Northern Convergence: Leaving a Beautiful Country

How will we deal with the hordes of people from the U.S. trying to invade our borders?

Our trip, the Northern Convergence tour, was not over, but the time had come to cross the border back into the United States from Canada. The trip thus far had been an eye-opener. We had been exploring the "crowded" part of Canada in British Columbia and Alberta, but the land itself exuded wildness and isolation.

We were on the High Plains east of the Rocky Mountains, and had spent the morning at the Head Smashed In Buffalo Jump World Heritage Site, and as gruesome as the name was, it was a fascinating place. From there we headed south to the border crossing at Carway. We figured since it had a name that there would be a town and facilities. We got there, and there was...one building. It was a duty-free souvenir/liquor/tobacco shop, and thank goodness, it had a restroom. Still, there were some picnic tables so we stopped for lunch and had a look around. We also wondered if the authorities were going to let us back into the United States. You never know...in the innocent days before 9/11, we were interrogated about whether we had any "Beanie Babies" in our luggage. I laughed at the question, and the border agent got very serious: "Sir, DO YOU have any Beanie Babies?"

We were not exactly in the High Plains, as the land was broken up into swales and shallow valleys underlain by very soft Cretaceous shale deposits. The shales had been deformed and twisted by the same convergent forces that had lifted the nearby Rocky Mountains, but erosion had smoothed off the sharp edges. The land was semiarid and treeless. More verdant lands could be seen in the distance as we looked westward towards the Rocky Mountains and Waterton-Glacier International Peace Park. Glacier National Park was our next destination.

Chief Mountain was especially prominent on the western horizon. The peak is an outlier of the Rocky Mountains, an isolated upper plate of a thrust fault that had pushed the hard Paleozoic limestones over the softer Cretaceous rock. Erosion had then isolated Chief Mountain as a klippe (see the diagram below).

The mountain was a dramatic welcome back into the United States. We only had a few more days left on our journey, but there was still much to be seen. The story will continue in another post!

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klippe

Northern Convergence: Athabasca Glacier, at the Front Line of Climate Change

Athabasca Glacier and Sunwapta Lake in July 2014

Athabasca Glacier in Jasper National Park is one of the few places in the world where one can drive to a glacier. It is also one of the most vivid places to see the global warming in action.

We were in the midst of our Northern Convergence journey through British Columbia and Alberta last July when we pulled up at the visitor center for the Columbia Icefield. Up to this point we had seen a large number of small glaciers tucked away in the high peaks of Yoho and Banff National Parks, and we had seen plentiful evidence of past glaciations at nearly all the localities we had been visiting over the previous six days. But here at Athabasca Glacier, we were confronted with ice. Lots of ice, just a short distance from the end of the road. It was not unlike stepping out of a time machine into the last ice age.

Athabasca Glacier in 1919. Sunwapta Lake does not yet exist.

One of the first issues that we were confronted with is global climate change. The Earth is warming up at an alarming rate, and the warming couldn't be made clearer than the fact that Athabasca Glacier is shrinking. Since the 1800s the glacier has receded more than a mile, forming a new lake, Sunwapta. It was visibly shorter than it was on my last visit in 2005 (see a comparison below).

We took in a brief overview of the glacier from the visitor center complex along the highway. We then crossed the highway and parked at the base of the rocky knob in the photo above.

We started up the trail, which was steep in a few spots, but not overly difficult. 

Looking behind as we climbed the slope we could see Sunwapta Lake, which did not exist prior to a few decades ago. Note the barren flats. There should be trees growing at this altitude, but the rocky debris and till has not had time to develop soils. This is a newly exposed landscape.

A marker along the trail appeared. It's message was rather stark. Only three decades ago, ice covered this spot.

The bedrock marks the passage of the ice in the form of striations (scratch marks from sand particles in the ice), and grooves.

We reached the top of the hill, where the ice existed as recently as 1992. Despite the decline in the size of the glacier, it is still an impressive sight. The ice ranges in thickness from 300 to 1,000 feet (roughly 100 to 300 meters). The crevasses mark the places where the ice is moving over a steep dropoff.

Large lateral moraines line the sides of the glacier. If it were not receding so rapidly, it would also have a terminal moraine around the end.

As we approached the terminus, we could see the swollen river of meltwater emerging from the ice. The river blocked easy access to the ice. There were a few boards to make a rudimentary bridge, but sternly worded signs warned of the dangers of actually going out onto the ice itself. Death, you know, from falling into crevasses and through thin ice (and yes, it happens).

Compare this photo to a shot from the same spot in 2005, below

The entire area covered by the river water had been covered at the time of my visit in 2005. Getting on the ice was easier, even encouraged, at the time. Not anymore.

Athabasca Glacier terminus in 2005

Much of the snout of the glacier was covered with dirt, boulders and debris exposed as the glacier melts.

The glacier is "fed" by the Columbia Icefield, a vast expanse of ice covering 125 square miles (325 square kilometers) between some of the highest peaks of the Canadian Rockies. Six major glaciers flow from the huge mass of ice coating the high divide. Meltwater from the glaciers flows to the both the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, as well as Hudson Bay and to the Arctic Ocean (thanks, Howard, for the correction). The icefield lies east of a gap in the Columbia Mountains that allows Pacific storms to drop prodigious amounts of snow each year, around 30 feet (ten meters).

In some places the chunks of ice simple fall off the cliffs into the cirques below. I saw one of these icefalls on my earlier visit, and was watching closely this time around, but no dice this year.

At the rate that the glacier is receding, it will probably be gone by the end of the century. There can hardly be a starker piece of evidence that the Earth's climate is warming. It is as plain as the nose on  one's face, unless you are a politician whose re-election depends on funding from lobbying groups who are paying you to be blind.

We returned to our vehicles and drove down the Icefields Parkway to a new destination: the High Plains of Alberta. We were on the trail to find some dinosaurs...more later.

Northern Convergence: A Geological Journey Through Canada and the Pacific Northwest

Some of the world's most dramatic landscapes exist within the strip of the North American continent between the High Plains of Canada and Montana and the Pacific Coast. The geologists call it the Western Cordillera, part of the mountain system that extends from the tip of South America to Alaska.

This mountainous terrain exists in large part because of a subduction zone that is or was once active offshore in the Pacific Ocean. This convergent boundary provided the mostly compressional forces that lifted these mountains.

We've just completed a journey across this incredible landscape, with the first ever extended tour of Canada by our department. Our travels took us from the Olympic Peninsula of Washington State to Vancouver Island, on a ferry across the Strait of Georgia to the Coastal Belt mountains and then into the western interior. We passed through Yoho, Banff, and Jasper National Parks in the Rocky Mountains, and spent some time on the High Plains before heading back into the States at Glacier National Park.

The journey was a collaboration between the geology and anthropology programs at Modesto Junior College. We learned the geological history of the land as well as the human history. It is a tough landscape, but people have lived and thrived here for at least 12,000 years.

The land also preserves the story of the ice times. Canada and the northern tier of states were once covered by thousands of feet of glacial ice. The glaciers had a profound effect on the landscape, and many of them still persist in the high country.

The High Plains reveal many secrets of past life forms on Earth. We paid a visit to one of the finest paleontology museums anywhere, the Royal Tyrrell in Drumheller, Alberta.

On our way back through Montana and Washington, we observed the effects of one of the greatest flood events in world history, the Spokane Floods of 16,000-12,000 years ago.

Our journey ended at one of the most visible effects of convergence: active volcanism. We explored part of Mt. Rainier, one of the most spectacular volcanoes on the planet.

Our route took us through some fascinating geology, and this new blog series will share some of the incredible things we saw. Stay tuned!

The Road Goes Ever Ever On: Getting Into the Field Again!

 

Roads go ever ever on,

Over rock and under tree,

By caves where never sun has shone,

By streams that never find the sea;

Over snow by winter sown,

And through the merry flowers of June,

Over grass and over stone,

And under mountains in the moon.

 

The Hobbit, by J.R.R. Tolkien

 

The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings were an important part of my youth, in part because Tolkien constructed a vividly real world in which he set his stories. The mountains of Middle-Earth, whether the Misty Mountains, the Lone Mountain, or the jagged cliffs surrounding Mordor, all seemed to evoke real places that I noted as I grew and traveled more and more. The poetry was pretty cool too, and I think of this poem whenever I set out on a new journey. Can anyone see the Misty Mountains north of Moria in a picture like that above (out of Banff?)

 

I love taking people to new places they have never seen, and helping them to understand the sometimes mysterious forces that produce these awesome landscapes. We don't usually have to battle orcs and goblins, but there ARE mosquitoes, tourons, and the occasional bear.

 

What I like better is to see new places and to get to know them. That's why this week is a bit special, because it combines the two. I'm taking our students to some familiar places to me, like Mt. Rainier, the Channeled Scablands, Glacier National Park, and Banff. But I'm also going to be discovering some places that are new to me as well: Olympic National Park, Vancouver Island, the Sea to the Sky Highway out of Vancouver and Whistler. I'm leaving this morning on a scouting expedition, and I'm feeling as excited as any of my students.

Posting will be off and on, as we will occasionally be in some isolated regions, but I'll certainly try to put up some pictures from the road. Take care, all!

Does this resemble Erebor, the Lonely Mountain, at least to those with a pre-Peter Jackson image in their minds?

Picture of the Day - The Airliner Chronicles Part 10

Back to the air...sorry, no context for this one, because United doesn't provide a GPS tracker. I can only say it was in northern Canada somewhere, and southwest of Baffin Island. I dunno, do continental glaciers have any influence on a landscape? And just what is a deranged stream pattern anyway? Lots of kettle lakes here.

Picture of the Day - The Airliner Chronicles Part 8

Several of my flights have passed over Greenland and northern Canada, giving me a chance to see some glacial features that I may never otherwise have a chance to see in my travels on the ground. Here are some beautiful drumlins partially submerged in water. I am struck by the absolute barreness of these landscapes, perhaps hundreds of miles from any human settlement. I think this was in the vicinity of Baffin Island, but as I mentioned in an earlier post, United didn't offer a GPS screen when movies were running. I haven't found the site on GoogleEarth yet, and I invite anyone to try and find it!