No, It's Not Erupting...and Probably Won't Any Time Soon: Mt. McLoughlin in the Oregon Cascades

There is a grand and momentary sight to be had if you are driving south on Interstate 5 about seven or eight miles north of Medford, Oregon. If the weather is clear when you round the last bend before the Rogue Valley, a beautifully symmetrical volcano comes into view. It is called Mt. McLoughlin. It's really quite dangerous for geologists to drive on this highway because of our tendency to swerve and hit the brakes the moment we see the volcano and start scrabbling around trying to find the camera. I get honked at a lot by angry truckdrivers all the time around that moment.

Luckily for me, Mrs. Geotripper was riding shotgun today, and I knew the corner was coming up. She got the camera ready ahead of time and was able to snap a couple of pictures. With the news of volcanoes erupting around the world at the moment (check out Mt. Etna in Italy and Krakatoa in Indonesia, for instance), it's not surprising to consider for a moment that McLoughlin looks like it's erupting. What we are seeing here is clouds forming as warmer air masses are blown upslope into colder air around the summit. The cooler temperatures cause the humidity to jump and condensation forms the clouds around the volcano summit. Sometimes the clouds are more lens-shaped (lenticular), giving rise to legends of UFO landings and aliens.

Mt. McLoughlin is 9,495 feet (2894 meters) in elevation and can best be described as a composite cone, as it is in part a basaltic shield with a prominent summit cinder cone and andesite flows. It has not erupted in the last 20,000-30.000 years and thus appears to be low on the list of recognized hazardous volcanoes. From some angles McLoughlin is a deceptively symmetrical cone. The summit has been deeply carved by glaciers.

Mt. McLoughlin is soon lost among the trees, buildings, and powerlines of Medford. It's not a particularly worrisome volcano although it is capable of wreaking havoc if the unlikely ever happens. But if you keep driving south on I-5, there are highway signs pointing to a volcano, or more correctly, a caldera, that is not visible at all from the freeway. It's Crater Lake, and it is a much more dangerous volcanic complex than McLoughlin. It erupted catastrophically only 7,000 years ago. And farther south still is Mt. Shasta. It looms menacingly over Northern California, and we'll have a short look at it in our next post.

POSTSCRIPT: I found out I had some aerial shots of McLoughlin from a flight I took in 2005. Here's one of the best. We were east of the volcano looking west. The glacial cirques are clearly visible...

After the Disasters that Formed the Crater Lake and Crooked River Calderas, St. Helens was Hardly a Blip...Right? Uh, Right?

Yup, perspective is everything. I've been going on for several posts about prehistoric volcanic eruptions that were pretty much unimaginable in their violence and destructiveness. The Crater Lake eruption took place 7,700 years ago, and put 15 cubic miles of ash into the atmosphere, covering much of the western North America. The Crooked River Caldera dwarfed the Crater Lake event, with something like 200 cubic miles of ash. A repeat of either event would result in a huge death toll, and a serious threat to civilization. Luckily, such events are relatively rare in the time frame of human history.

Which brings us to the next destination from our field studies journey through the Pacific Northwest last June: Mt. St. Helens in southern Washington. Every school child for the last 37 years knows the familiar profile of the mountain as it exists today, and vaguely knows that it looked much different prior to 1980. It appears in pretty much every science textbook in the United States, being the last volcano to erupt in the lower forty-eight states.

Mt. St. Helens prior to the May 18, 1980 eruption. Source: U.S. Geological Survey

The problem these days is that for many people, St. Helens is ancient history. It is a geological event that took place years before they were born, and as such there is a disconnect regarding the reality and intensity of the events that took place in 1980 and the years following. I'm even guilty of belittling the event by comparing it to the prehistoric eruptions that happened in the region thousands and millions of years ago

Mt. St. Helens in 2002. Note the lava dome in the crater interior

The eruption of Mt. St. Helens may not have been on the scale of Crater Lake or the Crooked River events, but it was a huge event, almost beyond imagination, by any kind of human standard. What had once been a mountain nearly 10,000 feet high was reduced to a smoldering crater 1,300 feet shorter. The trigger that led to the disastrous explosion was the largest mass wasting (landsliding) event ever witnessed by human beings. And many people lost their lives, despite the evacuation and relative remoteness of the mountain.

The eruption began in March of 1980 when a moderate 4.1 magnitude earthquake shook the mountain, the largest ever recorded. Geologists were concerned and wired the mountain with whatever sensors they could think of. The rising mass of magma began to interact with groundwater and ice within the mountain, and a series of ash eruptions tore away at the summit of the volcano. The magma began to push outwards on the north flank of the mountain producing a 600 foot high bulge. Geologists were concerned about slope stability, but what happened was far beyond what they expected, or could even imagine. On May 18, 1980 at 8:32 in the morning, a magnitude 5.1 earthquake shook the bulge loose in a titanic debris avalanched that dwarfed any ever seen by humans. It thundered down the north flank, partly into Spirit Lake, with the remainder shooting down the Toutle River valley for 12 miles. Twelve miles.

The loss of the bulge meant that there was no longer any pressure holding back the gas-rich magma chamber, and it exploded with the power of hundreds of atomic bombs. The main blast was directed north and west, again towards Spirit Lake, and down the Toutle River valley. The ash was moving so fast (around 300 mph) it actually passed the fast-moving debris avalanche, so that in places the ash layer is actually covered by the avalanche deposits.

Mt. St. Helens in 2006, during the eruption that began in 2004. Note the second dome in the crater, behind the first.

The ash traveled north at hurricane speeds, up and over the intervening ridges, ultimately traveling around fifteen miles. The heavy dust-laden air downed nearly every tree in its path, stripping away branches and bark. Unless they were already underground in burrows, no animals survived in the main blast zone. The total area of devastation was around 150 square miles.

USGS geologist David Johnston, monitoring the volcano from an observation station on the ridge that now bears his name was one of the first people killed by the blast. Despite the evacuation orders (which were not far enough away from the volcano anyway), 57 people died.

These are just numbers, and numbers can't always describe the totality of the destruction of this volcanic eruption. You pretty much have to stand in the middle of it, and walk it. My first exposure to the devastation came about dozen years after the main blast (smaller-scale eruptions continued through 1986). I drove to the Windy Ridge Observation Point on the east side, which at the time was the only real viewpoint. The mountain was socked in by clouds (I had one brief glimpse of the outline of the volcano), but mile after mile of downed forest drove home the magnitude of the devastation.

I began bringing my students to the volcano in the 1990s once the road to the Johnston Ridge Observatory was opened. It provides an almost terrifying view into the maw of the gigantic crater, as well as a 360 degree view of the devastation. Tree trunks still litter the landscape, and only a few spindly conifers have begun to replace those that were blown away in 1980. The mountain ecosystem is well underway towards recovery however. Areas that were gray and dusty during my first visit are now green and covered by shrubs and wildflowers.

The mountain erupted again in 2004, and of course all the networks and cable new outlets converged on the mountain to report on the death and devastation. They hung around for a week or so and no one died, so they got bored and went back to their breathless coverage of missing white women (yes, that was a thing for months, and both stories involved Modesto in one way or another). The eruption continued for four more years, and a new 900 foot high dome appeared behind the 1986 dome.

The last time we tried to explore St. Helens with students was in 2011. The day was rainy and fog-bound, and we saw literally nothing of the volcano or the devastation, wasting hours of valuable time in the attempt. That was on my mind last June as we sized up the weather reports for the day of our expected visit... they called for rain. Mrs. Geotripper suggested we might skip a few "minor" stops the day prior to our scheduled visit, and catch the mountain in the late afternoon. It turned out to be a great idea, and all we missed was a view of the crater rim, due to the advance clouds from the coming storm.

The hummocky surface of the debris flow is still very evident in the valley of the Toutle River. The brush has had a harder time covering the small hillocks because soils can't readily develop on the steep slopes. Hundreds of new trees can be seen on the slopes beyond the valley floor however. Two new lakes formed in 1980 because the debris flow blocked some of the side canyons. Ecosystems are developing in these new environments as well.

The forest belt of Washington is not necessarily know for wildflower shows, but the slopes around the Johnston Ridge Observatory are for the time being vast meadows. Until the forest recovers, wildflowers will be part of the visitor experience.

As we traveled down the highway towards our camp, we noted a striking difference in the forest as we left the national monument and entered onto private lands owned by lumber companies. The forest was as uniform as a cornfield. The companies lost a great deal of timber during the eruptions, and it made sense to replant trees as quickly as possible. It's a bit disconcerting to see what amounts to monoculture going on. One hopes that these trees aren't vulnerable to the boring tree beetles that have destroyed forests across the western United States.

We headed down the hill to our camp at Seaquest State Park at Silver Lake. We had been privileged to see most of the volcano, and gained a perspective of the devastation from the ground. I wished I could have shown my students even more, and was reminded of a flight I took to Seattle a number of years ago. It happened to be one of those rare perfectly clear days, and the flight was only half full. The stewards gave me some dirty looks as I gleefully jumped from one side of the plane to the other snapping pictures of Cascades volcanoes (I got great shots of every volcano north of Crater Lake to Mt. Rainier). And I got pictures of Mt. St. Helens from the air for the first time.

We flew on the west side of Mt. St. Helens which provided me a view of Mt. Adams in the distance, and the Toutle River valley in the foreground. The gray strip of flood plain reveals the location of the debris avalanche, providing a perspective on the size of the flow.

In the big picture of Earth history, the eruption of Mt. St. Helens will barely register as a blip. Unless future researchers find the debris avalanche deposits, the record of the eruption in most places will be a thin layer of ash, at most a few inches thick. It would be an unremarkable eruption. But the eruption happened in modern times. We had accurate records of the volcano as it existed before, and excellent documentation of the events of May 18, 1980 (had the day been cloudy, we would be confused by some of the deposits). And we know what the volcano looks like today. The changes by any human standard were huge, and the effects on society very large. There was nothing small about the eruption of Mt. St. Helens.

If you are interested in the St. Helens story, may I recommend an excellent series on the eruptions by fellow geoblogger Dana Hunter at Rosetta Stones (click here for the index). She did a stellar job of bringing the volcano to life, along with the stories of those who were affected by the disaster.

When Life Gives You a Single Point of View, Milk it For All it's Worth: Crater Lake in June

It never fails. I secretly control the incidences of drought and flooding in the western United States. How? By scheduling our summer field studies a full year in advance. The proof? Every time I schedule a Southwest trip, the climate changes to long-term drought, and it is a hot summer. Every time I schedule a trip to the Pacific Northwest, the drought breaks and we have record snowfall in the winter that doesn't melt until well into the summer. This was the case in 2011, our last northwest trip, and it was the case again this summer, in 2017.

In 2011, we saw that Crater Lake was snowbound, so we didn't even try to go there, heading into Newberry Crater instead. Even though somewhat lower, it was buried in snowdrifts as well. It had now been more than a decade since I had laid eyes on Crater Lake, so I planned the visit anyway, even though most of the roads were closed, and we would have to backtrack 80 miles off our trip route.

The only problem with having a single point of access and only a few parking lots plowed of snow was that only so many people could be accommodated in the park at a time, and June's massive heat wave was just getting started. People wanted to cool off, so they headed up into the mountains to Crater Lake. As a result spent 45 minutes in line at the entrance station, and our four vans were on their own for parking. We radioed each other to meet up at a rendezvous point near the rim once parking site was secured. So it was that instead of exploring a national park, we had the singular opportunity to view it from just one part of the rim.

And yet, what a sight it was! Just the dimensions are stunning. The lake is six miles across and 1,949 feet deep (542 meters), the deepest in the United States, the second deepest in North America, and the ninth deepest in the world (Baikal in Russia is the winner of that race, at 5,387 feet, or 1,642 meters). The deep blue color of the lake follows from the clarity of the water, which has been measured as deep as 175 feet (53 meters). It's not just the reflection of the sky above (note that the sky is lighter than the lake surface). The clear water absorbs the longer light waves at the red end of the spectrum, but scatters and reflects the shorter waves at the blue end of the spectrum.

The "crater" of Crater Lake is not a crater in the usual sense. It is a world-class example of a caldera, a volcanic feature that develops when a huge volume of ash explodes out of volcano, and the summit sinks into the void left behind. It was an unimaginable catastrophe. In the space of a few hours or days around 15 cubic miles of ash and debris were blasted into the atmosphere from the summit area of Mt. Mazama, the name given to the former volcano that became Crater Lake. What had once been a volcano as tall as 12,000 feet was now a smoking ruin with a rim barely exceeding 8,000 feet. The bottom of the caldera was another 4,000 feet lower. The ash was spread across the western United States and Canada, providing a crucial dating horizon for archaeologists (the ash has a unique chemical composition that can be identified in dig sites).

The lake itself, of course, came later. It is estimated that it took around 700 years for the lake to fill the depression to the level of the current day. There is no inlet or outlet. Water comes from snow and rain, and the level is balanced by evaporation and seepage (there are numerous springs around the flanks of the volcano). Fish are not native to the lake, but several kinds were introduced over the years. They don't do particularly well because of the purity of the water (there are few nutrients to support a food chain).

The Crater Lake caldera is young in the geologic sense, having erupted 7,700 years ago (+/- 150 years). Think about that: the ancestors of the indigenous people of the region saw and experienced this event. Their oral histories of the Klamath people recall the event. How many cultures in in today's world have collective memories that date back that far?

One might wonder if any eruptions from recorded history can match the violence of the Mazama eruption 7,700 years ago. It turns out there is. In 1815, Tambora, a 14,000 foot high volcano on the island of Sumbawa in Indonesia exploded with a fury equivalent to that of Crater Lake. The summit collapsed into a caldera in the manner of Crater Lake. After 200 years, a lake has begun to accumulate on the caldera floor.

Tens of thousands of people on the island died from the eruption itself or starvation later (all vegetation on the island was destroyed). So much ash was blown into the atmosphere that the climate cooled to the extent that snow fell during the summer months over much of the northern hemisphere. Famine contributed to hundreds of thousands of deaths around the world.

When we visited the park, the lake was still covered by snow, and crowded with tourists, but none of that could obscure the incredible story told by the rocks and water. The Cascade volcanoes are capable of great violence. The eruption of Mt. St. Helens in 1980 killed around four dozen people and did a billion dollars in damage, but the volume of that eruption was only about 1/60th the size of the eruption of Mazama 7,700 years ago. It's hard to imagine the effects of such an eruption in today's technological society. Would we be talking about it 8,000 years later?

Hitting the Road in the Best Way: Into the Pacific Northwest, and With My Students!

It's the time of year I love the most, our field season, when my students and I hit the road. We are making a grand loop, heading north along the spine of the Cascades, with stops at Mt. Shasta, Lava Beds, Crater Lake (above), St. Helens, and Mt. Rainier. We'll then head across eastern Washington through the Channeled Scablands, and climb into the northern Rocky Mountains at Glacier National Park. From there we'll head south into Yellowstone and Grand Tetons National Parks, and cross the Basin and Range Province on our way back home. Y'all have my permission to let up on the heat wave by the time we come back (stay cool and safe). Needless to say, postings on Geotripper will probably be sparse, but I'll give it a try if I can (maybe the laundromats have Wi-Fi out there).

See Glacier Before the Glaciers are Gone; See Yellowstone Before the Supervolcano Blows: Take a Geology Field Course This Summer

There was a time when the our national parks seemed like unchangeable icons and symbols. They were protected from development, they were reservoirs of intact ecosystems and clean water and air, and a family might have told stories of camping in the olden days of the 30's and 40's, and until recently one could reasonably expect to have a similar experience in the current era. Times are changing, however. Glaciers are disappearing from Glacier National Park, forests and wildlife are transforming in parks like Yellowstone and Yosemite as the climate warms, and some parks are becoming isolated islands in seas of urban development. Views in parks like Grand Canyon, Bryce Canyon and Sequoia are increasingly obscured by air pollution. Our orphaned parks, the state parks, are being being closed for lack of funding. Others face privatization. It's a shame that the best idea our country ever had is being in some ways abandoned. I would love to think that we are coming up with better ways of caring for our national and state treasures, but I am not optimistic. When budget cuts come, the parks get cut first.
I guess this is an odd way to extend an invitation! But if you live in the Modesto region (or are willing to make some major travel arrangements), we would like to invite you to travel with us on an exploration of some of our country's most precious places: the Pacific Northwest and the Northern Rocky Mountains. I'm working with our anthropology professor to offer a dyad class on the archaeology and geology of nine national parks and monuments (Lava Beds, Crater Lake, Newberry Crater, Mt. Rainier, Glacier, Yellowstone, Grand Tetons, Great Basin, Yosemite) as well as a multitude of state parks and other sites. And you can get three units of semester credit doing something interesting!
That's not to say there will be no work...you have to learn stuff, and demonstrate it too us! And it is a camping excursion, with all the possibilities of rain, snow, sun, wind and critters. On the other hand, there will be plenty of opportunities to hike, to see starlight skies and wonderful sunsets, and to have a multitude of unforgettable and unique experiences. If you are interested, see the press release below for more information. We are having an informational meeting on Monday if you live nearby. We can provide info by e-mail if you can't come to the meeting.

MJC offers new Geology and Archaeology summer field studies class

(Modesto, CA) — Modesto Junior College is offering a unique summer field studies course entitled Geology and Archaeology of the Pacific Northwest and Northern Rocky Mountains held June 15 to June 30, 2011. Anyone interested in enrolling in this special learning opportunity is invited to attend the orientation meeting on Monday, May 23 at 7 p.m. in Science 132 on East Campus.

The course will provide an exploration of Yellowstone, Crater Lake, Grand Tetons and Glacier National Parks, and Mount St. Helens and Lava Beds National Monuments. Participants will also have the chance to visit and discover some less familiar spots that provide evidence of the geological and human history of the region, including Great Basin National Park, Berlin-Ichthyosaur State Park, Fossil Butte National Monument, and Newberry Crater.

The new joint class is being taught by Professor of Anthropology Susan Kerr and Professor of Geology Garry Hayes and students will earn 3 semester units in either Geology 174 or Anthropology 174. A background is not required in either of these subjects. Basic principles will be developed prior to and during the course, and participation will benefit anyone interested in a career in teaching, park management and rangering, or science.

The group will camp in the parks and monuments and the $650 class fee includes all transportation, camping fees, park admission fees, and food. A registration fee of $26 per unit is additional, as are other applicable fees for those not already enrolled as an MJC student. Anyone wishing to register for the class who is not already enrolled as an MJC student must submit an application online at www.mjc.edu.

For additional information email Susan Kerr at kerrs@mjc.edu or Garry Hayes hayesg@mjc.edu or visit http://virtual.yosemite.cc.ca.us/ghayes/serv06.htm for a complete itinerary.

Geologists Travel...Part II

Continuing one geologist's travels in 2009...

Three weeks were spent on the Hawaiian Islands, an absolutely glorious journey with enough sights (and pictures) to last a lifetime. Here, Halemaumau crater on Kilauea is belching out tremendous amounts of sulfur dioxide and other gases into the atmosphere. The eruption began only a year or so earlier, with a vent 300 feet across and 600 feet deep. Lava is bubbling inside.

A July trip to Balboa Beach in Southern California saw the arrival of unusually large waves from a tropical storm off Baja. A couple of people were actually killed by them.

July also saw a trip to Lake Tahoe, the giant subalpine lake (1,700 feet deep) formed as a huge fault valley (graben) was dammed by lava flows. Mount Tallac, on the skyline, is composed of metamorphic rocks intruded by Mesozoic granitic rocks.

September included a field studies journey to the Cascades of Northern California and southern Oregon. We toured Mt. Shasta, Crater Lake (above), Lava Beds, and Lassen Volcanic National Park.

October was a field studies trip to the central Mother Lode, including an exploration of Black Chasm cave.

November included a tour of Pinnacles National Monument (above), and a Geology Club tour of Natural Bridges near Columbia in the Sierra Nevada Mother Lode.

And for December, a lot of family, and a quick look at the Grand Canyon!

The Airliner Chronicles: Crater Lake

In honor of my friends and colleagues who are gathered together in Portland for GSA this week, I'm sending out a new Airliner Chronicle photo of an Oregon volcano (wish I was there with you all!).

Crater Lake is one of America's crown jewels, a feature so unique that it was one of the earliest National Parks to be established, in 1902. Despite the beauty and unique nature that led to the protection of the lake, the actual origin of the "crater" was not completely understood. Early assumptions were that the volcano had blown out the summit in a titanic explosion (though the local native Americans knew better; their ancestors saw it happen). It wasn't, exactly.

Crater Lake began as a composite volcano, an edifice of several overlapping cones that reached an elevation of between 10,000-11,000 feet, perhaps similar to the Three Sisters a bit farther to the north. The magma chamber was evolving in late Pleistocene time to a more silicic (and more explosive) condition. About 7,900 years ago, a large plug dome, Llao Rock erupted on the northeast flank of the volcano, heralding trouble. Two hundred years later, a massive single vent ash eruption shook the mountain. The ash cloud reached tens of miles into the sky and the entire summit region of the volcano destabilized and began to collapse inward. Vast amounts of hot ash burst out of the flanks of the mountain, burying local valleys 300 feet deep. By the time the eruption subsided, the entire summit region of the volcano, an area five to six miles across, had collapsed thousands of feet into the depleted magma chamber, forming a caldera. It had been the largest eruption in the Cascades within the last million years, releasing some 12 cubic miles of ash into the atmosphere, which covered a vast area of the western United States, even into British Columbia.

In the decades and centuries that followed, water began to accumulate in the basin, eventually filling it to a depth of 1,945 feet, the deepest lake in the United States, and the seventh deepest in the world. Post-collapse volcanism built several cones within the caldera, including Wizard Island, an andesite cinder cone that peeks about the water surface on the west side of the lake.

My picture was taken in the last moments of a miserable nine hour flight from Germany to San Francisco in 2007. My choice of black and white may seem...antiquated, but the forest was almost as blue as the lake in the original picture, so I took out the color and upped the contrast to bring out the lake a bit more.

No Child Left Inside! Our National Parks

Long complex ramble today with four seemingly unrelated random thoughts. But they are...

• Devilstower, over at Dailykos.com, has a great post today about Little Giants , wondering what would happen if the estimated 5,000 to 7,000 tigers in the United States were all released at once.


• I had a great meeting with 60 fifth-graders in my lab this week, introducing them to the world of the geologist.


• I led a field studies class last week to the Cascades, studying the role of volcanism in three different national parks and monuments: Lassen Volcanic, Crater Lake and Lava Beds.


• Ken Burns and PBS are offering a six part documentary on "America's Best Idea", the story of the National Parks of America.
  

America's national parks are indeed one of the greatest ideas ever conceived by a society. The choice of overrunning a landscape and stripping it of resources to the point of ruination is a story that has been repeated over and over in human history. The idea that we might actually preserve a portion of our land in some condition approaching the primeval, for the benefit of all of its citizens, was an extraordinary leap that advanced civilization. If nothing else, the parks give us a focus point to understand how much we truly have changed our lands, and how far removed from our heritage we truly are. I am eagerly awaiting the Ken Burns documentary; the bits and pieces I've seen already are encouraging. Be sure to check it out.

My journey over the last week drove home the point of just how geological our national parks are. While acknowledging the historical nature of many parks in the system, such as Civil War battlefields and the like, most people think of places like Yosemite, Yellowstone or the Grand Canyon when they think of national parks. Although many people think of the national park experience as seeing wildlife, the bears, the moose, the buffalo, the deer and chipmunks, it is the rock that makes a place like the Grand Canyon or Yosemite Valley, it is the volcanism that has built the Hawaii Volcanoes, Haleakala, Rainier, Crater Lake, and Yellowstone, it is the movement of ice that sculpted the Grand Tetons, Glacier or the North Cascades. To truly understand a national park is to have an education, a true hands-on education, in geology. And yet: as Lee Alison of Arizona Geology points out, there are only 20 geologists employed in the Geologic Resources in the national park system, compared to 800 biologists.

The power of the national parks to move us is rooted in the common experience that many Americans have had while visiting our national parks, sometimes as adults, but especially as children. How many of us have that memory of playing in a river, camping out in the dark listening for the snuffling of bears, hiking a steep trail, or even conquering our first mountain? I remember as a young child climbing to the top of some small hill in Sequoia National Park on the Heather Lake trail, and giving it a name; I also remember the terror of being lost in a campground, having tried to find my own way to the bathroom in the dark as a five-year old. Terror at the time, and yet one of my most cherished memories, along with my first face to face meeting with a bear at Seqouia.

My visit with the fifth-graders this week was a startling reminder of something I already knew. Too many, way too many kids are not getting even a chance to experience their heritage as Americans. I live less than a two hour drive from one of the crown jewels of the national park system, Yosemite National Park, and almost none of these kids have been there! There are many reasons, of course, perfectly logical reasons. Even a twenty dollar entrance fee is too much for many struggling families, not to mention the cost of gasoline (we have 17% unemployment in our county right now). There is less and less of a cultural appreciation for simple forms of recreation: electronic games are very alluring to the short-term attention span of so many of our kids. And our kids, fed on a steady diet of junk food, and lacking any kind of exercise in their schools, just aren't healthy enough to appreciate hiking a trail or running away from a bear or snake.

And yet: these kids were excited just to see images of their national heritage. And I swear their eyes lit up when they came to the realization that these experiences were out there, and they could take part in them if they chose to. They could see an erupting volcano if they chose to. They could find a dinosaur bone in the ground. They want to see and experience these places, if we found a way to get them there.

It is we as a society who are robbing the youth of our country of their heritage. Every time we cut the budgets of our schools to the bare minimum of math and English classes, we take away the most valuable part of education. English is probably important, but what use is it if these kids have nothing to write about? An education is all about experience, not just knowledge.

And what about the Devilstower blog entry on little giants? In the last twelve thousand years, our continent has lost a huge part of our ecosystem: the megafauna. The North American continent once played host to mammoths, mastodons, giant elk, bison, camels, horses, sloths, and many other huge creatures. Most of them are gone, although, as Devilstower points out, some survived much longer by evolving into smaller forms (dwarf mammoths survived on the Channel Islands off California thousands of years longer than their bigger mainland relatives). What's left? The bison and elk and grizzly bears of places like Yellowstone National Park. For now, these creatures are managed as if they were in a zoo rather than part of an ecosystem, but there is a growing recognition that if we are going to choose to have these grand animals in our care, we have to see our land not as a few isolated protected havens like Yellowstone, but as a continuous habitat extending beyond park boundaries where these large animals and humans can coexist. It is a contentious topic to be sure: look at the controversy over the de-listing of the wolf from the Endangered Species Act.

One more note on the topic: this month's Accretionary Wedge, hosted by Tuff Cookie at Magma Cum Laude, is based on the following question: What kind of Earth Science outreach have you participated in? Have you hosted a geology day at your department, given a field trip, gone to your child's/niece's/nephew's/cousin's school to do a demonstration, or sponsored an event for Earth Science Week? To this I would add: You don't sponsor outreach? What do you plan on doing to change that?

Our pictures today? The west rim of the Crater Lake caldera, showing Llao Rock, and a black bear in Sequoia National Park. Something that every child should have a chance to see.

The Joy of a Good Zoom Lens...

My previous post concerned three volcanoes visible in a single shot, taken by my wife on our recent field studies journey to the southern Cascades. Lockwood asked in the comments about the location of the shot, so I have indicated the placement above. Most of you will immediately recognize the iconic view of Crater Lake and Wizard Island taken from the rim of the caldera near the resort complex on the southwest flank of the lake. The picture in question was a 24x zoom (half optical, half digital). It was amazing to me how much the shot took a familiar scene into unfamiliar territory.