
27. Visit the Deccan Traps
28. Visit the Columbia River flood basalt province
29. Visit Sumatra/Krakatau/Java, Indonesia
30. Visit the South Island of New Zealand
31. Visit the Appalachians
32. Visit the Dead Sea
33. Visit the Giant's Causeway, County Antrim, Northern Ireland.
34. Visit the Great Rift Valley of East Africa
35. Visit the Nile River
36. Visit the Mississippi River
37. Visit the Amazon River
38. Visit the Grand Canyon
39. Visit the Owens Valley, California (or anywhere in the Basin & Range, but the Owens Valley is pretty darned special, and geologically diverse)
40. Visit Gros Morne National Park, Newfoundland, Canada (walk on the "Moho")
41. Visit Siccar Point, Scotland (for the unconformity)
42. Visit Gibraltar, "UK"
43. Visit Vesuvius, Pompei, and the Pompei-to-be, Naples
44. Visit Uluru (Ayers Rock), Australia
45. Visit the Moon

Geological features

1. A tectonic triple junction (Mendocino, CA is an example, or northern Burma, or Panama)
2. Tower karst (Guilin, China, or southwestern Thailand are examples)
3. A regional flood
4. A flash flood
5. Ediacaran fauna fossils in situ (possibilities include the type locality of the Ediacaran Hills in Australia, or Charnwood Forest in England, the White Sea region in Russia, or maybe the Avalon Peninsula in Newfoundland)
6. Vertebrate fossils in situ
7. Visiting a laggerstatten site (Burgess Shale, Chenjiang, Sirius Passet, Solnhofen?)
8. An alpine glacier
9. A continental glacier (ice cap or ice sheet)
10. A kimberlite pipe (preferably with diamonds, and good luck with that)
11. A coral atoll (take your pick)
12. A meteor impact crater (not a buried one, either)
13. A big river delta (Mississippi, Ganges, Nile, or any of the dozens of others)
14. Barrier islands (Padre Island, Texas, and the Outer Banks of North Carolina come to mind, but I'm sure there are others on other continents)
15. A craton (Canadian shield, Kaapvaal, North China, etc. etc. etc.)
16. A big estuary (Cook Inlet, Chesapeake Bay, Bay of Fundy: all North American examples. Give me some others)
17. See some karst.
18. Kayak (or other boat) through a fjord.
19. See a dropstone.
20. See an ophiolite.
21. Visit a major stike-slip fault (San Andreas in USA/Mexico, or North Anatolian in Turkey, or Tan Lo (sp?) in China)
22. Visit a nappe or thrust sheet (Glarus Thrust in the Alps, Chief Mountain/Glacier NP in Montana, Blue Ridge in Virginia/North Carolina)
23. Visit a really big cave (Mammoth, Lechugilla, or some other that I don't know about on another continent)

Activities and experiences

1. A world-class natural history museum (London Museum of Natural History, American Museum of Natural History, and the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History all come to mind.)
2. Meeting of a classic scientific society (Royal Society, Explorers Club, Cosmos Club...)
3. Do some original research.
4. Present your research at a meeting of other scientists.
5. Publish your research in a peer-reviewed scientific journal.
6. Visit an original copy of "map that changed the world" (William Smith's geologic map of England, Wales, and part of Scotland)
7. Experience a big earthquake (greater than 5.0 sounds like as good a cut-off as any)
8. Experience a volcano erupting something other than gases (lava, pyroclastics)
9. Go ice fishing (or just out onto a frozen lake/pond/sea/ocean and ponder the improbable nature of ice and how it freezes from the top down, preserving the living things underneath, like fish. Without this odd property, it would be tough to maintain life in our high-latitude/elevation lakes/etc. through the winter months.)
10. Compare and contrast El Nino and La Nina.
11. Go on an oceanographic research cruise for more than two weeks at sea.
12. Experience a hurricane/typhoon/cyclone (preferably with surviving it as a caveat)

I welcome your additions and comments!

Labels: blogs, geologists, geology, travel

There's more than rocks in Hawai'i. Another thing that might catch the naturalist's eye is the diverse suite of interesting animals and plants. Today, I'd like to share some images of neat lifeforms I encountered on my Thanksgiving trip to the big island. I'll start with sea turtles, then move on to jellyfish, crayfish, endemic freshwater fish, chameleons, wooden tiki carvings (not technically alive), and plants.

Let's start with the turtles. These are green sea turtles, and they're pretty common in Hawai'i. They have certain beaches they frequent, where they haul themselves up and out onto the beach to rest. Here's one at Pu'uhonua o Honaunau National Historical Park:


Here's one feeding on algae at Punaluu Harbor:




Video of the same foraging turtle:


A short distance further along the shore, a snoozer:




But there's more in the sea than turtles... On a hike to the Polulo Valley, we found half a dozen small "Portuguese Man O' War" jellyfish on the beach:




A few valleys down, we spied these native crayfish and freshwater fish in a stream:


One of the real charmers is an invasive species, the Jackson's chameleon, native to Africa:




Look at those hands! Three "thumbs" and two "fingers."


Males have three prominent horns on their heads:


Video:




Baby Jackson's:


Do these count as "critters"? Not sure where else to put them... Tikis outside the chief's house at Pu'uhonua o Honaunau National Historical Park:


And lastly, a couple of botanical images:

Labels: anthropology, critters, hawaii, plants, travel

It has been said that the best geologist is the one who's seen the most rocks. A while ago, a list was composed of what geologists should try and see in their lifetimes. Geotripper started a meme on that theme, and has been followed thus far by Saxifraga, SciGuy315, Hypocentre, ReBecca, and Kim.

I hereby join the herd... The idea is to bold the ones you have done (and add comments and details in parentheses).

1. See an erupting volcano (Kilauea, the week before last)
2. See a glacier (I've seen many, but my favorites are in Alaska)
3. See an active geyser such as those in Yellowstone, New Zealand or the type locality of Iceland (Yellowstone, check. Iceland, check.)
4. Visit the Cretaceous/Tertiary (KT) Boundary. Possible locations include Gubbio, Italy, Stevns Klint, Denmark, the Red Deer River Valley near Drumheller, Alberta. (This past summer, in eastern Montana's Hell Creek Formation)
5. Observe (from a safe distance) a river whose discharge is above bankful stage (Summer 1995, Brandywine Recreation Area, West Virginia: after a downpour there, the streams that wind through the campground filled up and overflowed. Shockingly quickly.)
6. Explore a limestone cave. (The caves around Franklin, West Virginia, for instance)
7. Tour an open pit mine, such as those in Butte, Montana, Bingham Canyon, Utah, Summitville, Colorado, Globe or Morenci, Arizona, or Chuquicamata, Chile. (I've looked into the Berkeley Pit in Butte, but I couldn't really say that I've "toured" it...)
8. Explore a subsurface mine.
9. See an ophiolite, such as the ophiolite complex in Oman or the Troodos complex on the Island Cyprus (sort of -- I've seen ophiolitic blocks in the Virginia and Maryland Piedmont, but never a full, unmetamorphosed ophiolite complex. I hope to change that this summer in Nova Scotia & Newfoundland...)
10. An anorthosite complex, such as those in Labrador, the Adirondacks, and Niger
11. A slot canyon. (The Narrows, in Zion National Park, Utah)
12. Varves, whether you see the type section in Sweden or examples elsewhere. (Konnarock formation rythymites, interpreted as possible varves, in southwest Virginia.)
13. An exfoliation dome, such as those in the Sierra Nevada (the Sierra Nevada, atop Half Dome or surrounding Lake Tenaya)
14. A layered igneous intrusion, such as the Stillwater complex in Montana or the Skaergaard Complex in Eastern Greenland. (tragically, I have not... I really want to see the Stillwater)
15. Coastlines along the leading and trailing edge of a tectonic plate (the east coast of North America, the west coast of North America)
16. A gingko tree, which is the lone survivor of an ancient group of softwoods that covered much of the Northern Hemisphere in the Mesozoic. (They're all over my neighborhood of Adams-Morgan in DC, where their pungent "fruits" are known as "barf beads.")
17. Living and fossilized stromatolites (I define stromatolite loosely, as sedimentary structures facilitated by biofilms, and I've seen those many places, most recently in Lake Waiau, Hawai'i) (fossils of them? Galore! Virginia, Montana, elsewhere...)
18. A field of glacial erratics (New England)
19. A caldera (Kilauea, Long Valley, Yellowstone)
20. A sand dune more than 200 feet high (Elim Dune, Namibia)
21. A fjord (many, but favorites include Northwestern Fjord in Kenai Fjords National Park, Alaska, and the Lynn Canal, between Haines and Skagway, Alaska)
22. A recently formed fault scarp (1959 Hebgen Lake scarp, Montana)
23. A megabreccia (Max Meadows Tectonic Breccia, near Pepper, Virginia)
24. An actively accreting river delta (Mississippi Delta, kayaking with alligators)
25. A natural bridge (I drove over one this fall without seeing it: Natural Bridge, Virginia)
26. A large sinkhole (Not sure how to define "large," but I've been in and out of multiple sinkholes in the Virginia/West Virginia karstic areas)
27. A glacial outwash plain (downstream of Exit Glacier, near Seward, Alaska)
28. A sea stack (Oregon)
29. A house-sized glacial erratic (How about one the size of a city block? Kenai Fjords, Alaska)
30. An underground lake or river (Sinks of Gandy, West Virginia)
31. The continental divide (A gazillion times out west, also the Appalachian's Atlantic/Gulf divide, and the triple divide in Glacier National Park, Montana)
32. Fluorescent and phosphorescent minerals (Smithsonian)
33. Petrified trees (Rock Creek Park and Prince William Forest Park host some decent ones; I've also visited Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona, and seen the petrified trees in Yellowstone)
34. Lava tubes (in Utah [?] in college, and a few weeks back: Thurston Lava Tube in Hawai'i.)
35. The Grand Canyon. All the way down. And back. (Twice now, I've done the hike from South Rim to river and back in a day. Plus this summer I spent more than a week rafting the river.)
36. Meteor Crater, Arizona, also known as the Barringer Crater, to see an impact crater on a scale that is comprehensible (On the W&M regional field geology course in 1995 and again in 1996)
37. The Great Barrier Reef, northeastern Australia, to see the largest coral reef in the world. (in 1992, SCUBA diving and snorkeling, with my dad and little brother.)
38. The Bay of Fundy, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, Canada, to see the highest tides in the world (up to 16m) (I've seen it from New Brunswick, but I think my timing was off. I've been very impressed with tidal variations in Turnagain Arm, Alaska.)
39. The Waterpocket Fold, Utah, to see well exposed folds on a massive scale. (W&M regional field geology)
40. The Banded Iron Formation, Michigan, to better appreciate the air you breathe. (Got a nice sample of this in my lab as a result. Visited in 2006 on my three-month road trip.)
41. The Snows of Kilimanjaro, Tanzania. (Stayed at a coffee plantation, Kifufu, outside of Moshi, on the slopes of Kili with a great view of Mt. Meru; 2002.)
42. Lake Baikal, Siberia, to see the deepest lake in the world (1,620 m) with 20 percent of the Earth's fresh water.
43. Ayers Rock (known now by the Aboriginal name of Uluru), Australia. This inselberg of nearly vertical Precambrian strata is about 2.5 kilometers long and more than 350 meters high (This was our first stop on the Australia trip in 1992. Dad and I summited; my brother and I got chased by an emu while hiking around it.)
44. Devil's Tower, northeastern Wyoming, to see a classic example of columnar jointing (For the first time in 2006, and again this past summer.)
45. The Alps.
46. Telescope Peak, in Death Valley National Park. From this spectacular summit you can look down onto the floor of Death Valley - 11,330 feet below. (Does the opposite viewpoint count? I've looked up at Telescope Peak from Badwater...)
47. The Li River, China, to see the fantastic tower karst that appears in much Chinese art.
48. The Dalmation Coast of Croatia, to see the original Karst.
49. The Gorge of Bhagirathi, one of the sacred headwaters of the Ganges, in the Indian Himalayas, where the river flows from an ice tunnel beneath the Gangatori Glacier into a deep gorge.
50. The Goosenecks of the San Juan River, Utah, an impressive series of entrenched meanders. (W&M regional field geology)
51. Shiprock, New Mexico, to see a large volcanic neck (W&M regional field geology)
52. Land's End, Cornwall, Great Britain, for fractured granites that have feldspar crystals bigger than your fist. (...but I have seen feldspar megacrysts that size in California's Cathedral Peak Granodiorite)
53. Tierra del Fuego, Chile and Argentina, to see the Straights of Magellan and the southernmost tip of South America.
54. Mount St. Helens, Washington, to see the results of recent explosive volcanism. (rode my bicycle from San Francisco to Seattle in the summer of 1997, and stopped in at the volcano then)
55. The Giant's Causeway and the Antrim Plateau, Northern Ireland, to see polygonally fractured basaltic flows. (some of my first posts on this blog were images from the Giant's Causeway and surrounding areas)
56. The Great Rift Valley in Africa. (2002's 6-week trip to East Africa had me in and out of the rift many times.)
57. The Matterhorn, along the Swiss/Italian border
58. The Carolina Bays, along the Carolinian and Georgian coastal plain (As a kid, we would got down to the Outer Banks every summer)
59. The Mima Mounds near Olympia, Washington (never even heard of these...)
60. Siccar Point, Berwickshire, Scotland, where James Hutton observed the classic unconformity 61. The moving rocks of Racetrack Playa in Death Valley
62. Yosemite Valley
63. Landscape Arch (or Delicate Arch) in Utah (most recently this past summer)
64. The Burgess Shale in British Columbia
65. The Channeled Scablands of central Washington
66. Bryce Canyon (W&M regional field geology)
67. Grand Prismatic Spring at Yellowstone (a recent photo was posted here)
68. Monument Valley (this summer, for the third time)
69. The San Andreas fault (I've crossed it many times, especially when I lived in the San Bernardino Mountains of southern California)
70. The dinosaur footprints in La Rioja, Spain
71. The volcanic landscapes of the Canary Islands
72. The Pyrennees Mountains
73. The Lime Caves at Karamea on the West Coast of New Zealand
74. Denali (2006)
75. A catastrophic mass wasting event (Madison River landslide, Montana, last year and this year, and Gros Ventre, Wyoming, this year)
76. The giant crossbeds visible at Zion National Park (this year)
77. The black sand beaches in Hawaii (or the green sand-olivine beaches) (two weeks ago)
78. Barton Springs in Texas
79. Hells Canyon in Idaho
80. The Black Canyon of the Gunnison in Colorado (this summer)
81. The Tunguska Impact site in Siberia
82. Feel an earthquake with a magnitude greater than 5.0. (highest I've gone is 3.5, in Alaska)
83. Find dinosaur footprints in situ ("Find"? Does Dinosaur Ridge count?)
84. Find a trilobite (or a dinosaur bone or any other fossil) (My first trilobites were dug out of the Wheeler Shale, Utah on the W&M regional field geology course, and I found lots of dinosaur bone this summer in the Hell Creek Formation, Montana)
85. Find gold, however small the flake
86. Find a meteorite fragment
87. Experience a volcanic ashfall
88. Experience a sandstorm
89. See a tsunami
90. Witness a total solar eclipse
91. Witness a tornado firsthand.
92. Witness a meteor storm (right after the first Harry Potter movie opened in 2001)
93. View Saturn and its moons through a respectable telescope. (Bradford Woods, Indiana, 1996)
94. See the Aurora borealis, otherwise known as the northern lights. (Homer, Alaska)
95. View a great naked-eye comet (Hale-Bopp, Halley)
96. See a lunar eclipse
97. View a distant galaxy through a large telescope (at the recent VCCS Science Peer Conference, we looked at the Andromeda Galaxy... is that "distant" enough? Guess it's all relative)
98. Experience a hurricane (two: one in the Philippines, one in DC)
99. See noctilucent clouds
100. See the green flash

That's a total of 67/100 that I have done; 33 I haven't done. I turned 34 years of age on Thursday of this past week; I guess 2/3 of the list is pretty good for 16 years of travelling and checking out geology. What's your score?

Labels: blogs, geologists, geology, travel

What's the tallest mountain on Earth?

Everest, right? Well, yeah: if you're measuring from sea level. If you're measuring from the top of the crust the mountain rises from though, it's Mauna Kea, Hawai'i. It's about ~13,800 feet above sea level, but it rises ~33,500 feet from the oceanic crust to the peak (that's compared to Everest's mere ~29,000 feet from base to peak. So... you could say that Mauna Kea is the tallest mountain on our planet... (you could!)

On Thanksgiving day, my friend Lily and I took a drive up to the top of Mauna Kea, and did a little hike up there at high elevation. Today, I'd like to share some photographs of that excursion. We saw some pretty cool geology.

On the drive up the mountain, we saw an animal which was apropos, considering the day:

Gobble, gobble, gobble. Watch out turkeys, we'll be back after we work up an appetite...

Here's Lily's jeep in the "saddle" between Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa, looking north (with Mauna Kea in the background and basaltic lava flows from Mauna Loa in the foreground):


Some cider cones (the Hawai'ian word for cinder cone is pu'u) in the saddle:


Turning the other way (looking south), you can see the bulky form of "the long mountain," Mauna Loa. What a classic shield volcano shape! I love the fact that it's so dang wide it makes a lousy photograph. You just can't capture its spread-out bulk in a photo; it's too massive:


This was the spot where I pretended to have my toes overrun by a pahoehoe flow:


As we drove up the road to the top of the mountain, I was amazed at the raw volcanic landscape, decorated with cinder cones like this one:


At one point, we passed a neat little angular unconformity on the roadside. Here it is, with a nickel (white dot left of center) for scale:


Here's a closer-shot of this small angular unconformity. Earlier layers of ash and lapilli were deposited at a steep angle, and then eroded (perhaps by glaciation? pure speculation there) before more ash and lapilli were deposited atop it, at a lower angle. There's not likely to be much time missing here, and so perhaps it's better to think of this as the top of a cross-bed, an advancing front of pyroclastic deposition moving down the mountainside, overrun by later eruptions, which may have scoured off the upper few inches (??? pure speculation) or so before deposition.

Really, the truncated tops of cross-beds are mini-angular-unconformities, when you think about it; just not with the same amount of time missing at a "real" angular unconformity (with millions of years missing) due to mountain building like the one at Siccar Point. (Video of cross-beds forming)

Here's something else which the clueless geologist might mistake for a sign of mountain building:
No, those aren't originally-horizontal strata that have later been folded. They're layers (again of ash and lapilli) deposited on the originally-rough topography of the mountainside, covering small ridges and filling small valleys. Where a given layer is exposed at higher elevation, I interpret to be a paleo-topographic high; where that same stratum is exposed at lower elevation, that's a paleo-topographic low. The roadcut reveals these layers have undulating shapes, but this is unlikely to be folding that results from tectonic compression: instead, I think it's showing us the lay of the ancient land surface.

Looking south, we could see past Mauna Loa to the actively erupting steam vent coming out of Halemaumau Crater at Kilauea Caldera (source of the vog!):


Near the summit of Mauna Kea, there are a bunch of astronomical observatories:






On the summit is where you find those examples I mentioned the other day of hawaiite, a rock of basaltic composition that is very dense (ostensibly due to erupting beneath the extra pressures of a Pleistocene ice cap):


Here's me on the summit:


View to the north from the summit: More cinder cones...


Here's a YouTube video of me pointing stuff out from the summit (Kilauea, Hualalai, Mauna Loa, observatories, hikers, etc.). Unfortunately the wind makes it all but unintelligable, but I filmed it, doggone it, so I'm going to post it:



I found a beautiful example of a volcanic bomb up there:


After the visit to the summit, we went for a hike to a small supposedly-glacially-gouged-out lake below the summit (Lake Waiau):


Here's a Google Map, showing the lake's location:


I was surprised to see a thick biofilm on the bottom of the lake:


Encrusting the pebbles and cobbles there, it reminded me of Nora Noffke's modern and Archean biofilm photos in the recent GSA Today, as well as my "Life in Extreme Environments" class this past summer at Montana State University.


We saw some nice examples of structural geology on this hike. Previously, I've mentioned plumose structure, a branching pattern on the topography of fracture surfaces in fine-grained rocks. We saw some of that on blocks of basalt atop Mauna Kea, as in this example (again a repeat photo, but the other day I showed it to you for the vesicle; today I'm showing it to you for the plumose structure.)


A similar feature are arrest lines, which again are minute variations in the surface of a fracture. Like plumose structure, which branches from a source point (where the fracture initiated) and branches out in the direction of propagation, arrest lines tell us about the development of a joint. Unlike plumose structure, though, they are not parallel to the propagating fracture front. Instead, they form perpendicular to it, and record how the fracture propagates in small "steps." Each of these arrest lines is interpreted as being a spot where the fracture grew a little bit, then stopped ("arrested") and then grew some more. In this case, the fracture face we're looking at started at the bottom of the picture and grew towards the top of the photo. You can even see some less-discernible plumose structure backing this up:

Similar arrest lines can be seen in basalt images here and here...

We also saw some pretty spectacular xenoliths. Here's one of gabbro in basalt:


Here's one of peridotite in basalt:


And a few more:



My boots, with another volcanic bomb:


Driving back down the mountain afterwards, we got this nice view of the cinder cones (pu'us!) in the eastern part of the "saddle" between Maunas Kea and Loa:


This Mauna Kea excursion was one of my favorite things that I did on my all-too-brief trip to Hawaii. It was great to get up in the high country, where the air is thin (and vog free!) and the skies are deep blue, and the geology is surprisingly varied (at least it was surprising to me, and pleasantly so). The hike let us work up a good appetite, so we headed back down the mountain and straight to Thanksgiving dinner!

Labels: basalt, birdies, geology, glacial landforms, hawaii, igneous, mountains, msse, primary structures, structure, travel, unconformities, volcano, xenoliths

Got this from Saxifraga at Rising to the Occasion...

The idea is to bold the ones you've done. (I'm also going to add commentary in parentheses.)

1. Started my own blog
2. Slept under the stars
3. Played in a band (I'm assuming karaoke of the Talking Heads' "Psycho Killer" counts?)
4. Visited Hawaii (See here for some recent posts on that topic.)
5. Watched a meteor shower
6. Given more than I can afford to charity
7. Been to Disneyland/world (Hell no, we won't go!)
8. Climbed a mountain
9. Held a praying mantis
10. Sung a solo (Aha: here's where that Talking Heads solo fits in!)
11. Bungee jumped
12. Visited Paris
13. Watched lightning at sea
14. Taught myself an art from scratch (Woodcut block printing; Boston, 1996)
15. Adopted a child
16. Had food poisoning (seafood poisoning - the worst!)
17. Walked to the top of the Statue of Liberty
18. Grown my own vegetables
19. Seen the Mona Lisa in France
20. Slept on an overnight train (Mongolia: the legendary Choibalsan to Ereentsav run)
21. Had a pillow fight
22. Hitchhiked (Many times out west)
23. Taken a sick day when you're not ill (in high school: biked down to National Airport to watch the planes land and read Hemingway)
24. Built a snow fort
25. Held a lamb
26. Gone skinny dipping
27. Run a Marathon
28. Ridden in a gondola in Venice
29. Seen a total eclipse
30. Watched a sunrise or sunset
31. Hit a home run (this one involves sports, doesn't it? )
32. Been on a cruise (Alaska Marine Highway System, Haines to Bellingham, summer 2006)
33. Seen Niagara Falls in person (brought my Geology Honors students there in March of this year!)
34. Visited the birthplace of my ancestors (but I am planning to go to Newfoundland this coming summer, to visit my maternal ancestors' descendants)
35. Seen an Amish community
36. Taught myself a new language (if the Peace Corps helped me, that's okay, right?)
37. Had enough money to be truly satisfied
38. Seen the Leaning Tower of Pisa in person
39. Gone rock climbing
40. Seen Michelangelo's David
41. Sung karaoke (okay, here's where that bit goes...)
42. Seen Old Faithful geyser erupt
43. Bought a stranger a meal at a restaurant (friend of a friend work okay?)
44. Visited Africa
45. Walked on a beach by moonlight
46. Been transported in an ambulance
47. Had my portrait painted
48. Gone deep sea fishing
49. Seen the Sistine Chapel in person
50. Been to the top of the Eiffel Tower in Paris (sheesh -- whoever wrote this list liked Paris and Italy, it looks like)
51. Gone scuba diving or snorkeling
52. Kissed in the rain
53. Played in the mud
54. Gone to a drive-in theater
55. Been in a movie
56. Visited the Great Wall of China
57. Started a business (does freelance writing and scientific illustration count?)
58. Taken a martial arts class
59. Visited Russia
60. Served at a soup kitchen
61. Sold Girl Scout Cookies (gosh, I tried, but they told me I wasn't allowed for some reason...)
62. Gone whale watching
63. Got flowers for no reason
64. Donated blood, platelets or plasma
65. Gone sky diving
66. Visited a Nazi Concentration Camp
67. Bounced a check
68. Flown in a helicopter (This summer, exiting the Grand Canyon)
69. Saved a favorite childhood toy
70. Visited the Lincoln Memorial
71. Eaten caviar
72. Pieced a quilt
73. Stood in Times Square
74. Toured the Everglades
75. Been fired from a job
76. Seen the Changing of the Guards in London
77. Broken a bone
78. Been on a speeding motorcycle
79. Seen the Grand Canyon in person
80. Published a book (kinda sorta -- two copies left if anyone wants 'em)
81. Visited the Vatican
82. Bought a brand new car (Le Prius, almost a year old!)
83. Walked in Jerusalem
84. Had my picture in the newspaper (accompanying an article about one of my Billy Goat Trail geology hikes)
85. Read the entire Bible
86. Visited the White House
87. Killed and prepared an animal for eating
88. Had chickenpox (and I have the scars to prove it)
89. Saved someone's life
90. Sat on a jury (civil suit: taxi cab driver sued teen driver who ran into his cab)
91. Met someone famous
92. Joined a book club
93. Lost a loved one (cats and dogs only at this point, and may it long remain)
94. Had a baby
95. Seen the Alamo in person
96. Swam in the Great Salt Lake
97. Been involved in a law suit
98. Owned a cell phone
99. Been stung by a bee
100. Ridden an elephant (but I have ridden a water buffalo)

Labels: blogs, humor, travel

I had planned to write about vog next week, but NASA's Earth Observatory has forced my hand this morning by publishing this:

What you see in this image of the Hawaiian islands is a lot of vog, an acrid mix of sulfur dioxide, water, and oxygen that results when volcanic emissions mix with the atmosphere.

When I was there last week, I experienced some vog, starting with the source. Here's Halema'uma'u Crater (part of Kilauea Caldera), steaming away in Hawai'i Volcanoes National Park, spewing water vapor, carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide, and other gaseous goodies upward and downwind:

The prevailing winds keep these nasty gases close to the ground west of the crater, resulting in the park service closing down the roads in that area of the park.

From there, the gases drift west and north, mixing and interacting with the atmosphere, forming vog. If the trade winds aren't active, the vog kind of stalls on the western side of the big island, and even drifts along the archipelago to plague Maui and the other islands.

On Thanksgiving day, I was standing on top of Mauna Kea, one of the five volcanoes that makes up the island, and on the descent back down the mountain, looking south towards Mauna Loa, where I could see a curtain of vog on the western flank of the big mountain (obscuring Kona and the coast):


Now here's a zoomed-in shot, augmented with a dotted line to show you approximately where the silhouette of Mauna Loa would be, if you could see it through all the vog there on the western side of the mountain. Honestly, it looked just like a curtain of greyish white hanging from the sky: palpable and with a discrete edge:


Down in the thick of it:


It wasn't as noxious as I thought to be in it and breathe it, but the vog definitely had a distinct scent and taste, and my eyes were watery (though that may have been psychosomatic, because it was kind of freaky how thick it was).

According to my friend Lily in Waimea, the trade winds have picked up in the past day or so, though, and scrubbed away the vog. So: clear skies return to Hawai'i... but for how long?

Labels: clouds, geology, hawaii, national parks, travel, volcano

Dave at the Geology News blog is hosting this month's Accretionary Wedge on the topic of "favorite places to do field work."

My favorite place to do field work is in California's "range of light," the Sierra Nevada.

I did my geology master's field work in the eastern Sierra, along the Sierra Crest Shear Zone, a major high-strain zone which parallels the eastern edge of the Sierra Nevada Batholith through older meta-sedimentary and meta-volcanic host rocks.

In 2003, I spent the summer out there, starting with my first field area at lovely Gem Lake:

An angular unconformity can be seen in this image as the tilted (close to vertical) metasedimentary and metavolcanic rocks (orange and gray) are overlain by dark colored "Tertiary" basalt flows. A big talus slope of basalt chunks makes a black triangular shape that heads downhill toward the lake. In the distance, where the land rises appreciably, the granites (and granodiorites) of the batholilth begin.

We camped on this peninsula sticking out into Gem Lake:


Dazhi Jiang (Then of UMD-College Park; now at the University of Western Ontario) and USC's Geoff Pignotta examine strained metavolcanics near Gem Lake:


Here's me with the Ritter Range in the background:


Glacial striations sculpting my strained metavolcanics:



Field gear:

Labels: california, field trips, glacial landforms, granite, igneous, metamorphism, structure, travel

Yesterday, I showed you some sand, including some green sand from Green Sands Beach on the big island of Hawai'i. Today, I'll show you some more images from Green Sands. Let's start by orienting ourselves: We're on the south side of the island, just east of Ka Lae (a.k.a. South Point). Here's a Google Map of the cove (Mahana Bay) where Green Sands Beach (a.k.a. Papalakoa Beach) is located:


To get there from the Ka Lae parking area, you can either drive a four-wheel-drive vehicle over some very rough "roads" or you can hike about 2 miles along the coast. When I visited last week, we hiked. It's a pleasant walk, and there's plenty of green sand to be seen en route to the official Green Sands Beach. Here's the coast: basalt and grassy pastureland, with plenty of wind:


A view looking down into the cove where the green sand beach is located:


So, just why is the sand here green? It's full of olivine, which is weathering out from the local rocks. At first, I assumed the source was the local porphyritic basalt. The fine-grained basalt contains many large phenocrysts of olivine, and when the basalt breaks up, these dense grains tend to be concentrated together. Here's some of that olivine-rich basalt:


But