Continents Collide: The Appalachians and the Himalayas

Fifty Years of Studying Geology

Amidst the media cacophony of last Fall (2021), I realized that my formal Geology education had begun 50 years ago when my high school Senior-year Geology course began.

Prior to that event, early on, I had been one of those kids with interests not only in dinosaurs but in volcanoes as well (examples of both of these were far from my home on the Georgia Piedmont).  One of my "early treasures" which I have kept up with is this basalt sample from the 1944 eruption of Mt. Vesuvius.  

One of my Dad's friends lived next door to my grandma Lillie and when I got bored during extended Sunday visits, I wandered up the hill to his home.  He would tell me stories about his being an American RAF volunteer in England before the U.S. was involved in WWII.  After the U.S. entry into the war, he either returned home to enlist in the Army or he enlisted while still in England. 

During the "Italy Campaign", his Army unit was in Naples when Mt. Vesuvius began its 1944 eruption.  Following the initial Ash Fall eruptions, basalt flows entered the margins of Naples (as he told me) and he picked the souvenir shown below.  I probably knew something about Mount Vesuvius at age 9 and one day - probably in early 1963 - he handed me this hand-sized sample and told me the story.

Sadly, a few weeks later, he passed away from a sudden heart attack.  I think he was the first non-family member - that I was close to - to pass away.  

On a cheerier note, another "threshold event" that happened about that time (3rd grade) was related to a classroom event when our teacher mentioned that her husband's road crew had found some Mastodon teeth in Florida and he had brought back three of the teeth.  

Our teacher lived only a block from the school and she got permission for us to walk with her to visit their garage during recess.  (Our class was not the first ones to do this, as I found out later.)  After seeing and touching the teeth, when I returned to the classroom, I could think of little else.  

I reasoned that "if extinct elephants were running around in Florida, they were probably in Georgia, too".  At that time, I had no way of knowing that years later, sporadic discoveries of dinosaur bones would be made on the Inner Coastal Plain, south of Columbus, GA.  So, even though - at the time - dinosaurs were unknown in Georgia, Mastodons would have to serve the purpose as large vertebrates that roamed the local prehistoric terrain. 

Both of my parents enjoyed being outdoors, doing such things as taking nature hikes, looking for arrowheads, visiting historical sites, panning for gold in the Dahlonega, GA area, and screening for rubies and sapphires in the Cowee Valley near Franklin, NC.  

In the latter part of my high school Junior year, I was presented with the choice of taking Physics or Geology during my Senior year.  Remembering the fun I had outdoors when I was young was a major reason for my choice of Geology.  Besides, as I struggled with Math, I knew Geology had to be easier than Physics (though no one told me of the Trigonometry and 2 Calculus courses I had to pass in college).  I had also heard that the Physics teacher was "creepy" while the Geology teacher was just "eccentric".

There are a few other outdoor learning opportunities I experienced while playing in "our" creek.  Those can be mentioned another time.                                                                

A Reminder About This Blog's Content

For any new visitors, my goal is to provide more of my original material, i.e., thoughts, memories, photos, and videos.  

A Georgia native, I have been formally studying Geology for a little over 50 years, starting with a high school Geology course that began in the Fall of 1971.  This was followed by my first college Geology courses in the Fall Quarter of 1972.  

My first trips westward across the Mississippi River were during a family vacation in 1973 and a road trip with my college roommate in 1974 (both of which were instrumental in my choosing to go to the University of El Paso in 1977 for grad school).  My first Scientific Photography (35 mm) courses began in 1975.

Original material takes time to write and edit (to my satisfaction).  To avoid too many gaps in postings, I add Geology and other related Science videos, mostly from Youtube.  I hope to keep things educational, informative, and entertaining.

Thanks for visiting.  

What a Geologist Sees - Part 32 [Original Post Date 5/27/10]

[Subtitled: Geophotos, Memories, and Hopes.  Please excuse any leftover 2010 formatting glitches and inconsistencies.]  

Within my geophoto database, the photos that are among my favorites include those from the Eagle Mts. (West Texas), the Bisti Badlands (San Juan Co., NM), and Monument Valley (UT/AZ). [The labeled photos have been used in some of my classroom Power Point presentations.] 

Figure 1.

Yeah, I got a bit carried away going down memory lane. The Eagle Mts. (an Oligocene caldera) were the site of my originally-intended Master's Thesis work, during the summer of 1978. The 1st photo here was taken from the East Mill area, where we camped while we mapped the southeastern portion of the mountains. In the near foreground is a portion of Wyche Ridge, composed of Cretaceous sedimentary rocks, forming part of the margin of the caldera. Eagle Flat is in the middleground and the Carrizo Mountains are in the background (and maybe the Beech Mountains and/or the Sierra Diablo in the far background, too). Alamo Springs may be visible from this location, also.

Figure 2.

This was one of the few close-up photos of the pyroclastic textures that I took that summer. I guess I planned to get more in future trips, but I got "distracted" by events in my personal life and never finished this project. 

(I did start another thesis project in 1985 in the Aden Volcanic Field). I would, love the opportunity to take my son 4-wheeling back in the Eagle Mts., - maybe someday. To enjoy the quiet and get a few more photos and maybe find that rock hammer that I lost, the one I was given by my Dad when I went off to Grad School.

Figure 3.

The Bisti Badlands in San Juan County, NM were the site of a 1979 summer job. I was hired to assist in a "fossil recovery project", locating Cretaceous vertebrate, invertebrate, and permineralized wood samples, prior to the opening of a coal mine. 

Figure 4.

During the early part of my six weeks there, I took hundreds of slides, then unbeknownst to me, the shutter on my Miranda camera jammed. It rained almost every day the first two weeks we were there and the clays in the Fruitland Fm. are like grease when they get wet. After that first two weeks, I don't recall anymore rain for the remaining four weeks of the project.

Figure 5.

The primary goal of our project was to mark the location of every dinosaur bone in two and a half square miles, recover all loose bone fragments, then leave the removal of large pieces to the University of New Mexico. 

Sometimes when I talk about being a Geologist to a bunch of kids, I tell them about the summer "I got paid to look for dinosaur bones", which usually catches their attention. We were supposed to continue this same project in the summer of 1980, but the permits between the state and federal land didn't get resolved in time. I would have enjoyed another go-round in this area.

Figure 6.

It has been years since I read any reports generated by this project, but I seem to remember my lead professor telling us that most of the bones we found were of hadrosaurs (duck-billed dinos). We also found turtle shells fragments, crocodile scutes, and a few fresh-water bivalves (the ecosystem had been an Everglades sort of setting).

Figure 7.

It was always fun to find one of these areas just littered with permineralized logs, though they were not generally as colorful as the wood from the Petrified Forest. 

Figure 8.

I hope this stump was retrieved for a museum or at least given a place of honor outside of a college classroom building.

Figure 9.

The site where I collected this "clinker zone" shale (actually outside of our study area), with the plant fossils is one of those places that I regret not having collected more samples from. I only picked up two pieces and gave one away during the intervening years. I wish I had filled a bucket.

Figure 10.

Monument Valley is a place I had not yet visited (until 2015), but someday hope to. My geophotos from Monument Valley are scanned slides taken in the summer of 1980 - by my Dad - when he and my Mom were on their last vacation together. He passed away in November 1980. 

Figure 11.

Figure 12.

I use these photos, along with my photos of Canyonlands NP and the Grand Canyon when discussing Colorado Plateau stratigraphy and when discussing arid-climate weathering and erosion characteristics and when discussing things like eroded volcanic necks. 

Figure 13.

Other stops on that trip included the Painted Desert/Petrified Forest,...

Figure 14.

...and Dinosaur National Monument,...

Figure 15.

...Yellowstone, ...

Figure 16.

...and the SD Badlands. 

My Dad was not a Geologist, but he (and my Mom) did enjoy learning about new things and being outside. I will forever be thankful that he got me interested in photography.

Ancient footprints in New Mexico raise questions about when humans inhab...

What a Geologist Sees - Part 27 [Original Post Date 2/27/09]

[Updated to 2022.]  Yeah, this is a long one.

100 Things a Geologist Should See or Do For the source of this list, see this link at Geotripper. To see the entire list, visit the link. Printing the entire list is too long, so I will list the things I have done or seen and the things that I consider in the realm of possibility of doing sometime in the future. 

Been there/done that: 

3. See an active geyser... such as those in Yellowstone 

4. Visit the Cretaceous/Tertiary (KT) Boundary. Raton, NM - 2015

6. Explore a limestone cave. Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico, Luray Caverns, VA, Raccoon Mt., TN; Cumberland Caverns, TN; Mammoth Cave, KY 

7. Tour an open pit mine,... a copper mine in Santa Rita, NM, a uranium mine in Sierra Peña Blanca, Chihuahua, a Kaolin Mine and a Marble Quarry, Georgia. 

8. Explore a subsurface mine - a coal mine in Mexico, an old WWII-era "tin mine" Franklin Mts., and others. 

13. An exfoliation dome, such as those in the Sierra Nevada - or Stone Mt., GA. 

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. - Had one in my side yard. 

17. Living and fossilized stromatolites (Glacier National Park is a great place to see fossil stromatolites - or the Franklin Mts., El Paso area while Shark Bay in Australia is the place to see living ones) - done 1/2 of that 

19. A caldera - Valles Caldera, Los Alamos, NM, several calderas in West Texas 

18. A field of glacial erratics - Individual Glacial Erratics in Central Park, NYC - 2009

20. A sand dune more than 200 feet high - Sleeping Bear Dunes, Leelenau Peninsula, Michigan 2021

26. A large sinkhole - Silver Springs, FL 

31. The continental divide - Crossed it numerous times

32. Fluorescent and phosphorescent minerals - Collected several Fluorescent Minerals, including a diamond in Arkansas

33. Petrified trees Bisti Badlands, San Juan County, NM (see this post) 

34. Lava tubes Aden Crater, NM 

35. The Grand Canyon. All the way down. And back. 1/2 of this, I have been on the South Rim of the Grand Canyon 4 times. 

36. Meteor Crater, Arizona, also known as the Barringer Crater, to see an impact crater on a scale that is comprehensible - 1978 

51. Shiprock, New Mexico, to see a large volcanic neck - 2015, as well as others in the Navajo Volcanic Field

58. The Carolina Bays, along the Georgia coastal plains 

62. Yosemite Valley - 1974 

63. Landscape Arch (or Delicate Arch) in Utah - camera crapped out on both visits 1977 & 1979, success in 2016 

68. Monument Valley - 2015

76. The giant cross-beds visible at Zion National Park - 2016

80. The Black Canyon of the Gunnison in Colorado - 1977, 1979

83. Find dinosaur footprints in situ - I didn't find them, but I did visit two dinosaur track locales in 2015. 

84. Find a trilobite (or a dinosaur bone or any other fossil) - found plenty of fossils, including dino bones, but haven't found a complete trilobite, yet. 

85. Find gold, however small the flake - numerous times in GA and CA 

88. Experience a sandstorm - Salt Lake City and Phoenix - 1974 and El Paso, 1977 and other times 

90. Witness a total solar eclipse - in Georgia, 2017

95. View a great naked-eye comet, an opportunity which occurs only a few times per century - Don't recall the name
96. See a lunar eclipse - Several times, don't recall exactly when

So, it looks like I have done 33 of these things (or been 33 of these places). That is not to say I haven't seen a countless number of interesting things, but they might not be interesting enough to put on a Top-100 list. 

Might go there/do that someday: 

1. See an erupting volcano - I would like to visit either Iceland or Hawaii 

2. See a glacier 

5. Observe (from a safe distance) a river whose discharge is above bankful stage (I have watched a rather intense flash flood near Hillsboro, New Mexico, I don't know if that would qualify or not) 11. A slot canyon. Many of these amazing canyons are less than 3 feet wide and over 100 feet deep. They reside on the Colorado Plateau. Among the best are Antelope Canyon, Brimstone Canyon, Spooky Gulch and the Round Valley Draw. 

14. A layered igneous intrusion, such as the Stillwater complex in Montana or the Skaergaard Complex in Eastern Greenland. 

15. Coastlines along the leading and trailing edge of a tectonic plate (check out The Dynamic Earth - The Story of Plate Tectonics - an excellent website). 

22. A recently formed fault scarp 

23. A megabreccia 

24. An actively accreting river delta 

25. A natural bridge 

27. A glacial outwash plain 

28. A sea stack 

29. A house-sized glacial erratic 

30. An underground lake or river 

39. The Waterpocket Fold, Utah, to see well-exposed folds on a massive scale. 

40. The Banded Iron Formation, Michigan, to better appreciate the air you breathe. 

44. Devil's Tower, northeastern Wyoming, to see a classic example of columnar jointing 

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. 

50. The Goosenecks of the San Juan River, Utah, an impressive series of entrenched meanders. 

54. Mount St. Helens, Washington, to see the results of recent explosive volcanism. 

59. The Mima Mounds near Olympia, Washington 

61. The moving rocks of Racetrack Playa in Death Valley 

64. The Burgess Shale in British Columbia 

65. The Channeled Scablands of central Washington 

66. Bryce Canyon 

67. Grand Prismatic Spring at Yellowstone 

69. The San Andreas fault 

75. A catastrophic mass wasting event 

77. The black sand beaches in Hawaii (or the green sand-olivine beaches) 

78. Barton Springs in Texas (will try to do that next time I am in Austin) 

79. Hells Canyon in Idaho 

82. Feel an earthquake with a magnitude greater than 5.0. 

86. Find a meteorite fragment 

87. Experience a volcanic ashfall 

91. Witness a tornado firsthand. (Important rules of this game). (We were in our basement at 1 AM when we got hit by a tornado in 1998, it is probably not the same thing as watching one cross the plains of Oklahoma or Kansas) 

92. Witness a meteor storm, a term used to describe a particularly intense (1000+ per minute) meteor shower 

93. View Saturn and its moons through a respectable telescope. 

94. See the Aurora borealis, otherwise known as the northern lights - (I was in Wisconsin in the summer of 1982, but I was enjoying the local beer and I forgot to look for the Northern Lights at night).  On the Michigan Upper Peninsula, it was cloudy in 2021. 

97. View a distant galaxy through a large telescope 

98. Experience a hurricane 

99. See noctilucent clouds 

100. See the green flash 

I would add a couple more things: 

101. Go to the Crater of Diamonds State Park in Arkansas and stay there until you find a diamond. I found one my first trip there in 1973. 

102. Stand on the platform of an operating oil drilling rig. I have sort of done this, we visited a couple of drill rigs in SE New Mexico on a Geology field trip in 1982, both were operating rigs, but they had suspended drilling for safety reasons while we were there (or else some maintenance was going on).

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What a Geologist Does [Original Post Date 3/29/10]

[Notes from 2010.]

Aside from my part-time Geology job and my part-time teaching... 

What I am doing right now includes (when time permits, largely on weekends): 

1) Retyping/rewriting my Master's Thesis (from 1989) and scanning the photos and related 35 mm slides. (It was probably one of the last theses typed on an electric typewriter). Because of the binding, scanning all of the text would be a hassle. 

The reason I am doing this is to be able to send some info to a vulcanologist with the Hawaii Volcano Observatory. A while back, he contacted me with information relating Hawaiian volcanic shatter rings with the Quaternary "explosion-collapse" craters that I studied in the Aden Basalts, in southern New Mexico. 

In other words, he thinks that the five craters I described are probably "shatter rings". My thesis advisor and I had scoured the literature available in the middle and late 1980s and found no references pertaining to these craters, characterized by an encircling rampart of boulders and a collapsed central floor. 

If I can secure his permission to reference his work, I may work up an abstract for a GSA meeting next year, if it doesn't conflict with a more substantial publication he has in the works. 

2) Continuing the work on my science-photo CD.  For the last 8 years I have been compiling a database of photos to use in my Geology and Environmental Science lectures. At this time, I am trying to fill in some missing categories. There are currently 900+ photos applicable to Geology, Biology, Weather (clouds), and Environmental Science. 

I am greatly looking forward to going back to NJ and NYC this summer to get some photos of the glacial features of Central Park and maybe some of the terminal moraines on Long Island. Maybe I will get some good photos of the Palisades of the Hudson and some of the coastal features of New Jersey, including Sandy Hook. 

I would also like to collect some samples of the garnet beach placers on Long Island, i.e., heavy mineral sands dominated by garnet fragments. 

3) Continuing work on a compilation of Cretaceous & Tertiary well logs from Burke County, GA. This began 10+ years ago while a co-worker and I were working on a state geologic survey project in the vicinity of the Savannah River. My friend is a well-known Gulf Coastal Plain stratigrapher and his detailed well-log descriptions were too voluminous to put in the original reports and our goal was to produce a separate report, which would hopefully resolve some of the stratigraphic nomenclature and correlation issues between this part of Georgia and adjacent South Carolina. 

[If memory serves me correctly, my friend logged about 13,000 feet of core for the Tritium Project.] With my friend's retirement to Albuquerque a few years ago, it has hindered work on this paper (he was actually here a couple of weeks ago, looking at other Coastal Plain cores and rewriting well logs - once a stratigrapher, always a stratigrapher). 

If we ever get this paper finished, even if it doesn't get published, if we can print a few copies onto CDs and send them to some local colleges that might be interested, at least someone would have access to the descriptions to the cores for future projects. 

4) Learning the "Ins and Outs" of Google Earth in tying GE images to visited sites and sample locations. As for the sample locations, my junior college is building a sand sample collection, i.e., various beach, river, and dune sand samples and I would like to be able to tie location maps (and descriptions of source area geology) to the individual sand samples. 

5) Revisiting the trace fossils I found in the Permian Cloud Chief Formation in Southern Ellis County, OK. Originally found in July, 2007 and ID'ed as "Arthropod locomotion marks" by the Oklahoma Geological Survey, I recently did an internet search and determined that these are very likely Arthropleurid trackways. Only one side of each set was preserved, perhaps because the centipede-like creature was wider than the individual rock slabs. Though I hope to revisit the area again to do some more collecting and documentation, I doubt that it will be this summer.

A Few Days in New Mexico ...

Well, unlike the other "A Few Days ..." segments posted so far, to introduce a few days of videos and posts, I can't say anything in reference to New Mexico being personally largely neglected and overlooked, though there are some "Bucket List" places I would like to revisit with my digital cameras.  Of the number of "nights spent" in particular states, it looks like New Mexico is #3.

1. Georgia 

2. Texas

3. New Mexico (estimated)

4. Arizona (estimated)

5. Oklahoma (estimated) 

I have been to all "four corners" of New Mexico (having been to the Four Corners Monument", I am speaking figuratively about the other three), with the SW Corner the least visited (to my great regret), just driving through between El Paso and Bisbee, AZ in November 1979.

In mid-2015, my first visit to NE New Mexico was spent visiting Clayton Lake State Park, followed by hours wandering the Clayton-Raton Volcanic Field.  As I was due in Albuquerque that evening, other than the Raton K-T Boundary site, the small dike crossing I-25, and some faulting in outcrops of the San Andres Limestone, I wasn't able to spend as much time in the area north and northeast of Santa Fe, as I would like. 

I have blogged before about the U.S. Hwy 66/I-40 corridor, another place I would like to spend more time in.  It truly is the "Land of Enchantment".

Because of the Geologic and personal importance of New Mexico, I have blogged about the state numerous times.  Here are a few prior New Mexico entries/posts:

White Sands National Monument

Bisti Badlands, San Juan Basin

Recurring Themes, Including New Mexico Experiences

Geo-Learning, Including Clayton-Raton Volcanic Field

What a Geologist Sees: Part 27

Get Your Kicks on Route 666 - Part 2 (Shiprock and More)

Get Your Kicks on Route 666 - Part 1 (Not my video)

Sky Island - New Mexico's Jemez Mountains

Carrizozo Basalts

Personal Photos of New Mexico Volcanic Features (Some labeled for Educational Purposes

A Post on Diatremes and Maar Volcanoes, including New Mexico Maar Volcanoes

Albuquerque to Gallup (Includes Albuquerque Volcanoes and other Geologic Sites along I-40 West)

A Video on New Mexico Volcanoes (Not my video)

New Mexico's Dynamic Geology  (Not my video)

My 1979 Summer Job in the Bisti Badlands (All photos are mine)

There are more New Mexico posts, scattered through my blog archives, but finding them and cleaning up scattered glitches takes time.