geologictimepics

Geology and Geologic Time through Photographs

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07 Nov 2026
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Side Canyon Sand

A solitary raven flies overhead, the sound of its wings awakening me to the profound silence. Giant sandstone blocks, fallen from the cliffs above, litter the canyon floor.  A broken tree trunk dangles silently over the canyon rim. All I hear are my footsteps, my breathing, and my noisy thoughts.

Just two hours ago, I joined a 20-minute line of cars waiting to enter Zion National Park and only a mile away, Utah State Highway 9 conveys thousands of cars each day. Too late to get a ticket to hike trails in Zion Canyon itself but determined to take some backcountry photographs, I stopped at this side canyon and started walking. The more I walked, the more the silence grew. Now, even my thoughts are quieting.

Cross-bedding in Navajo Sandstone, Zion National Park, Utah. (260329-67)

I haven’t felt this present or aware since I found myself alone in the midst of a sand dune field in Death Valley a few years ago.  Just after sunset, the dunes were draped in shadows, and I put away my camera to watch the last sunlight fade from the nearby mountains. As I felt the temperature drop, I lingered. With no sound, no evidence of humanity in my view, and my mind free of distraction, planet Earth seemed to reveal itself –and part of me has remained there ever since.

The intimacy of this canyon differs from the expansiveness of Death Valley, but the silence is equally powerful.  There, I looked out on a wide valley framed by mountains. Here, I’m confined by 100-foot walls of sandstone. There, I stood on top of a dune field alone with its countless changing lines and shapes. Here, I’m within a dune field, one made of the same blowing sand and changing lines and shapes, but now preserved as rock.

Today’s extent of the Navajo Sandstone and equivalents. Modified from Kocurek and Dott, 1983

These dunes are part of the Navajo Sandstone, deposited during the Jurassic Period beginning about 195 million years ago. They form the 1000’ high cliffs in Zion as well as cliffs in Arches and Capitol Reef National Parks, and the White Cliffs of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. The Navajo Sandstone extends southward into Arizona while similar-aged dunes form the Aztec Sandstone in Nevada, the Glen Canyon Sandstone in Colorado, and the Nugget Sandstone in Wyoming and Idaho. The immensity of its area, literally a sea of sand called an “erg” staggers the imagination. The going estimate for its original size is that it covered roughly 850,000 square miles –larger than the all the dune fields of today’s Sahara Desert combined.

195 million years ago. Estimates vary for its age, from the very beginning of the Jurassic Period 201 million years ago to about 180 million years ago. Deposits like these are notoriously difficult to date because they preserve few if any diagnostic fossils, and being sedimentary, any dateable minerals in the sand would have formed in an older rock. However, in 2019, Judith Parrish of the University of Idaho and her colleagues dated the carbonate in lake deposits near the base of the formation at 200.5 and 195.0 million years.

The Jurassic Period itself, during which other sand seas came and went, river systems deposited the Morrison Formation in northeastern Utah and its cache of dinosaur bones, parts of the Rocky Mountains rose and the Atlantic Ocean began forming, lasted some 56 million years, from 201 to 145 million years ago. As a human being I can’t comprehend such time. I try and fail miserably. Sometimes I equate that time span to 56 years of my own life. 56 years ago, I was in elementary school and that was so long ago I scarcely remember it. I can’t help but smile at the absurdity.

Besides the Navajo Sandstone, Zion National Park also hosts the other Jurassic-age strata of southwest Utah. The Moenave and Kayenta Formations lie beneath the Navajo, marking an earlier time of increasing aridity that eventually led to these dunes. I drove through their red sandstones after entering the park and climbed through their layers while ascending the switchbacks to the long tunnel on highway 9. Just above the Navajo Sandstone lies red mudstone of the Temple Cap and Carmel formations, deposited when the land subsided below sea level. Erosional surfaces on top the Navajo and in-between these younger rocks indicate periods of emergence.

I snap a photo of the sandstone’s tell-tale cross-bedding, where myriad groups of bedding planes lie at varying angles to each other, each having formed on the side of a sand dune. Typically, sand blows over the dune crest, causing the dune to migrate and the sand to build up in sloping layers. Researchers measured the orientations of these cross beds to define wind flow patterns during this part of the Jurassic. They find that for most of the Navajo, the wind consistently blew from the north or northwest.

Cross-bedding in Navajo Sandstone, Zion National Park, Utah. (260329-11)

So these sand grains came from the northwest. With a handlens, I can see them, countless grains, all a very small size capable of being transported by wind. And they’re nearly all quartz. Of all the common rock-forming minerals, quartz is by far the most resistant to change. It can break into smaller pieces, but unlike most other minerals that eventually turn to clay, quartz stays quartz. Researchers suggest these grains came from a variety of sources like pre-existing sandstones found in Idaho, Montana, or even southern Alberta. There are certainly sandstones found in those places, and they’re older than the Navajo. The Cambrian ones deposited west of the so-called “Cordilleran Hingeline” are the thickest. Some 500 million years ago, they accumulated on continental crust that had been stretched thin by a period of rifting 100 or 200 million years before. They include the Tintic Formation, which today forms much of the 1000’ cliffs behind Ogden, Utah and the Gog Quartzite, which makes 4000’ foot cliffs behind Moraine Lake in Banff National Park of Alberta.   At the same time those grains were being deposited, thinner accumulations of sand formed along the North American shoreline as the sea was rising over the subsiding land. These thinner sandstone bodies include the well-known Tapeats Sandstone of the Grand Canyon and the Flathead Sandstone of the Teton Range of Wyoming, both of which sit directly on the much older metamorphic and igneous rock that comprises North America’s foundation.

Of course, that leads to more questions. Those sandstone formations are exposed today, but they had to be exposed during the Jurassic Period if they provided the sand for the Navajo. If the Navajo is indeed 195 million years old, it would predate the known mountain building that occurred later in the Jurassic. Perhaps the Navajo is younger? Perhaps there was enough uplift before the main event to expose those rocks? Perhaps there was something else I’m not thinking of?

I love considering those possibilities, but it sends my thoughts back to my office and my computer. It makes me want to start looking things up and engaging with my colleagues who know more about this issue. But that can wait. I’m here in this canyon, not my office. So I look through my handlens at the sand grains once again and let my thoughts settle. I admire their tiny uniform sizes and shapes, and the glassy look of the quartz, frosted from being shuffled around by the wind. I ponder their numbers. Am I gazing at infinity? Surely the number of sand grains in my field of view could be counted. But what of the sandstone block I’m sitting on? The cliff? Zion National Park? The entire Navajo erg? What does infinity mean anyway? It’s a mathematical term that means endless. To my human brain, the numbers of grains are endless.

As is the length of time those sand grains have cycled through the rock record. Regardless of which sandstone bodies eroded to release it, they must have been older than the Navajo and had to receive their quartz grains from somewhere else. Eventually the process had to reach back in time until the original quartz crystals formed in a magma that cooled and crystallized into a rock, possibly miles below earth’s surface. What a journey! And the sandstone is eroding today, forming the spires and canyons we so adore in this part of the world. Just as important, it’s releasing sand grains to be blown around by the wind once again.

The sound of a commercial jet overhead makes me aware again of the silence, suddenly lost until after the plane passes. I realize I’ve been walking in this silence all morning. Suddenly grateful for my lack of trip preparation, I imagine my day had I managed to procure a permit to hike one of the more popular hikes in the park. I walk silently down the canyon and encounter the first hiker coming up. We smile in greeting and walk past each other as I realize my time alone in this canyon is ending. At the same time, I sense that part of me is still up there, drifting around with the loose sand.

Groundwater seep (260329-73)

Special thanks to my friend Jan for recommending the canyon.

References:
Kocurek, G., and Dott, R.H.Jr., 1983, Jurassic Paleogeography and paleoclimate of the central and southern Rocky Mountains Region. in, M.W. Reynolds and E.D. Dolly eds., Mesozoic Paleogeography of west-central United States. Rocky Mountain SEPM, p. 101-116.
Parrish, J.D., Rasbury, E.T., Chan, M.A., and Hasiotis, S.T., 2019, Earliest Jurassic U-Pb ages from carbonate deposits in the Navajo Sandstone, southeastern Utah, USA: Geology, v. 47, p. 1015-1019, https://doi.org/10.1130/G46338.1

Photos: Each photo can be viewed large by clicking on it –and can be downloaded freely from my photo site: Geologypics.com by typing the stock number into the search. (Or you can type a more general word or name–like “sandstone” or “Zion” and see a selection!

Posted in essay, Geologic Time, Geology, Geology, Geologic Time, geophotography, Uncategorized and tagged , , , , , ,
18 Dec 2024
6 Comments

Picture of the world in a sidewalk

Need a quick dose of geology? Go outside and look at a sidewalk. These human-made rocks offer a lot –from insights into weathering and erosion to regional geology and Earth History.

When I was 19 years old and just entering the geology major, I used to marvel at how sidewalks cracked. In front of me, almost in real time, geological weathering processes were at work, mostly through growing tree roots, differential settling of a sidewalk’s base, or a host of other processes that in Colorado typically included frequent freeze-thaw cycles. At the same time, other processes, aided by the water trickling into the cracks, were breaking down the concrete chemically. Suddenly, abstract concepts of physics and chemistry became real. I transformed from a science phobe to a science geek.

I’m still hooked on sidewalks. Not as much on their cracks, although they still fascinate, but the concrete itself. Consisting of gravel and sand—collectively called aggregate—as well as cement, which binds it together, this human-made conglomerate tells stories of landscapes dominated by volcanoes to coastlines to deserts. You just have to look at it.

But the aggregate can be hard to see. It’s frequently hidden beneath a fine cement-rich zone called the “float”, which typically rises to the surface when the concrete is poured and workers smooth over its top surface. Through wear and natural degradation, however, the aggregate gradually shows through. Those cracks I used to admire also expose the aggregate and can even act as small fault zones, allowing one side to shift relative to the other. Where the shifting poses a hazard to pedestrians, city crews sometimes grind the protruding edges to reveal a beautiful mosaic of differently colored, rounded pebbles, surrounded by a finer matrix of sand and cement.

Each of those pebbles has a story. Consider the close-up photos above: the one on the left shows a rectangular chip I cut from a larger piece of concrete; the central photo shows the chip mounted on a microscope slide and ground thin so that it can transmit light (a “thin section”); the photo on the right shows a microscopic view of the little rectangular area near the left-bottom corner of the other photos. It appears in all its glory below!

Read more…
Posted in essay, Geologic Time, Geology, Geology, Geologic Time, Uncategorized and tagged , , , , , , ,
31 May 2024
4 Comments

Summarizing Death Valley’s Geology in 12 outtake photos

I’ve long been drawn to Death Valley. As a geologist, I can’t think of a better place to witness the incredible geologic history that shaped western North America –and as a photographer, I can’t think of a better place to capture images of what’s a mind-boggling array of geologic features.

To that end, I recently completed a book called Death Valley Rocks! A guide to geologic sites in America’s hottest national park. It’s being published by Mountain Press and should be out in early July. The book covers 40 geologically amazing sites in the national park as well as the adjacent Amargosa Valley and will be full of color photos and maps –and (of course) many of my photos didn’t make the cut. Here are twelve of those outtakes, selected to present a general picture of Death Valley’s geology. You can click on any image to see it at a larger size.

The first photos reflect Death Valley’s modern setting, an actively evolving basin in the southwestern part of the Basin and Range Province. The valley is the terminus of the Amargosa River, shown as the heavy dashed blue line resembling a giant fishhook in the map. The river starts just north of Beatty, Nevada, and flows southward about a 100 miles through the towns of Shoshone and Tecopa before turning northward to empty into Death Valley. Without an outlet, all the water that reaches the floor of Death Valley stays there until it evaporates. As it evaporates, the water precipitates salt, producing a magnificent salt pan that is broken by myriad polygonal shrinkage cracks.

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Posted in Death Valley, Geology, geophotography, photography, Uncategorized and tagged , , , , , , , ,
13 Jun 2023
4 Comments

35 Minutes of Humanity

This essay first appeared in the June, 2023 issue of Desert Report
–Click on each image to see them at full size

You don’t see many rocks where I live in western Oregon. Lush forests or savannah-like areas dotted with Oak, yes, but the bedrock mostly lies beneath the vegetation and a thick mantle of soil. Just south of town though, the highway cuts through a hillside to expose rock that reminds us of our geologic setting –and taken in context, points to Earth’s incomprehensibly long history.

I’m standing in a soft rain at the foot of the roadcut, looking upwards at some 50 feet of strata. The rocks are sedimentary, having been deposited in lakes and rivers, but there’s also a thin layer of light-gray ash near the top of the cut and a much thicker one near the bottom –and slashing vertically through everything are two narrow gray, almost black, bodies of igneous rock. Called dikes, they worked their way upwards as molten rock along cracks in the older sedimentary rock before cooling and crystallizing where they are now.

Highway Roadcut near Eugene, Oregon

Evidence of ancient volcanic activity abounds: ash, dikes, even the sedimentary rocks are made mostly of volcanic particles. And on clear days, I can walk to the south side of the roadcut and look eastward to forested ridges of the Western Cascades that give way in some 50 miles to the snow-capped peaks of the High Cascades. They’re all volcanic. The High Cascades volcanoes are young and active whereas those of the western Cascades are long extinct and deeply eroded. Combined, the two parts of this range formed over a period of about 40 million years and produced miles and miles of lavas, ash and debris flows, and volcanic-rich sedimentary rocks.

Trying to imagine this 40 million-year history is like watching the stars, filling me with wonder and leaving me humbled, subdued, and exhilarated, all at the same time. And by geologic standards, 40 million years isn’t extremely long. Death Valley, California, one of my favorite haunts, showcases some 30,000’ of sedimentary rock that was deposited over a period of 400 million years, between about 700 and 300 million years ago –and beneath them lies rock that records conditions on Earth’s surface over a billion years ago. Anyone can see these rocks, touch them, and imagine the incomprehensible.

Paleozoic strata in Death Valley

When I was in college, I encountered a textbook passage that helped me visualize geologic time. The author, Don Eicher of the University of Colorado, imagined Earth’s entire 4.54 billion year history compressed into a single year. He pointed out that, in this calendar, Earth’s first organisms would’ve lived sometime in late March, the first creatures that produced shelly fossils appeared November 17, and the first land plants around November 23. He included many noteworthy events, but they didn’t include the Cascade Range. By my calculations, the 40 million years of Cascade volcanic activity existed for about the last three days of this calendar year. The first humans? They appeared about 35 minutes before midnight.

It boggles the mind to think about how much humans have done in those 35 minutes, so much so that we’re considering naming a geologic period of time after ourselves: the Anthropocene. It’s likely that we’d designate it an “epoch” so it would naturally come after our present epoch, the Holocene, which followed the Pleistocene (Ice Age), which followed the Pliocene, and so on. Of course, any formal designation would require people to agree on exactly when it began and for that there is little consensus because humans caused major changes on Earth at different places during different times. The one time most researchers agree affected everywhere at once was the widespread atomic weapons testing in the late 1940s and 1950s, which spread radionuclides across the planet and are now an identifiable part of the sedimentary record.

Folded mylonitic gneiss, Death Valley, California

Without question, humans are an indomitable geologic force, especially since the early 1950’s. It’s no wonder many researchers call that time “The Great Acceleration”, when our technology and energy use increased exponentially. And less than 40 years later during the 1990s, we recognized that our activities move more material each year than any other natural force such as rivers or landslides or glaciers. Since then, our “bioturbation” has only increased. We have colonized every habitable nook and cranny on this planet and are precipitating environmental catastrophes we’re only beginning to comprehend.

But to call this human time period a geologic epoch seems to imply a certain longevity to both the period and to its trademark origin: Homo sapiens –and since 1950, the earth has aged barely a half second in its year-long calendar. I wonder how much longer we can last. To me, the concept of the Anthropocene as an epoch seems contingent on us surviving our environmental crises and continuing for thousands of years. After all, the Holocene Epoch, which it would replace, lasted for 10,000 years, and all the epochs before lasted millions. Instead of a new epoch, we may instead be in a transitional period from the Holocene to something that postdates Homo sapiens. If that’s the case, then we’re witnessing more of dramatic event: mass extinctions and environmental changes that will herald an altogether different ecosystem.

I reach down at my feet and untangle a wet plastic bag from some rocks that have fallen from the roadcut. So different, yet both pieces of sediment just the same. Both may find their way into the rock record. I wonder how our part of the record will appear long after our time has passed. I imagine we’ll be a readily identifiable layer, thick in some places and thin in others, and everywhere representing the same moment in time. It won’t be an epoch, but a fleeting second or two in Earth’s year of ages.

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Photos available for free download on geologypics.com

Posted in Geologic Time, Uncategorized and tagged , , ,
25 Oct 2022
6 Comments

Mountain in Transition

inside the crater of Mt. St. Helens
(click on images to see them at full size)

Terminus of Crater Glacier, Mt. St. Helens, Washington

There’s a glacier in the crater of Mt. St. Helens—and unlike most other glaciers, it’s growing. Shaded by soaring crater walls and continually replenished by snow avalanches and rockfalls, it oozes forward more than 100 feet per year. At the sound of a loud crack, I look up at its steep front to see a bunch of rocks breaking free of the ice and tumbling downwards to rejoin their compatriots at the bottom. Soon, the ice will advance over them and they’ll be a part of the glacier again.

I’ve long been attracted to these landscapes, practically devoid of organic life but alive just the same. They evoke a sense of timelessness, a connection to Earth’s past, long before mammals and reptiles, let alone humans, colonized its surface. Besides this glacier, near-continuous rock fall and rising dust plumes, there’s a 1000’ tall lava dome that still puts out steam. Younger than many teenagers, the dome formed as sticky silica-rich lava extruded from a vent in the crater floor. It rose to within 800 feet of the highest part of the rim over a period of 5 years, from 2004-2008. It now towers over an older dome, which grew from 1980 until 1986, scarcely middle-aged by human standards.

Crater domes and fumarole emissions. The dark ledge across the bottom of the photo marks the terminus of Crater Glacier.

My group is taking its lunch break. One person’s off shooting photos, a few are talking quietly, another’s inspecting some of the pumice and broken rocks that blanket this part of the crater. Our guides are conferring over our route. I feel lucky to be here, having been invited a few months ago to accompany the group to talk about the geology. The Mt. St. Helens Institute, the non-profit that organized the trip, does so under a special use permit from the Gifford Pinchot National Forest.

Looking northward to Spirit Lake and Johnston Ridge, I see a landscape of somber browns, yellows, and grays, decorated with greens. Most of those colors come from rock, either ancient bedrock or eruptive products from the big eruption in 1980.  The greens though come from vegetation that is rapidly covering the lower elevations. On the way here, we walked over ashy fields spotted with prairie lupine, paintbrush and a host of other wildflowers I couldn’t identify, small stands of juvenile Douglas Fir and through the occasional jungle of alder.

View northward from the crater entrance to Spirit Lake and the eastern edge of Johnston Ridge.

Almost nothing in my view was spared the effects of the 1980 eruption. At 8:32am, May 18, a magnitude 5.1 earthquake caused the bulging north side of the mountain to fail as a gigantic avalanche, releasing pressure on the magma within the volcano, which naturally expanded northwards at supersonic speeds. Entire forests blew over in the scalding hot gas. 10 miles from the crater and forty years later, you can still see many of these trees lying down in formation, just like toothpicks. The failed north side of the mountain, all .67 cubic miles of it, ranks as the world’s largest debris avalanche in recorded history. I can see its path, marked by giant piles of rock called hummocks. Even here in the crater are deposits of the debris avalanche, forming towers of conical pointed hills more than 100 feet high.

Hikers and landslide hummocks in the crater of Mt. St. Helens, Washington.

I stoop down to look at a small plant. It’s all by itself, growing between loose, rounded pieces of pumice and undoubtedly rooted in more of the same. An early colonizer. If the crater floor were to remain undisturbed, more vegetation would creep in and eventually, this place would become lightly forested like other places nearby at this elevation. Of course, that’s unlikely here, with an advancing glacier and all the rocks falling from the rim.

Or more eruptions! Mt. St. Helens is, without question, the most active volcano in the Cascade Range, with more than a dozen smaller eruptions since the big one on May 18. And long before 1980 there were hundreds. The US Geological Survey closely monitors Mt. St. Helens’s ongoing activity as well as its geologic past to understand the volcano’s behavior through time. They define its history in terms of four distinct eruptive “Stages” that stretch back some 275,000 years. The most recent of these, the Spirit Lake Stage, started about 3900 years ago and is further divided into six eruptive “Periods”, each marked by multiple eruptions and separated by times of dormancy. One of these eruptions, between 3500-3300 years ago during the Smith Creek Period, dwarfed the 1980 eruption. And in the early 1480s, two eruptions of comparable size to the one in 1980 occurred just two years apart.

Shading the sun from my eyes, I look southward to the volcano’s rim, and I can see a whitish layer produced by these two eruptions. It’s called the “W Tephra”. More than 250 feet of rock now sits above it –all formed after 1480. And there used to be 1300 feet of rock above that, until it was blasted off in 1980—which means that in 500 years, Mt. St. Helens grew more than a quarter mile in height. Just before its cataclysmic eruption, its summit stood 9,677 feet above sea level.

Dacite domes and Crater Glacier in crater of Mt. St. Helens, Washington. The W Tephra forms the light-colored band at the end of the arrow.

It’s the myriad smaller eruptions that cause a volcano to grow, and in the case of Mt. St. Helens, they mostly produce lava domes instead of lava flows. As a college student, I had the hardest time visualizing a lava dome because the photographs I saw just looked like gigantic piles of broken rock.  But that’s basically what they are, gigantic, dome-shaped, piles of rock. Imagine lava that is so viscous it can hardly flow, oozing out of a volcanic vent, and pushing aside or piling on top of earlier extruded lava, and cooling and breaking up in the process. By its very nature, silica-rich lava like the dacite of Mt. St. Helens is highly viscous. Silica molecules bond with each other to form interconnected networks, so the more silica in a lava, the more viscous it tends to be. Lower silica lavas like andesites contain fewer of those networks so they’re more likely to produce lava flows. Basaltic lavas contain even less silica and flow even easier.

Feeling a gentle breeze, I close my eyes and imagine this place sometime in the future. Two hundred years? Five hundred years? I picture the crater walls, slightly lower now, having steadily eroded through time, their debris gradually filling the crater. A couple large landslides have removed large fractions of one of the walls and piled their debris up against today’s modern domes. During this time, the mountain was largely dormant, but now a pulse of basaltic magma is working its way towards the surface, intruding the gray dacite domes along fracture surfaces as black basaltic dikes. Some of these dikes break through the top of the domes and spill out as basaltic lava flows, which flow a short way down and out of the crater. Mt. St. Helens awakens again, but this time, the lava is basalt so it awakens quietly.

I remind myself that this volcano hasn’t produced much basalt during its 275,000-year history. It doesn’t tend to “awaken quietly”, but more like some grumpy person who you’ve roused with a splash of ice water. Besides the numerous domes, its products typically depict violence: deposits of fallen ash or pumice, or pyroclastic flows, which consist of fast-moving ash, pumice and rock fragments mixed with hot gases. The only basalt lavas from Mt. St. Helens erupted during the end of the Castle Creek Period, which stretched from about 2500 to 1900 years ago. Ape Cave, the lava tube on the volcano’s south side, formed in these lavas, as did the steep rocky slopes we climbed on our hike into the crater. And there, low on the east crater wall, I can see the drama: black Castle Creek dikes slicing through light-colored rock of an older dacite dome. They’re overlain by dark-colored Castle Creek lava flows likely fed by the dikes below, just like my daydream.

Basaltic dikes of the Castle Creek Period cut an older dacite dome. Pyroclastic flow deposits form the layered materials near the bottom of the photo in shadow.

As we start our descent, I reflect on the ongoing Modern eruptive period. Before the first earthquakes on March 16, nearly everyone in the Pacific Northwest viewed Mt. St. Helens as a perfectly symmetrical and docile ice cream cone of a mountain. My college friend Michael longed to return home to Portland for long enough to climb it, partly because it offered such a wonderful glissade after summiting. Then less than two weeks after those first earthquakes, the first steam eruptions began. Then more earthquakes. Bulging of the northern edifice. Steam. Earthquakes. May 18. 

We’ve learned so much since then! We’ve watched the Modern Period unfold with our own eyes as well as with a vast array of ever-evolving instruments. We can see the rich details of the volcano’s behavior to the point that researchers divide the last 40 years into two subperiods, defined by the formation of each lava dome. We’ve watched Crater Glacier evolve from a snowfield to a full-on glacier that itself has experienced major changes in its shape and behavior. We’ve watched the crater rim erode. We’ve watched vegetation recolonize a landscape that was suddenly rendered devoid of nearly all organic life.

Loowit Falls and debris avalanche deposits.

Our group stops for a quick break at Forsyth Spring to absorb the flourishing willows, alders, and sounds of running water. I contemplate the earlier phases of Mt. St. Helens, reaching back to its origin as a series of lava domes 275,000 years ago. Those phases must have been as interesting and diverse as today, but we can experience them only through whatever preserved evidence we can find in the volcano’s deposits. We can’t taste the water or feel the freshness of new growth. Still, we can imagine it.

For this reason, I don’t think of today’s Mt. St. Helens as being “reborn” as it’s so often described. Sure, the vegetation is returning, but I can’t help but see it as incidental to the overall story of a volcano that’s always in transition. The 1980 eruption wasn’t an end point or a beginning –just an event that happened during a long eventful history. We’re experiencing just another moment, another transition, in this volcano’s cycle of life.

All photos freely available from geologypics.com. Click here for more photos of Mt. St. Helens and its geology. Type “Mt. St. Helens” into the search to see them all!

Posted in Geology, Geologic Time, science, Uncategorized, volcanoes and tagged , , , , , ,
25 Jul 2022
8 Comments

In Transit

This little black pebble, now sitting on my desk, traveled a lot today. After picking it up beneath a cliff face in southwestern Montana, I carried it in my pocket for a few hours and then drove some 20 miles to this college dorm where I’m staying.  It’s the most this pebble has moved for millions of years. 

Some time ago–this morning, a week, a year, 10 years, 100 years—the pebble weathered out of a much larger rock and fell to the ground. Its worn, rounded edges tell me that before it became part of that larger rock, it traveled down a stream bed –and its size tells me that its source probably wasn’t too far away. As is typical of stream gravel, its movement was irregular, marked by short bursts of movements during floods separated by longer periods of rest on a gravel bar or in the channel itself. Somewhere along the line, the pebble became buried by more sediment, probably because the land subsided or the river channel switched to another position. Eventually, the pebble and the rest of its surrounding sediment turned into rock.

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Posted in essay, Geology, Geology, Geologic Time, science, Uncategorized and tagged , , ,
27 Apr 2021
14 Comments

“Oregon Rocks!” My new book about Oregon’s Wonderful Geology

I’m very happy to announce that my new book, Oregon Rocks! A guide to 60 Amazing Geologic Sites, is out there and available. Although the title always makes me cringe a little, I’m excited and proud of this project, which took me three years to complete and took me all over my beautiful state. At the risk of being overly exuberant, here are some excerpts!

If you click on the image below, you can actually read the table of contents (left) and study the site map. Both these illustrations group the sites in one of Oregon’s six physiographic provinces: The Coast Range, Klamath Mountains, Cascade Range, Lava Plateaus, Blue Mountains, and Basin and Range.

Table of contents and site map of Oregon Rocks!

The site numbers are especially important –not only because they key to the map location and page numbers in the book –they also refer to the timeline and schematic cross-section across the state. I’m especially proud of this part because it lets you place each site into the context of how the entire region evolved. Click on the timeline and maps below to see what I mean!

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Posted in geophotography, Oregon geologic history, Oregon geology, photography, Uncategorized and tagged , , , , , , , , ,
16 Mar 2021
7 Comments

Skill and Spirit: Teaching field geology on public lands

 

Something different here: an essay I wrote about teaching field geology on public lands– published under the same title in the March, 2021 issue of Desert Report with a few extra photos added (please click on the photos to see them larger). I guess I’m hopeful –even optimistic– that I’ll be able to teach field camp again this summer! 
******************

Six pairs of eyes stared blankly at me. Cows. Amazing how big those creatures are, especially when you’re sitting on the ground so I was grateful they hadn’t already tried to share my tiny bit of shade. I stood up, shouldered my pack, and walked into the bright sun.

Folded Triassic rocks of the Dinwoody Formation

I’m in southwestern Montana, teaching a field geology class. It’s public land, a place I bring my students year after year without fear of locked gates or fences.  Besides the great geology, we see awesome views in all directions, innumerable cacti, wildflowers, and sagebrush, occasional wildlife, and of course, cattle. But we come for the rocks: layer after layer, deposited as seafloor sediment, coastal dune, or river gravel over a period spanning some 300 million years. We’re in what’s called the Rocky Mountain Fold-Thrust Belt, where the layers show twists and turns you can’t imagine, and fault zones that caused mountains to rise long before the present landscape even began to form.

And because the area’s managed by the Bureau of Land Management, we can go pretty much anywhere and everywhere over this 3 or 4 square mile area, just like the cows. Each student creates a detailed geologic map. They identify the rocks, draw lines on their maps to show the boundaries between different rock units, and use their maps to interpret the geologic history. It’s difficult work and highly rewarding ‒ and most students complete the course with a new-found sense of confidence and competence.

Students and thrust faults in Triassic LImestone and shale

I spot some students on a nearby ridge and veer off the gravel road to meet them. The sagebrush near the road is high, but as the slope steepens, it gives way to grass and ledges. On cresting the ridge, I call out:

 “How’s it going?”

“Okay” one of the students replies. We look at each other stupidly. I have no idea who it is.

“Hope you’re having a good day!” I say cheerfully and walk on.

These students aren’t mine. They’re from one of the many other universities that come here to teach field geology skills. With so many students tramping over this landscape every summer, following existing paths to key outcrops or creating their own, breaking pieces off the bedrock so they can inspect fresh surfaces, I sometimes worry that we might love this place to death.

I feel a slight cooling breeze and sit down. In front of me, the rocks form a rounded arch shape ‒ a product of crustal compression that built mountains here some 80 million years ago. The frustration of chasing down the wrong students morphs into gratitude. I think of the many students who’ve told me, years later, how much they learned here and how much it shaped their careers. Many describe how blending physical exertion with their academic backgrounds led to a sense of discovery they’d never before experienced.

I watch a pickup truck approach the cows down on the road. It slows briefly to pass by and then continues up the gentle grade. Multiple use ‒ that’s the BLM mantra. Besides grazing and wandering geology students, this place is open to energy development, timber harvesting, and all sorts of recreation. By comparison, our impact is small ‒ and the geology here will outlive all of us, no matter how many cattle trails we follow, or create, or how many outcrops we hammer. I’m grateful for our freedom to wander, pursuing education anywhere and everywhere here, and to arrive anytime without having to fill out any kind of paperwork.

****************************

Ten days later, I’m sitting on a block of limestone, listening to water cascade over some ledges before coalescing into a narrow stream. Above me, soaring cliffs of Helena Dolomite form the headwall to the once mighty Grinnell Glacier. Some of the glacier persists high up in this cirque, but the retreat has been so rapid and recent that the glacial scratches across the bedrock are still fresh. Two of my students sit silently, gazing upwards to the headwall. Another studies a rock with a hand lens. Two others slowly make their way towards my perch.

Glacier National Park hosts a vast wilderness of landforms designated by glacial terminology: peaks called horns, ridges called arêtes, cliffs called headwalls, bowl-shaped valley heads called cirques, rock-bound lakes called tarns, deep U-shaped valleys called U-shaped valleys ‒ all carved by glaciers into this amazing bedrock. I ponder what this place must have looked like 15,000 years ago when glaciers were at their maximum. The peaks and some ridges would be recognizable but the valleys between them would be filled with ice that extended in long strands to the edge of the Great Plains.

One of my students practically shrieks with excitement. I’ve been waiting for this: they found the stromatolites, fossilized algae ‒ Earth’s oldest easily visible life form. Resembling an onion in cross-section, these thin concentric layers of rock formed when dome-shaped bodies of algae in shallow clear water trapped sediment as they grew. The ones here, which reach a meter or more in diameter, are the largest and most dramatic I’ve seen.

I watch the other students hurry over as the contemplative mood lights into a spontaneous revival. One student starts laughing. Another exclaims, “Look at this one!” another says, “Oh God!” another: “And the glacial striations go right across them!” Another turns to me quizzically: “How old are these rocks?”

I smile. “I just read that they were all deposited between 1.4 and 1.47 billion years old ‒ so somewhere in there.”

Another question: “And these glacial striations, maybe 10 or 15,000?”

I keep smiling. This spot is one of my all-time favorite places. We hiked the five miles up here for sunrise and now, mid-morning, still have the place to ourselves. The landscape is so fresh and raw ‒ so untouched ‒ that we feel a primeval kinship with this rock and ice.

I finally answer. “Or younger. This place was under ice just thirty years ago. There’s still some glacier left, just across the lake. So much change, huh?”

Many of my students have visited national parks before, but this is the first time they’ve come as geologists. They now see things through the lens of geologic time and process ‒ and for the first time, they are applying their knowledge to a landscape that not only surrounds them, but is beautiful and pristine. They learned important skills earlier in the course on BLM land and here they combine those skills with their human spirits.

We cross the stream and start picking our way up the ledges on the other side, finding more stromatolites as we go. I hear my students talking about landscape and time. Like me, they can relate to today’s landscape, and can imagine the scene during the glacial maximum some 15,000 years ago, but the shallow inland sea in which these rocks formed seems beyond comprehension. Its age, about 1.4 billion years, makes it all the more inconceivable. And what does the word “about” mean in this context anyway? If the rocks formed 1.41 instead of 1.40 billion years ago, they would be a full ten million years older. As geologists, we bandy these ages around with comfort, but when we really think about it, we can’t comprehend 10 million years, let alone a billion.

Upper Grinnell Lake and Helena Dolomite

I stop and consider a series of stromatolites in front of me. They’re exposed on both the front and upper sides of the ledge, giving three-dimensional views of their mounded shapes. Weathering and erosion rounded off many of the broken edges, accentuating the stromatolite’s appearance. For a second, I think I can see them breathe.

Our little group falls silent as we watch a rain squall farther down the valley. What a vast open-air cathedral we’re in! Public lands, be they national parks or forests or open BLM land, house these wonderful places and welcome everyone who will make the journey.

To see more geological photos from from SW Montana or Glacier NP, please see my geology photo website, where you can use keywords to search among >4000 images and download them for personal or instructional uses for free.

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02 Mar 2021
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Oregon’s geologic history. A new cross-section and timeline –and some great places to see it.

Oregon sits at the very western edge of the North American Plate, an “active” plate margin in the truest sense of the term. There’s active uplift on the coast, active volcanic activity in the Cascade Range, and active crustal extension to the east—not to mention the active subduction just offshore that’s driving most of it.  And the products of all that activity are today’s amazing beaches, forests, sand dunes, playa lakes, plateaus, mountain peaks, rivers –the list goes on.

Folded Ribbon Chert on the Oregon Coast –click on the images to see them enlarged

Collectively, those landscapes paint a picture of Oregon and its geology today. But Oregon’s geologic history stretches back some 300 million years to its oldest rocks of Devonian age and will continue into the future until who knows when. We live in a snapshot of an unfolding geologic history –and while we can’t see the landscapes of the future, we have the rock record to show us some of the landscapes of the past.

Schematic Cross-section across Oregon, from Oregon Rocks! –The red letters refer to places described here, the numbers refer to sites in my new book.

The schematic cross-section above outlines Oregon’s geology, with each different color signifying a different grouping of rock, and therefore, a different part of its geologic history. The heavy red dashed line marks the boundary between Oregon’s “basement rock”—a term that refers to the deepest level crustal rock in a given area—and its cover. Oregon’s basement rock consists of disparate crustal fragments called “terranes” that were accreted to the edge of North America since about 200 million years ago or igneous bodies called “stitching plutons” (in pink) that intruded the terranes. The cover consists of sedimentary and igneous rocks that formed after accretion and over the top of the terranes.

Fun fact: Oregon has the shortest geologic history of any state in the conterminous US! That’s because its geologic history only goes back as far as the oldest rock of its oldest accreted terrane, which is some Devonian (419-359 million years) limestone in the Blue Mountains. All the other states have basement that includes rock of Precambrian North America. In many states, this older rock isn’t exposed, but we’ve seen it in well cuttings or on seismic lines. In Oregon, it’s simply not there! –the basement has all been added onto the edge of the ancient continent.

Read more…
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30 Nov 2020
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Five Awesome Minerals –for rocks and landscapes

All told, we humans have discovered more than 5000 mineral types. I challenged myself to list the five most important minerals when it comes to the formation of rocks and their subsequent weathering and erosion into landscape.

Rock, which makes up our planet, consists of different minerals. This granite is made of, Q=quartz, O=orthoclase feldspar, P=plagioclase feldspar, B=biotite mica (IP18-1012ce)

It’s an impossible task –and subjective, of course –and I fudged a bit by grouping some minerals together. But here they are: the silicate minerals quartz, mica, feldspar, and mafic minerals, and the carbonate mineral, calcite. I invite you to take me to task in the comments section. Even so, these five minerals are easy to identify and are critical to any discussion about rocks –which makes them important to understanding weathering and erosion. And, I’m adding them to my already packed curriculum for my introductory class on surface processes next term, so five seems to be a good upper limit on the numbers.

Oh! Click on any image to see it enlarged on a separate page.

The five awesomest minerals

Weathering, by the way, is the in-place physical and/or chemical breakdown of rock; erosion is its removal –so they go hand-in-hand. A lot goes into how susceptible a rock is to these processes—not just the mineral content—and when it comes to chemical breakdown, the main factors always involve water. If a rock is accessible to water, it will break down more quickly; if it’s not accessible to water, it will be more resistant.

Fractures in granite collect water and host vegetation, focusing weathering along the fracture. Acadia National Park, Maine. (100608-59)

Because some rocks will weather and erode more quickly than others, landscapes form with cliffs and valleys and steep slopes, gentle slopes –all sorts of variation you can imagine—depending in part on the bedrock. We call the phenomenon “differential erosion”. You can find more detail on the processes in one of my earlier posts, called “Shaping of Landscape“.

Differential weathering and erosion: Mexican Hat, Utah (9OtR-049)

Ok… the minerals:

Quartz  –most people have come to know quartz because of its pretty crystals –especially the purple variety called amethyst—but they might not realize that it’s a hugely important component of many igneous, metamorphic, and sedimentary rocks, and it forms the cement of many sedimentary rocks.  When it comes to weathering, quartz is practically inert chemically, so a strongly quartz-cemented sandstone will be more resistant to weathering and erosion than most other sedimentary rocks. The sandstone will stand out in relief, likely as cliffs or even overhangs. By contrast, weakly cemented, often finer-grained rocks tend to form slopes or even valleys.

Differential erosion along the Front Range of Colorado: resistant, inclined sandstone beds form ridges while intervening shale forms a valley. (131025-52)

If you look closely at a sandstone like the one below, chance are you’ll see mostly quartz grains. Quartz grains might break up into little pieces as they’re being transported by rivers, for example, but they won’t turn into clay like most other minerals. The result? Sediment gets increasingly rich in quartz the farther it’s transported from its source –and so if it travels a great distance, quartz is just about the only thing left!

Close-up views of quartz sandstone and cement. Photo on right is enlarged approx 3x. (click on it to see it even larger) Nearly all those little sand-sized particles are quartz! (201120-10i)

And if you’re one of those people who really love this mineral, check out this post by Roseanne Chambers, which is all about quartz!

Micas are those shiny sheet-like minerals we see catching the light in a whole host of rocks. The best known micas are muscovite (white mica) and biotite (black mica). In metamorphism, they grow larger with increases in temperature, providing a handy way to distinguish between slate, phyllite, and schist — a nice thing to know in a geology class. The diagram below illustrates the process.

With increasing temperature, the clay within shale will recrystallize to microscopic mica to make slate a hard, metamorphic rock with a dull luster. Even hotter and the micas grow larger to produce phyllite, which has a reflective sheen, and then become easily visible in schist. Hotter still and coarse minerals segregate into layers to make gneiss. (201119-12e)

When it comes to weathering and erosion, those little mica sheets allow infiltration of water. Metamorphic rocks overall are pretty resistant because of their crystallinity –but slates or schist, for example, degrade much more quickly than gneisses because of their prevalence of mica minerals, which together create a fine-scale layering in the rock. Gneisses are coarse-grained, and their layering tends to be thicker and less permeable.

Collectively, feldspars are the most common minerals of the Earth’s crust –and there are numerous varieties, the most common being orthoclase and plagioclase, which often occur together. For the purposes of landscapes, I grouped them together as one: they’re all kind of chunky looking and are generally light-colored. Feldspars are the main components of igneous rocks, making up 60-70% (or even more) of most granitic rocks, which tend to form distinctive landscapes marked by cliffs and large rounded boulders.

Spheroidal weathering in Cretaceous granitic rock, SE California. Mt. Whitney and the Sierra Nevada in background. (180314-91)

The “mafic minerals” are named so because they’re generally rich in iron and magnesium and poor in silica when compared to a lot of other common minerals –and they’re typically dark green to black in color, so “mafic rocks” like basaltic lavas also tend to be darker colored. The main mafic minerals are olivine, pyroxene, and amphibole. Olivine, as it turns out, is our planet’s most common mineral! It’s the main stuff of the mantle, which depending on where you are, lies some 10-40km below the surface.

Hikers on basalt flow on Mauna Loa Volcano in Hawaii; cinder cone (also basalt, but weathered red from oxidized iron) in background. Inset shows large olivine crystals in basalt surrounded by mostly pyroxene and calcium-rich plagioclase feldspar. (170917s-14) and 200517-4) Please click the link for a post on this amazing volcano!

The physical properties of these mafic minerals explain all sorts of things like why oceanic plates subduct beneath continental ones (being made of mafic minerals, they’re denser so they sink) to the shapes of volcanoes (mafic lavas, being less viscous than silicic ones, tend to form broad, low-relief shield volcanoes). For surface weathering and erosion, the mafic minerals tend to break down into clay more quickly than most other silicate minerals –which means that all else being equal, rocks with more mafic minerals will weather and erode faster than rocks with the other silicate minerals described here.

Mauna Kea Shield Volcano, Hawaii (left), made from basalt, which is more fluid (less viscous) than more silicic lavas like andesite, which make steeper cones such as Mt. Shasta in California. (170918s-83 and 140617-114)

Finally, calcite, the sole non-silicate on this list, is hugely important because it’s what makes up the very common sedimentary rock limestone. Limestones occupy a separate class of sedimentary rock than sandstones: they’re “biogenic”, having formed through the precipitation of calcite through biological processes, as opposed to “clastic”, which are just broken particles. As a result, they’re important to understanding sedimentary rocks, and because of the biology connection, Earth history and evolution. For landscapes, limestones are also really important because the calcite will dissolve in slightly acidic water to form caves and sinkholes–there’s a whole class of landscape called “Karst”, which results from the dissolution of limestone.

The “fizz test”: calcite crystal (left) and limestone (right) both react with a weak solution of hydrochloric acid to give off carbon dioxide gas –because they’re both made of the same material (201122-11 and 201111-17)

And re-precipitation of calcite within caves forms the beautiful speleothems we so love –stalactites, stalagmites, flowstone… the list goes on. That rock, called travertine, occupies a third class of sedimentary rock called “chemical sedimentary rocks”.

Stalagmite, Carlsbad Caverns NP, New Mexico. (100131-63)

Phew! My apologies to those mineralogy people who might read this and think, “but she missed that important idea! And that one too! And what about that mineral?” Maybe that’s the point though –this is just a start. There is so much these five minerals can teach us –and there are so many other wonderful minerals I didn’t even mention. So here’s to reading more info that somebody might’ve put into the comments section. Here also to all the geology majors out there who take upper level geology courses that delve into all the amazing detail and make connections that I wasn’t able to in this little space!

Olivine. I already know that I didn’t do olivine justice. (201119-20)

And if you want to download any of these photos for your own –just type in the photo id into the search function of my geology photo website.

Also, I posted a primer on rock types –if you’re interested, please have a look –and thanks for reading!

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