National Park Week

National Parks have been called the best idea America has ever had. I have to agree. This past week has been National park week, a time to celebrate our idea to set aside and save some of the best that our country has to offer. Its a hard job to balance the millions of visitors parks get every year with the mission of protection.  

In the late 1980's, I actually postponed grad school graduation ( I was one course shy of finishing) because of a job offer with the NPS, in my favorite national park. I was a ranger in Rocky Mountain national park for 3 summers. My kids will tell you that those summers were their favorite 

while growing up. I worked in a campground, was trained to fight forest fires, helped with search and rescue and was impacted for the rest of my life. It was also handy that my graduate work was all in trying to make sense of the different glaciations the Colorado Rockies had seen. I was working in my field area :)! and, yes that is me in the Smokey the Bear hat.

Since then, I have been a enthusiastic visitor to as many different national parks as I can every year. This would be a good place to start a "how-many-parks-have-you-visited" meme, but I am too lazy to make a list. Buy the pass, even at its newer-higher "Bush era" price increase its still the best deal in America.  

concretions

A portion of last weekend was spent walking through Ute canyon in the Colorado National Monument.  In some areas we were walking across an eroded Wingate surface. The Wingate sandstone is early Jurassic in age and is a windblown quartz dominant sandstone with obvious crossbedding through out the formation. While walking on the Wingate (or the Navajo ss) there are sometimes collections of small marble like objects on the ground. These marbles are iron concretions. 

When the rock was originally going through the rock forming process a thin patina of hematite coated the quartz grains creating a cement holding them together.  Later, water (with certain reducing agents) moving through the sandstone picked up the iron. When this dissolved iron combines with oxygen the dissolved iron loses an electron and its solubility is reduced.  The hematite is immediately precipitated out forming the iron concretion.

This process happens all through the sandstone creating all sorts of shapes. The marbles are the most common, but concretions can be found as buttons and towers and sheets along the ground. As the softer sandstone erodes away, the harder concretions stand out making a surface of small marbles. 

Hawaiian volcanoes

I have to thank my fellow geobloggers for giving me some ideas for my Hawaiian vacation.  Spring in the Rockies can have glorious weather that allows for quality time outside, or it can be snow and cold and wind, with the emphasis on the cold and snow and wind. What better time to visit Hawaii?  Our choice of the big island was easy, where else do you get to combine all of the earth sciences? Geology was everywhere we looked, with the concentration of course being with volcanic rock. Astronomy was well represented by the Mauna Kea observatories and oceanography is self explanatory.

We did see steam rising from the ocean as new lava poured in. The NPS sure wanted to keep us safe so the view was a distant one. The highlight here was the walk across Kilauea Iki, the smaller Kilauea caldera. There are no pictures as it was raining too hard to get the camera our or to see anything.

What I found amazing was to hike across large open areas of fairly new lava flow. It must of been quite a sight watching lava pour over this cliff.  The biology was incredible watching the succession of plants create soil.

The black sand beaches were fun just to play in.  It was hard to imagine the interaction between the hot lava and the cooler water while we were playing in the sand watching sea turtles in the surf.

Just a reminder of the earthquakes that can occur around the Pacific Rim. This is definitely an image that will make it into my class slide shows.

What a tropical look. The lava flows coming right down to the ocean with palm trees on the beach...I could live here.

Spring break in Hawaii

Just back from a week in the tropical rain of Hawaii. We visited Hawaii Volcano NP and peered through the mist to see what could be a caldera...any way more of that to follow. This was also a visit to the only state I had not been to.

visited 50 states (100%)
Create your own visited map of The United States or website vertaling duits?

Regime change

I was able to spend time in one of my favorite places in Utah, Cedar Mesa also known as the monument uplift. This area is directly south of Canyonlands NP and much of the southern drainage from the Abajo Mountains comes this way. The soft Cedar Mesa sandstone has eroded into a set of incredible canyons from this drainage. What makes this doubly fun is the amount of Anazasi (Ancestral Puebloan) ruins and rock art found throughout the canyons.

The upper elevations of the mesa tops is known as the Red House cliffs. The base of the cliffs are made of the Permian Organ Rock shale while the mesa top is capped with Triassic Moenkopi and Chinle formations. These red beds indicate bright oxidized muds from the Ancestral Uncompaghre uplift to the east. The drainage at the time making large alluvial fans that filled this part of Utah.

Below the red beds of the Organ Rock/Moenkopi/Chinle lies my second favorite rock unit on the Plateau: Cedar Mesa sandstone. Being as this is the type area, the Cedar Mesa sandstone makes up the majority of Cedar Mesa. Almost every canyon is cut into this very thick white Permian sandstone. The sandstone shows obvious large scale crossbeds and a uniform grain size suggesting wind blown deposits. You can see the crossbedding in the space below the granary. I have read a petroleum description that this is a wet eolian deposit. This is in keeping with the idea of a cyclic rising and falling of local sea level.

Under the Cedar Mesa is the Elephant Hill Limestone . This is one of those limestones I enjoyed using as a prop in intro geology labs. Its a sandy limestone more than a limy sandstone. There are fossils present and samples will do all the things limestone should do in field tests.

So for about 80 million years you can see regime changes happening; seas coming and going all the time. Now this area is  very arid region. If the regime was different, lets say similar to the East coast, so much of the existing rock would have eroded away and these magnificent canyons would be nothing but a flat plain.

The newest crop of Earth Scientists

I had the opportunity to be a substitute teacher yesterday for a local 5th grade class. While there we did the usual elementary school daily events: math, writing, recess, reading and spelling. Unfortunately I was not to be the science teacher, but I quickly made the math class into an hour filled data collecting exercise and study of probability.  It was at lunch when I was looking at the stuff all around the room and noticed a wall full of astronomical posters. One poster highlighted variable stars. I thought that was an unlikely topic for a 5th grader to study. I asked the other teacher about the choice of variable stars. I wasn't expecting her answer. The girl who studied variable stars choose the topic because the picture in the book showed a pink star.

I am sorry to say my first reaction was very guy-like with a laugh (to the teacher not the student!). But, I quickly started wondering. Do we create our elementary science posters/text/web pages etc. To attract both genders? I don't know? I think that the newest images coming from the Hubble are beautiful works of art. I am reminded of Jodie Foster in Contact saying that they should have sent a poet. But, I am a guy. What do these images look like to 5th grade girls? And what do you think about creating more pink stars to find the next Vera Rubin, Jill Tarter or Annie Cannon.

writing and more writing

Last fall I was offered a contract to create a new middle school online earth science course. I was slowly working my through their outline and keeping up with all the small yet numerous editing changes.  Three weeks ago I was told that I really needed to be finished by the end of the next budget cycle...you know what that means.  I'm an independent contractor so I am not employed anyway but I wanted the money. My deadline is this next Monday morning. 

 

So three weeks of writing, editing rewriting with 6th grader readability (just watch I'll be writing simple sentences for the next few months).  I have been finding just the right image, working on remote servers, having MS word crash just a few times and trying hard to require some inquiry in the lessons. I am tired and as of about 1 hour ago, finished! I beat the deadline. Now the first set of editing takes place but first some serious time outside all next week