geologictimepics

Geology and Geologic Time through Photographs

Archive for the category “aerial geology”

27 Mar 2020
16 Comments

Touring the geologic map of the United States

Published in 1974 by the US Geological Survey, the geologic map of the United States beautifully lays out our country’s geology. If you’re stuck at home these days –as most of us are—you can gaze at this masterpiece and go anywhere! USAGeolMap-allllr

S Willamette Valley

Southern Willamette Valley. Eugene’s in the center of the map

At their simplest, geologic maps read like road maps: they tell you what rock unit or recent deposit forms the ground at a given place. So right here where I am in Eugene, Oregon, I can see that I live on “Q” –which stretches north up the Willamette Valley. “Q” stands for Quaternary-age material (2.5 million years to present), which is typically alluvial material –or sediment deposited by rivers and streams.  Just to the south of me lie a variety of older volcanic and sedimentary rocks. You can look them up in the map’s legend using their symbols. Here’s Rule #0: white areas, being mostly alluvium, mark low areas; colorful areas indicate bedrock, so are typically  higher in elevation.

The beauty of this map is that you can see the whole country at once, and using just a few rules, can immediately glean the underlying structure of a region.For any of the maps, photos, and diagrams here, you can see a larger size if you click on the image.

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Rule 1: Rock bodies without internal contacts appear as color swatches (or “blobs”) as seen on the block diagram below. These rocks include intrusive igneous, undifferentiated metamorphic, and flat-lying sedimentary rock. (If you’re not sure what geologic contacts are, please see my recent post on the nature of geologic contacts.) Read more…

Posted in aerial geology, aerial photography, geologic maps, Geology, Uncategorized and tagged , , , , , , , , , ,
04 Jan 2020
10 Comments

Aerial geology photos– favorites from commercial flights of 2019

I always try for window seats when flying and I always try to shoot photos out the window –with varying results! So often, the window’s badly scratched, there are clouds, it’s hazy, the sun angle’s wrong –there are myriad factors that can make good photography almost impossible from a commercial jet. Last year though, I had a few amazing flights with clear skies and a great window seat –and I’ve now loaded nearly 100 images onto my website for free download. Here are 10 of my favorites, in no particular order. You can click on them to see them at a larger size. They’re even bigger on my website.

Mt. Shasta at sunset. Volumetrically, the biggest of the Cascade Volcanoes, Mt. Shasta last erupted between 2-300 years ago –and it’s spawned over 70 mudflows in the past 1000 years. From the photo, you can see how the volcano’s actually a combination of at least 3 volcanoes, including Shastina, which erupted about 11,000 years ago.

Mt. Shasta at sunset, California

Aerial view of Mt. Shasta, a Cascades stratovolcano in northern California.

If you want to see more aerials of Mt. Shasta (shot during the day) –and from a small plane, go to the search page on my website and type in “Shasta”.

 

Meteor Crater, Arizona.  Wow –I’ve ALWAYS wanted to get a photo of Meteor Crater from the air –and suddenly, on a flight from Phoenix to Denver, there it was!

Meteor Crater, Arizona

Aerial view of Meteor Crater, Arizona

Meteor Crater, also called Barringer Crater, formed by the impact of a meteorite some 50,000 years ago. It measures 3900 feet in diameter and about 560 feet deep. The meteorite, called the Canyon Diablo Meteorite, was about 50 meters across.

 

Dakota Hogback and Colorado Front Range, near Morrison, Colorado. Same flight as Meteor Crater –and another photo I’d longed to take. It really isn’t the prettiest photo, BUT, it shows the Cretaceous Dakota Hogback angling from the bottom left of the photo northwards along the range and Red Rocks Amphitheater in the center –then everything behind Red Rocks, including the peaks of Rocky Mountain National Park in the background, consist of Proterozoic basement rock.

Hogback and Colorado Front Range

Aerial view of hogback of Cretaceous Dakota Formation and Colorado Front Range.

 

Distributary channels on delta, Texas Gulf Coast. I just thought this one was really pretty. Geologically, it shows how rivers divide into many distributary channels when they encounter the super low gradients of deltas. And whoever thought that flying into Houston could be so exciting!

Distributary channels on delta, Texas Gulf Coast

Distributary channels on delta, Texas Gulf Coast

 


Meander bends on the Mississippi River. My mother lives in Florida, so I always fly over the Mississippi River when I go visit –but I was never able to take a decent photo until my return trip last October, when the air was clear, and our flight path passed just north of New Orleans. Those sweeping arms of each meander are about 5 miles long!

Meander bends on Mississippi River, Louisiana

Meander bends on the Mississippi River floodplain, Louisiana

 

Salt Evaporators, San Francisco Bay. Flying into San Francisco is always great because you get to see the incredible evaporation ponds near the south end of the bay. I always love the colors, caused by differing concentrations of algae –which respond to differences in salinity. And for some reason, salt deposits always spark my imagination. Salt covers the floor of Death Valley, a place where I do most of my research, and Permian salt deposits play a big role in the geology of much of southeastern Utah, another place I know and love.

Salt evaporators, San Francisco Bay, California

Salt evaporators, San Francisco Bay, California

 

Bonneville Salt Flats and Newfoundland Mountains, Utah. And then there are the Bonneville Salt Flats! They’re so vast –how I’d love the time to explore them. They formed by evaporation of Pleistocene Lake Bonneville, the ancestor of today’s Great Salt Lake. When the climate was wetter during the Ice Age, Lake Bonneville was practically an inland sea –and this photo shows just a small part of it.

Bonneville Salt Flats and Newfoundland Mtns, Utah

Aerial view of Bonneville Salt Flats and Newfoundland Mountains

 

Stranded meander loop on the Colorado River. I like this photo because it speaks to the evolution of this stretch of the Colorado River. Just left of center, you can see an old meander loop –and it’s at a much higher elevation than today’s channel. At one time, the Colorado River flowed around that loop, but after breaching the divide and stranding it as an oxbow, it proceeded to cut its channel deeper and left the oxbow at a higher elevation.

Stranded meander loop, Colorado River, Colorado

Stranded meander loop (oxbow) on the Colorado River, eastern Utah

 

San Andreas fault zone and San Francisco. See those skinny lakes running diagonally through the center of the photo? They’re the Upper and Lower Crystal Springs Reservoirs –and they’re right on the San Andreas Fault. And you can see just how close San Francisco is to the fault.  As the boundary between the Pacific and North American Plates, its total displacement is about 200 miles. See this previous post for more photos of the San Andreas fault.

San Andreas fault zone and San Francisco

San Andreas fault zone and San Francisco

 

And my favorite: Aerial view of the Green River flowing through the Split Mountain Anticline –at Dinosaur National Monument, Utah-Colorado. Another photo I’ve so longed to shoot –but didn’t have the opportunity until last year.

The Green River cuts right across the anticline rather than flowing around it. It’s either an antecedent river, which cut down across the fold as it grew –or a superposed one, having established its channel in younger, more homogeneous rock before cutting down into the harder, folded rock. You can also see how the anticline plunges westward (left) because that’s the direction of its “nose” –or the direction the fold limbs come together. The quarry, for Dinosaur National Monument, which you can visit and see dinosaur bones in the original Jurassic bedrock, is in the hills at the far lower left corner of the photo.

Split Mountain Anticline, Utah-Colo

Split Mountain anticline and Green River, Utah-Colorado

 

So these are my ten favorites from 2019. Thanks for looking! There are 88 more on my website, at slightly higher resolutions and for free download. They include aerials of the Sierra Nevada and Owens Valley, the Colorado Rockies, including the San Juan Volcanic Field, incised rivers on the Colorado Plateau, and even the Book Cliffs in eastern Colorado. Just go to my geology photo website, and in the search function type “aerial, 2019” –and 98 photos will pop up. Boom!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Posted in aerial geology, aerial photography, Geology, geophotography, Uncategorized, volcanoes and tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
06 Oct 2017

Geologypics.com– A new (and free) resource for geological photographs

What better way to kick off my new website than to write about it on my blog? To see it, you just need to click on the word “home” in the space above. Or you can click the link: geologypics.com.

Here’s part of the front page:
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As it says, the site offers free downloads for instructors –and for anybody who’s craving a good geology photograph. It’s my way of contributing to geology education –showing off some of our landscape’s amazing stories and providing resources for other folks who want to do the same.

I think the best part of the whole site is that red button in the middle of the home page. It says “Image Search by Keyword”.

Right now, there are more than 2200 images you can search for — all of which are downloadable at resolutions that generally work for powerpoint. If you search for “sea stack” for example, you’ll get 38 hits –and the page will look like this:

Sea Stack search

First page of sea stacks when you search on the term.

 

Notice that ALL the photos are presented as squares–which works for most photos, but not all. To help mitigate that, the photos with vertical or panorama formats say so in their title, so you know to click on them to see the whole image. Take the photo in the upper center, for example –it’s got a  vertical format. Here it is:vertial image

 

A more detailed caption below the photo, along with its ID number appears at the bottom of the pic. This particular image is the chapter opener to the Coast Range in my new book “Roadside Geology of Washington“, which I wrote with Darrel Cowan of University of Washington.

There are also galleries –a chance to browse a variety of images without having to think of keywords. Similar to the search, they’re presented as squares so you need to click on the photo to see the whole thing.

 

Here’s what the photo gallery page looks like (on the left), followed by part of the “glaciation” page you’d see if you clicked on “glaciation”.  Woohoo!

galleries

part of Galleries page (left) and part of Glacial page (right)

 

Then there’s the “About” page, which gives some information about me and details my policies regarding use of the images (basically, you can download freely for your personal, non-commercial use if you give me credit; if you want to use the image in a commercial publication you need to contact me to negotiate fees). There’s also a “News” page, that gives updates on the website. There’s a contact page from which you can send me emails. And the blog? It goes right back to here!

And finally, if you’re looking for a great web designer? Try Kathleen Istudor at Wildwood SEO –she created the site and spent hours coaching me on how to manage it.

Enjoy the site!

 

Posted in aerial geology, aerial photography, climate change, Coastal uplift, geologic hazards, Geologic Time, Geology, Geology, Geologic Time, geophotography, mountains, national parks, photography, science, volcanoes and tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment
21 Mar 2017
3 Comments

Oregon’s rocky headlands: geologic recycling through erosion and uplift and erosion…

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Crashing waves at Heceta Head, Oregon

You can’t avoid thinking about erosion while standing on one of Oregon’s rocky headlands. The waves keep coming, one after another, each crashing repeatedly against the same rock. Impossibly, the rock appears unmoved and unchanged. How can it not erode?

The answer, of course, is that headlands do erode, quickly, but on a geologic time scale. We just miss out because we live on the much shorter human time scale. And the erosion belongs to a cycle in which coastal uplift causes eroded and flattened headlands to rise and become headlands once again, all subject to more ongoing erosion and uplift.

Wave energy is most intense at headlands because the incoming wave typically feels the ocean bottom near the headland first, which causes the wave to refract. As shown in the aerial photo below, this refraction focuses the wave energy on the headland.

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Wave refraction causes wave energy to focus on the headland. Arrows are perpendicular to wave fronts.

As you can see in the next few images, headlands don’t erode evenly. They erode irregularly, as the waves exploit any kind of weakness in the rocks such as faults and fractures, or if they’re sedimentary, bedding surfaces. The products of this erosion are as beautiful as they are interesting: sea stacks, sea arches, sea caves… The list goes on and on.

Headland and lighthouse, Heceta Head, Oregon

Aerial view of Heceta Head, Oregon.

From the above photo, you can see that sea stacks are simply the leftover remains of a headland as it retreats from erosion. That’s a critical point, because some sea stacks, especially the one with the arch in the photo below, are a long way from today’s coastline.

Sea stacks and sea arch, southern Oregon

Sea stacks and sea arch, southern Oregon

Those rocks, 1/4 to a 1/2 mile away used to be a part of the coastline? The land used to be way out there? YES!!! For me, that’s one of the very coolest things about sea stacks –they so demonstrate the constant change taking place through erosion.

Taken to its extreme, erosion renders headlands into wave-cut platforms, such as the one below at Sunset Bay. Being in the intertidal zone, these platforms make great places for tide-pooling–and ironically, for people-watching too. Geologically, they form important markers because they’re both flat and form at sea level. When found at higher elevations, they indicate uplift.

Wave-cut bench, Sunset Bay, Oregon

Wave-cut bench at Sunset Bay, Oregon

In fact, looking carefully at the photo above, you can see a flat surface on the other side of the bay. It’s an uplifted wave-cut platform! Called a marine terrace, it’s covered by gravel and sand originally deposited in the intertidal zone. Those deposits rest on bedrock that, at an earlier time, was also flattened by the waves. The photo below shows a better view of this terrace from the other side.

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Breaking wave at Shore Acres State Park, Oregon. Tree-covered flat surface in the background is an uplifted marine terrace.

These uplifted marine terraces can be found up and down Oregon’s coastline. Researchers recognize several different levels, the oldest being those uplifted to highest elevations. The one in the photo above at Shore Acres State Park is called the Whiskey Run Terrace and formed about 80,000 years ago. You can see a similar-aged terrace below as the flat surface beneath the lighthouse at Cape Blanco, Oregon’s westernmost point. An older, higher terrace forms the grass-covered flat area on the right side of the photo.

Cape Blanco, Oregon

Cape Blanco, Oregon looking NE. The flat surface beneath the lighthouse is the ~80,000 year-old Cape Blanco Terrace, probably equivalent to the Whiskey Run Terrace at Shore Acres; the flat area on the right side of the photo is the higher Pioneer Terrace,  formed ~105,000 years ago.

Researchers take the approximate ages of the terraces and their elevations to calculate approximate rates of uplift. In this area, Kelsey (1990) estimated a rate of between 4-12 inches of uplift every 1000 years. That might seem slow, but over hundreds of thousands of years, it can accomplish a great deal.

And look! The uplifted terraces? They’re on headlands! Of course, because they’ve been uplifted! And the headlands are now eroding into sea stacks and then platforms –to be uplifted in the future and preserved as marine terraces that sit on top headlands. And on and on, as long as the coastline continues rising.

YachatsWaves1-4

Blowhole near Yachats, Oregon. Incoming wave funnels up a channel eroded along a fracture and explodes upwards on reaching the end.

Some links and references:
Kelsey, H.M., 1990, Late Quaternary deformation of marine terraces of the Cascadia Subduction Zone near Cape Blanco, Oregon: Tectonics, v. 9, p. 983-1014. (Detailed study of Cape Blanco, including uplift rates).

Miller, M., 2014, Roadside Geology of Oregon, Mountain Press, Missoula, 386p. (General reference which details the concepts and includes several of the photos used here).

Earth Science Photographs: free downloads for Instructors —or anybody! (my webpage)

Posted in aerial geology, aerial photography, Coastal uplift, Geologic Time, Geology, Geology, Geologic Time, geophotography, photography, science and tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
24 Dec 2015
3 Comments

Landscape and Rock–4 favorite photos from 2015

Landscape and bedrock… seems we seldom connect the two. We all like beautiful landscapes, but most of us don’t ask how they formed –and even fewer of us think about the story told by the rocks that lie beneath it all. Those make two time scales, the faster one of landscape evolution and the much slower one of the rock record. Considering that we live in our present-day human time scale, it’s no wonder there’s a disconnect!

Take this photo of Mt. Shuksan in northern Washington. My daughter Meg and I drove up to the parking lot at Heather Meadows and went for a quick hike to stretch our legs and take some pictures just before sunset.We had about a half hour before the light faded –and all I could think about was taking a photo of this amazing mountain. But the geology? What??

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1. Mt. Shuksan and moonrise, northern Washington Cascades.

Thankfully, I’d been there in September scoping out a possible field project with a new grad student, and had the time to reflect… on time. From the ridge we hiked, shown as the dark area in the lower left corner of the left-hand photo below, we could almost feel Shuksan’s glaciers sculpting the mountain into its present shape. Certainly, that process is imperceptibly slow by human standards.

Shuksan combo

Mt. Shuksan: its glaciated NW side, summit, and outcrop of the Bell Pass Melange.

But the glaciers are sculpting bedrock –and that bedrock reveals its own story, grounded in a much longer time scale.

It turns out that the rock of Mt. Shuksan formed over tens of millions of years on three separate fragments of Earth’s lithosphere, called terranes. These terranes came together along faults that were then accreted to North America sometime during the Cretaceous. At the top of the peak you can find rock of the Easton Terrane. The Easton Terrane contains blueschist, a metamorphic rock that forms under conditions of high pressures and relatively low temperatures, such as deep in a subduction zone. Below that lies the Bell Pass Melange (right photo) –unmetamorphosed rock that is wonderfully messed up. And below that lies volcanic and sedimentary rock of the Chilliwack Group.

Here’s another of my favorites from 2015: the Keystone Thrust! It’s an easy picture to take –you just need to fly into the Las Vegas airport from the north or south, and you fly right over it. It’s the contact between the gray ledgey (ledgy? ledgeee?) rock on the left and the tan cliffs that go up the middle of the photo.

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2. Keystone Thrust fault, Nevada–gray Cambrian ridges over tan Jurassic cliffs.

The gray rock is part of the Cambrian Bonanza King Formation, which is mostly limestone, and the tan cliffs consist of  Jurassic Aztec Sandstone. Cambrian, being the time period from about 540-485 million years, is a lot older than the Jurassic, which spanned the time 200-145 million years ago. Older rock over younger rock like that requires a thrust fault.

Talk about geologic history… the thrust fault formed during a period of mountain building during the Cretaceous Period, some 100-70 million years ago, long before the present mountains. And the rocks? The limestone formed in a shallow marine environment and the sandstone in a sand “sea” of the same scale as today’s Sahara Desert. We know it was that large because the Aztec Sandstone is the same rock as the Navajo Sandstone in Zion and Arches national parks.

Cambrian-Jurassic

left: Limestone of the Cambrian Bonanza King Formation near Death Valley; right: Cross-bedded sandstone of the Jurassic Navajo Sandstone in Zion NP, Utah.

So… the photo shows cliffs and ledges made of rocks that tell a story of different landscapes that spans 100s of millions of years. But today’s cliffs and ledges are young, having formed by erosion of the much older rock.  Then I flew over it in about 30 seconds.

At Beach 2 near Shi Shi Beach in Washington State are some incredible sea stacks, left standing (temporarily) as the sea erodes the headlands. The sea stack and arch in the photo below illustrates the continuous nature of this erosion. Once the arch fails, the seaward side of the headland will be isolated as another sea stack, larger, but really no different than the sea stack to its left. And so it goes.

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3. Sea arch and headland at Beach 2, Olympic Coast, Washington.

And of course, the headland’s made of rock that tells its own story –of  deposition offshore and getting scrunched up while getting added to the edge of the continent.

ShiShi

Bedrock at Beach 2 consists mostly of sandstone and breccia. The white fragment is limestone mixed with sandstone fragments.

And finally, my last “favorite”. It’s of an unnamed glacial valley in SE Alaska. My daughter and I flew by it in a small plane en route to Haines, Alaska to visit my cousin and his wife. More amazing landscape–carved by glaciers a long time ago. But as you can expect, the rock that makes it up is even older and tells it’s own story.

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4. Glacial Valley cutting into Chilkat Mountains, SE Alaska.

Of course, this message of three time scales, the human, the landscape, and the rock-record time scale applies everywhere we go. Ironically, we’re usually in a hurry. I wish I kept it in mind more often, as it might slow me down a little.

Here’s to 2015 –and to 2016.

To see or download these four images at higher resolutions, please visit my webpage: favorite 10 geology photos of 2015.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Posted in aerial geology, aerial photography, Geologic Time, Geology, Geology, Geologic Time, geophotography, mountains, national parks, photography, Uncategorized and tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
31 Jan 2015
15 Comments

Columbia River Basalt Group–outrageous!

I can’t stop thinking about the Columbia River Basalt Group–the series of basalt flows that blanketed so much of my state of Oregon about 15 million years ago. Abbreviated as “CRBG”, it covers a lot of Washington too, as well as parts of western Idaho and northern Nevada. If you’re driving across those parts, you’ll likely travel miles and miles and miles over basalt basalt basalt –and that causes some people to say (mistakenly) that it’s boring. Some geologists even get grumpy about it because it covers up all the older rock.  Outrageous!

Lava flows of the CRBG in northern Oregon and Mt. Adams of southern Washington. With views like this, how can you say the CRBG is boring? (Location "F" on map below.)

Lava flows of the CRBG in northern Oregon and Mt. Adams of southern Washington. With views like this, how can you say the CRBG is boring? (Photo “F” on map below.)

But of course, the CRBG is outrageous for a whole host of other reasons. For one thing, it really is huge: it covers an area of more than 77,000 square miles with a volume of more than 52,000 cubic miles –that’s more than 50x the volume of air between the north and south rims of the Grand Canyon! Really—the National Park Service estimated the volume of “Grand Canyon Air” to be about 1,000 cubic miles. It also erupted over a fairly short period of time: from about 17 million years ago to 6 million –but 96% of it erupted between 17 and 14.5 million years ago.

CRBGblog

And… most of it erupted from fissures in eastern Oregon and Washington –the roots of which are now preserved as dikes. And… many of the lavas made it all the way to the Pacific Ocean. And… (here’s the outrageous part), on reaching the Pacific, many of the flows re-intruded into the existing sediments and sedimentary rocks along the coastline to form their own magma chambers, some of which were thousands of feet thick! AND… some basaltic magma from those chambers then re-intruded the country rock to form dikes –and some even re-erupted on the seafloor!

All these outrageous details. Now think about them for a moment. They really happened. That’s what I find so wonderful and amazing about geology. We learn all these things and we put them in some part of our consciousness that doesn’t really let them soak in –but once in awhile they do.

Finally, the CRBG is beautiful and forms beautiful landscapes! Below are some photos to illustrate it, from feeder dikes in eastern Oregon to sea stacks eroded from a giant sill on the coast.

And I’ll save my snarky comments about young earth creationism for another post.

–and at the bottom, I’m adding a short glossary to explain some of the terms.

Ok… the photos!

 

Photo A. Steens Mountain and Alvord Desert.  The CRBG started with eruption of the Steens Basalt about 16.7 million years ago, which makes up the upper 3000′ or so of Steens Mountain, shown here.  Steens Mountain is one of our state treasures –it’s a fault-block mountain, uplifted by Basin-Range extension along a normal fault along its eastern side.

Fault-bounded east front of Steens Mountain and Alvord Desert.

Fault-bounded east front of Steens Mountain; mudcracked playa of Alvord Desert in foreground.

 

Photo B. Steens Basalt at Abert Rim. Like most of the CRBG, The Steens basalt covered outrageously huge areas.  It also makes up the cliffs above Lake Abert about 75 miles to the east.  Called Abert Rim, the cliffs are also uplifted by a big normal fault.  Lake Abert occupies the downdropped basin.  And much of the Steens basalt consists of this really distinctive porphyry with outrageously big plagioclase crystals!

Photo B. Steens Basalt at Lake Abert; Abert Rim in background.

Photo B. Steens Basalt at Lake Abert; Abert Rim in background.

 

Photos C-1, C-2. CRBG dikes.  One reason we know that the CRBG erupted from fissures is that we can see their roots, as dikes cutting through older rock.  C-1 shows a dike cutting through previously erupted basalt flows in Grande Ronde Canyon, Washington; C-2 shows some narrow little dikes cutting accreted rock of the Triassic Martin Bridge Limestone. Photos 5 and 6 of my last post shows some aerial photos and describes this area in more detail.C. Feeder dikes

 

Photo D. Imnaha Canyon. The next major unit of the CRBG is the Imnaha Basalt, followed by the Grande Ronde Basalt.  Both these units erupted from sites in northeastern Oregon and southeastern Washington.  This view of Imnaha Canyon in Oregon shows the Imnaha Basalt near the bottom and the Grande Ronde Basalt at the top.

Photo D. Imnaha Canyon, Oregon.

Photo D. Imnaha Canyon, Oregon.

 

Photo E. Picture Gorge Basalt at the Painted Hills.  And the next youngest unit of the CRBG was the Picture Gorge Basalt, shown capping the ridge in the background. Unlike most of the CRBG, the Picture Gorge Basalt originated in central Oregon, not too far from here–there’s a whole swarm of dikes near the town of Monument, Oregon.

The colorful hills in the foreground make up the Painted Hills of John Day Fossil Beds National Monument, another of our state treasures.  I like this photo because it gives a sense of what lies beneath the CRBG –and the John Day Fossil Beds are outrageous in their own way–but save that for another time.

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Photo F. Lava Flows of the CRBG and Mt. Adams, a modern volcano of the High Cascades in Washington.  See the first picture at the top of the post!

 

Photo G. Wanapum Basalt near The Dalles. This exposure of the Wanapum Basalt, which overlies the Picture Gorge Basalt, tells the story of the CRBG as it flowed into and filled a lake along the Columbia River some 15 million years ago. At the bottom of the flow, pillow basalt formed as the lava poured into the lake, while the upper part of the flow shows the columnar jointing typical of basalt that flows across land.  What’s more, this exposure lies less than a mile off I-84 in The Dalles, Oregon.  See page 251 of the new Roadside Geology of Oregon for another photo and more description!

Photo G. Single flow of Wanapum Basalt near The Dalles, Oregon.

Photo G. Single flow of Wanapum Basalt near The Dalles, Oregon.

 

Photo H.  Upper North Falls, Silver Falls State Park, Oregon.  This wonderful state park hosts about a zillion waterfalls that spill over cliffs of CRBG, 14 of which lie in the main river channels of the north and south forks of Silver Creek.  The falls depicted in this photo are 136 feet high!

Upper North Falls at Silver Falls State Park, OR. The roof of the alcove consists of Wanapum Basalt, the bedrock near the river channel consists of Grande Ronde Basalt.

Upper North Falls at Silver Falls State Park. The roof of the alcove consists of Wanapum Basalt, the bedrock near the river consists of Grande Ronde Basalt.

Notice that the picture’s taken from behind the water. The trail goes into a big alcove, so it’s easy and safe.  The alcove formed because this particular waterfall crosses the contact between the Wanapum Basalt and the underlying Grande Ronde Basalt –and there is a 10-20′ thick, easily eroded, sedimentary unit between the two.  Remember the Grande Ronde Basalt –from Photo D in northeastern Oregon? Here it is, just east of Salem!

 

Photo I.  Saddle Mountain, northern Coast Range.  Here starts the truly outrageous part of the CRBG story.  Saddle Mountain, the highest point in the northern Coast Ranges, consists almost entirely of the rock on the right: brecciated pillow basalt, full of the alteration mineral palagonite. Apparently, the basalt started to flow into the ocean at about here, formed pillows and fragmented like crazy in the water-lava explosions. I. Saddle Mtn

But!  These flows were likely confined too –such as in a submarine canyon–which allowed them to develop enough of a pressure gradient to intrude downward into bedding surfaces, faults, and fractures of the Astoria Formation.  The diagram below illustrates the process in cross-section.  The diagram also give a context for photos I-L.  intrusive CRBG diagram4

 

Photo J.  Sea stacks of intrusive Columbia River Basalt Group at Ecola State Park.  Some of the magma chambers were several thousand feet thick and are now exposed as gigantic sills along the coast.  One such sill is Tillamook Head, of which Ecola State Park is a part –and it’s eroding into the sea stacks you can see in the distance.J.130120-11lrs

 

Photo K.  Haystack Rock at Cannon Beach, OR.  Go figure, one of our iconic state landmarks is an undersea volcano?  You can actually walk out to this thing at low tide and see lots of pillow basalt and dikes intruding the Astoria Formation.  The smaller sea stacks are part of the same complex.K.130121-12

 

Photo L. Seal Rock, Oregon.  Seal Rock is the southernmost exposure of CRBG on the coast –and it too, is intrusive.  It’s a big dike that trends NNW for about a quarter mile out to sea.  And along its edges, there are smaller dikes that you can see intruding the Astoria Formation, such as in the smaller photo.  The arrow points to where you can see the small intrusion, at low to medium tides.

L. Seal Rock

Some Terms:
dike: a tabular-shaped intrusion that cuts across layering in the surrounding rock.  Imagine magma flowing along a crack and eventually cooling down and crystallizing.  That would form a dike.  A feeder dike is a dike that fed lava flows at the surface.

normal fault: a type of fault along which younger rocks from above slide down against older rocks below.  They typically form when the crust is being extended.

porphyry: an igneous rock with larger, easily visible crystals floating around in a matrix of much smaller ones.

sill: an intrusion that runs parallel to layering in the surrounding rock.

 

Some references:

Reidel, S.P., Camp, V.E., Tolan, T.L., Martin, B.S. 2013. The Columbia River flood basalt province: stratigraphy, areal extent, volume, and physical volcanology. In The Columbia River Basalt Province, Geological Society of America Special Paper 497, eds. S.P. Reidel, V.E. Camp, M.E. Ross, J.A. Wolff, B.S. Martin, T.L. Tolan, and R.E. Wells, p. 1-44.

Wells, R.E., Niem, A.R., Evarts, R.C., and Hagstrum, J.T. 2009. The Columbia River Basalt Group—From the gorge to the sea. In Volcanoes to Vineyards: Geologic Field Trips through the Dynamic Landscape of the Pacific Northwest, Geological Society of America Field Guide 15, eds. J.E. O’Connor, R.J. Dorsey, and I.P. Madin, p. 737-774.

Some links:

Roadside Geology of Oregon
Geology pictures for free download
Geologic map of Oregon

Posted in aerial geology, Geology, geophotography, photography, volcanoes and tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
10 Jan 2015
9 Comments

Geologic field trip from Yellowstone Lake to Portland, Oregon at 30,000 feet

What a start to the new year!  January 1, I flew home to Oregon with a north-facing window seat on a spectacularly clear day.  So much incredible landscape!  So much incredible geology!  Here are nine photos I shot out the plane window, keyed to the geologic map below.

Yel-PDX + US map

Photo 1.  Absaroka Range, northern Wyoming and southern Montana.  You can see that these mountains consist of layered rocks (see bottom of photo especially)–but they’re not sedimentary.  They are basaltic to dacitic lava flows and pyroclastic rocks of the Absaroka Volcanic Field,  erupted from about 53-43 million years ago.  Much of the present topography is the result of glacial erosion during the Pleistocene.

Absaroka Range, east edge of Yellowstone Lake on left.

Absaroka Range, east edge of Yellowstone Lake on left.

Photo 2.  Yellowstone Lake.  As you can see on the map, Yellowstone Lake fills only a fraction of the caldera created by Yellowstone’s Lava Creek Eruption, 600,000 years ago.  Since then, rhyolite lavas, shown in pink, filled in the caldera.  Notice the oval-shaped bay at the end of the lake’s western arm.  It’s called West Thumb, and is a younger caldera that erupted about 150,000 years ago.  It’s a caldera within a caldera!  It’s pretty big too– almost identical in size to Crater Lake in Oregon –but compared to the main caldera, it’s tiny.

Photo and geologic map of Yellowstone National Park

Photo and geologic map of Yellowstone National Park. The dashed red line marks the caldera edge.

Photo 3. Recent faulting of the Basin and Range Province. In this photo, the Pahsimeroi River flows northwestward to its confluence with the Salmon River, near the left side of the photo –and the Salmon continues flowing northward for about 100 miles before it turns westward and eventually joins the Snake River.

Recent faulting along western edge of Lemhi Range, Idaho.

Recent faulting along eastern edge of Pahsimeroi Valley, Idaho–and western front of Lemhi Range.

But what I think is so cool about this photo is that it so clearly shows the abrupt western edge of the Lemhi Range, which runs diagonally from the right (east) side of the photo to just above the center.  The range literally rises right out of the ground.  That abruptness is caused by faulting that takes place recently and frequently enough that erosion doesn’t keep up with it.  The fault is a normal fault, caused by crustal extension.  Notice the linear nature of the ranges to the northeast (upper right) –More normal faulting!  This is a northern expression of the Basin and Range Province.  Woohoo!

Photo 4. Mountains of the Idaho Batholith.  Granitic rock of the Idaho Batholith underlies a huge area of Idaho, some 14,000 square miles of it. On the geologic map, it’s the big green area.  The rock intruded as a series of plutons during the Late Cretaceous, from about 100 – 65 million years ago.  Similar in age and composition to the Sierra Nevada Batholith, the Idaho Batholith was fed by magma created during subduction along the west coast of North America.

Mountains of the Idaho Batholith

Mountains of the Idaho Batholith

Photo 5. Hell’s Canyon.  Not only does the north-flowing Snake River in Hell’s Canyon form the boundary between Idaho and Oregon (Yay, we made it to Oregon!), and not only is it the deepest canyon in the conterminous United States, but it’s also incredibly important from a geologic-history-of-western-North-America point-of-view.

Notice the flat areas above the canyon–they’re especially visible on the west (left) side, but you can also see them on the east.  Those places are flat because they’re made of flat-lying basalt of the Columbia River Basalt Group. These basalts erupted mostly between 17-14.5 million years ago, but kept erupting off and on until about 6 million years ago –and they cover ALL of northern Oregon and ALL of southeastern Washington State.  In fact, they flowed all the way to the Pacific Ocean.

Hell's Canyon and the Snake River.

Hell’s Canyon and the Snake River. The Imnaha River forms the next deep canyon to the left (west).

Those basalt flows overlie rock of the Wallowa accreted terrane: mostly volcanic and sedimentary rock that formed in an island arc setting, far offshore from North America.  It was added (accreted) to the North American continent during the Mesozoic –probably some 150 million years ago.

Photo 6. Wallowa Mountains, Oregon. Just west of Hell’s Canyon are the Wallowa Mountains, Oregon’s premier alpine country outside of the Cascades.  Like Hell’s Canyon, the Wallowas contain the accreted Wallowa terrane overlain by Columbia River Basalt –but the Wallowas also host the Wallowa Batholith, a Jurassic-Cretaceous granitic “stitching pluton”.  It’s called a stitching pluton because it intrudes across accreted terranes and “stitched” them together.

Glacial valleys and frontal fault zone on the north side of the Wallowa Mountains, Oregon.

Glacial valleys and frontal fault zone on the north side of the Wallowa Mountains, Oregon.

You can see a bunch of other things in this photo though.  First off, the mountains end suddenly in a line: a recently active fault zone that has uplifted them more than 5000′ relative to the valley floor. Also, you can see how glaciers carved the landscape.  Notice the deep U-shaped valleys, cirques, and knife-edged ridges called aretes.  And see the lake in the upper right corner of the photo?  It’s Wallowa Lake, dammed by a glacial moraine!

(at this point, the folks in the seats next to me wanted to throw me out of the airplane)

Photo 7. View of Washington High Cascades over The Dalles.  That’s Mt. St. Helens on the left (west), Mt. Adams in the middle, and Mt. Rainier in the far distant right.  Mt. Rainier is 90 miles away!

Looking north over the Dalles to Mts. St Helens, Rainier, and Adams.

Looking north over the Dalles to Mts. St Helens, Rainier, and Adams.

These volcanoes are dormant –which means that they’re …sleeping?  And they can awaken at any time.  I remember a college friend of mine wanted to climb Mt. St. Helens in 1979.  It was dormant then, and nobody worried about it.  Then in May, 1980 it erupted violently, blowing off its top 2000′.  Both St. Helens and Mt. Rainier have erupted many times in the past several thousand years; Mt. Adams though, erupted only twice in that period.

Photo 8.  Columbia Gorge, the Washington High Cascades, and the Bonneville Landslide.  From left (west) to right, the volcanoes are Mt. St. Helens, Mt. Rainier, and Mt. Adams.  You can see the Bonneville Landslide along the river on the right side of the photo, directly below the left base of Mt. Adams.  It detached from the cliffs directly behind it about 1450 A.D. and slid right into the river –and it pushed the river about a mile to the south! Just downriver from the landslide, you can see the Bonneville Dam zig-zagging across the river.

View northward over the Columbia River Gorge to the Washington High Cascades.

View northward over the Columbia River Gorge to the Washington High Cascades.

The ridges at the bottom of the photo lead up to Mt. Hood, another dormant stratovolcano and Oregon’s highest peak.  Apparently, the view out the south side of the plane was even more ridiculously cool.

Photo 9. Columbia River, just below Portland.  Right near Portland, the Columbia River turns northward for about 40 miles before it heads west again out towards the Pacific–and it drops only 10 feet in elevation for the whole distance.  The northward deflection of the river is probably the result of uplift of the Portland Hills, which likely began as long as 16 million years ago (they also deflect 16 million year old lava flows of the Columbia River Basalt). That town along the river in the background is St. Helens, Oregon.

View northward, down the Columbia River.

View northward, down the Columbia River, Washington on the right, Oregon on the left.

See more geologic photos of Oregon by typing “Oregon” into the geology search engine on my website –or type “Oregon, aerial” if you want to see aerial shots!  And if you’re suddenly really excited about Oregon geology, please check out the new edition of Roadside Geology of Oregon!

Posted in aerial geology, aerial photography, Geologic Time, Geology, Geology, Geologic Time, geophotography, mountains, photography and tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
26 Dec 2014
2 Comments

“Crazy Modern Period” -a vanishingly thin sliver of Earth History

I’m in Florida, visiting my mother. There’s a beach, waves, shorebirds… And it’s warm! Late last week, my youngest daughter and I boarded a plane in Portland, Oregon, flew to Chicago –and then on to Fort Myers, Florida –across the continent for a distance of nearly 3000 miles. Being the holidays, the airports were packed, with people going in all directions, all over the planet. And like most people, we arrived at our destination the same day we departed.

Above the clouds --somewhere over eastern Oregon.

Above the clouds –somewhere over eastern Oregon.

Of course, just about everybody agrees that us human-types do pretty amazing things, like fly across the continent in a day and communicate instantly with family, friends, and colleagues on the other side of the planet. Oh for goodness sake… human beings have traveled to the moon and sent spacecraft to Mars!

In the context of geologic time, however, humanity and its accomplishments are positively mind-boggling. Homo sapiens dates back some 100,000 years, a miniscule period of time given that Earth is 4.55 billion years old. But it wasn’t until 1933, less than 100 years ago, that humans entered the “crazy-modern period” –when we flew the first airline flight across the US with no overnight stops. At that point, all parts of our planet became readily accessible to the public.

Divide 100 years by 4.55 billion? Our “crazy-modern period” is one 45.5 millionth of Earth history. What a unique moment in Earth history we’ve created! No other species has come close to anything like this –ever— in 4.55 billion years.

Sanibel Island and the Florida Gulf Coast --while descending into Fort Myers

Sanibel Island and the Florida Gulf Coast –while descending into Fort Myers

I won’t try to speculate how long our resources and (relatively) clean environment will last, but if we don’t figure out a way to live sustainably, these amazing times will soon disappear no matter how smart we are. Our sliver of Earth history will remain vanishingly small. Earth will heal, of course –but humans don’t have the same luxury of geologic time.

Regardless of whether or not we survive our successes, all of us share this unprecedented time. Here’s to another solstice passing –and to another calendar year. _MG_3784

Posted in aerial geology, climate change, Geologic Time, Geology, humanity, young earth creationism and tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
17 Dec 2014
7 Comments

Geologic Irony in Cincinnati and northern Kentucky! Deep geologic time everywhere –and the absurd denial of the Creation Museum.

It’s been awhile since I’ve posted –too many things have been happening, like the end of fall term, other deadlines, and of course, coming down with a bad cold!  But I did manage to visit Cincinnati, Ohio for Thanksgiving.  I’m originally from Cincinnati, and I always enjoy going back.

Ordovician shale and limestone along I-75 in northern Kentucky; downtown Cincinnati, Ohio occupies the background

Ordovician shale and limestone along I-75 in northern Kentucky; downtown Cincinnati, Ohio occupies the background

Besides visiting with old friends, one thing I love about the Cincinnati-Northern Kentucky area, is the incredible wealth of marine fossils in its rocks, which date from the Ordovician Period, some 475 million years ago.  It’s always amazing to me that I can, almost at random, pick up a rock and see the remains of critters that were actually alive so long ago.  It fills me with a sense of wonder, mystery, and awe that I’ll never be able to explain –and it demonstrates to me how I’m a part of the earth –not apart from it.

marine fossils in Ordovician limestone from northern Kentucky --you can see mostly brachipods (they look sort of like clam shells) and bryozoa (branching coral-like things) in this rock.

marine fossils in Ordovician limestone from northern Kentucky –you can see mostly brachipods (they look sort of like clam shells) and bryozoa (branching coral-like things) in this rock.

Really, these fossil-rich limestones are just about EVERYWHERE!  Even many of the stone buildings and walls that you can see throughout Cincinnati, are full of Ordovician marine fossils.

And what a wonderful setting!  The Ohio river cuts through its original floodplain, now perched a couple hundred feet above the river.  That’s actually a whole story in itself, because today’s Ohio River formed as a result of the continental ice sheet advancing across northern Ohio, and blocking the courses of several north-flowing rivers, such as the Kentucky and Licking Rivers.

Looking up the Ohio River from the air --near where Ohio, Kentucky, and Indiana meet.

Looking up the Ohio River from the air –near where Ohio, Kentucky, and Indiana meet.

And then there’s the Creation Museum in northern Kentucky, perched on the old river terrace above bedrock of fossil-rich Ordovician limestone and shale.  One look at the two photos below and you can see what they’re all about.

The explanation for fossils according to the Creation Museum (on the left), and a diorama depicting a human being coexisting with a dinosaur on the right.

The explanation for fossils according to the Creation Museum (on the left), and a diorama (on the right) depicting a human being coexisting with a dinosaur.

According to “The Museum”, fossils “were formed by Noah’s Flood (~4,350 years ago) and its aftermath” –and dinosaurs really did coexist with humans.  In fact, I read that before Adam and Eve ate their apple, T Rex dinosaurs were actually vegetarian.

But don’t take it from me that those limestones are actually very old (100s of millions of years, as opposed to 4,350 years).  Take a look at a geologic map.  The Cincinnati-Northern Kentucky area is underlain by more than 1000 feet of limestone and shale –and if you travel eastward or westward, you encounter 1000’s more feet of marine sedimentary rock that sit on top the Ordovician.  And the fossils in those rocks show a change with time, called evolution.  If you think about it, you’re looking at a long long time to deposit –and preserve–all that sediment.

Geologic map of the United States; the area around Cincinnati is enlarged. "CM" shows the approximate location of the Creation Museum.

Geologic map of the United States; the area around Cincinnati is enlarged. “CM” shows the approximate location of the Creation Museum.

The Creation Museum tells us that all that sediment was deposited by “the flood”.  Never mind that very little of the rock contains particles even as big as a sand grain.  Below is a photo of a real flood deposit.  As you can see, the deposit is very coarse-grained!  It’s coarse-grained because large floods are very energetic and transport large particles.

Coarse-grained sediment, deposited by one of the Missoula Floods in Oregon, some 15,000 years ago.

Coarse-grained sediment, deposited by one of the Missoula Floods in Oregon, some 15,000 years ago. The exposure is about 20 feet high.

So the Creation Museum is asking you to BELIEVE that 1000s of feet of limestone were deposited by a flood, as well as the 1000s of feet of older rocks and 1000s of feet of younger rocks I didn’t even mention.  They also want you to believe that T. Rex was a vegetarian who lived alongside Adam and Eve.

But here’s what really bothers me: by misrepresenting science and promoting its own skewed interpretation of the bible as the literal Truth, the “museum” discourages people from looking at these beautiful rocks with a sense of wonder, mystery, and awe.  It discourages them from inquiring into how those rocks really formed.  The museum discourages people from learning important things about our planet and from forming their own views on the world.

Me petting a dinosaur at the Creation Museum

Me petting a dinosaur at the Creation Museum.

Type “Ordovician” into the search for a few more photos of Ordovician fossils.

Posted in aerial geology, aerial photography, creationism, Geologic Time, Geology, geophotography and tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
28 Oct 2014

California’s largest lake formed by its largest fault zone: the Salton Sea and San Andreas Fault

With a surface area of nearly 1000 square kilometers (381 square miles), the Salton Sea is California’s largest lake.  But it’s relatively shallow –and because it has no outlet, it’s saltier than ocean water.  It formed in 1905 when the nearby Colorado River overwhelmed irrigation canals and flooded the region.  Now it’s an incredibly important migratory bird refuge, fishery, and dumping ground for agricultural waste.  Seems like those things shouldn’t really go together!

Aerial view of the Salton Sea, looking northward.

Aerial view of the Salton Sea, looking northward.

But it just seems young.  The Salton Sea actually occupies part of the Colorado River Delta –and as a result, has been filled with freshwater multiple times since the delta was first constructed, probably near the beginning of the Pleistocene.  It’s also at the remarkably low elevation of 234 feet (71m) below sea level; the deepest part of the lake is 44 feet (13 m) below that.

And the low spot is there because of extension caused by the San Andreas fault system!  The San Andreas fault terminates along the eastern margin of the lake basin, but steps across the lake to the Imperial fault, which forms its western margin.  Both faults are right-lateral –and because they step to the right, they pull the area apart in-between them.  Kind of like central Death Valley –which is even lower in elevation than the Salton Sea!  But more on Death Valley later.

Aerial view of Salton Sea, with the approximate locations of the southern San Andreas and Imperial faults. Note how right-lateral slip on the two en-echelon faults drive extension between them.

Aerial view of Salton Sea, with the approximate locations of the southern San Andreas and Imperial faults. Note how right-lateral slip on the two en-echelon faults drive extension between them.

click here to see more photos of the San Andreas fault system, or click here to see a photo geology tour of Death Valley, California.

Posted in aerial geology, aerial photography, Geology, geophotography, photography and tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

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