Register for the Fall Meeting of the National Association of Geoscience Teachers! Oct. 10-12 at CSU Sacramento

The 2003 meeting sponsored by CSU Sacramento: Exploring the Malakoff Diggings

The fall meeting of the Far Western Section of the National Association of Geoscience Teachers is taking place on Oct 10th-12th in Sacramento at California State University Sacramento. Trip opportunities include the Sierras, Delta and local Sacramento geology.  Professors, K-12 teachers, and students (official and unofficial) of the earth sciences or geology are encouraged to join us. You do not have to be a member of the NAGT to attend, although we would love to have you join our organization. We encourage and support the teaching of the earth sciences in California, Nevada and Hawaii, and try to sponsor meetings that are not a great stress on teachers and students on limited budgets. You do not have to live in these three states either. These meetings are a great way to become acquainted with the geology of this fascinating region!

Here is a sampling of some of the exciting field trips that are planned:

1.    A Traverse of the Sierra Nevada from Sacramento to Donner Summit-Eldridge Moores, Emeritus Professor, Geology Department, UC, Davis  

2.    Bay Delta Hydrology and Geology-Rob Barry, Chief Project Geology Section, California Department of Water Resources; John Suen, Professor Emeritus, California State Univ., Fresno; Mark Pagenkopp, Geologist, Calif. Dept. of Water Resources

3.    Gold, Aggregates, and the Yuba Dredge Fields, California Mineral Education Foundation, Cynthia Pridmore, Engineering Geologist, California Geologic Survey

4.    Miocene, Pliocene, and Pleistocene Stratigraphy near Sacramento, CA. Tim Horner, Chair CSU, Sacramento, Geology Department, CSU, Sacramento

5.    The Legacy and Effects of Mercury in California Gold Rush Streams -Mike Hunerlach, Regional Mining Geologist and Liaison US Forest Service, Charlie Alpers, Research Chemist, United States Geologic Survey. 

Speakers:
Stephen Testa, California State Mining Board-Oil, Gold, Earthquakes and Higher Education in the latter half of the 19^th Century.

Sue McClurg, Deputy Executive Director, Water Education Foundation The Bay Delta Conservation Plan: How did we get here, and where are we going? 

Lots of other activities and field trips are scheduled!

Register now! Information can be found at the links below:
    Register Online, using credit card or PayPal! http://nagt-farwestern2014.bpt.me/ 
    Registration form: http://nagt-fws.org/New_Registration_Form-1.pdf
    Conference Information: http://nagt-fws.org/NAGT_fall_conference_info.docx.pdf
    Conference Agenda: http://nagt-fws.org/NAGT_FWS_2014_Conference_Agenda.pdf
    Accommodation Options: hhttp://nagt-fws.org/Accommodation_Options_Fall_2014.pdf

Hydraulic mine in the California goldfields.

So What Do You Gain From Teaching Anyway?

Black tourmaline (schorl) crystals in a muscovite pegmatite

It's been six years and 1,307 blog entries since I began Geotripper as sort of a lark. I had a lot of digital images of geological subjects, and lots of stories from twenty years of teaching, so I figured I had a few months of material to write about before I ran out of steam. I guess that didn't happen, and here I am, still excited to be telling the story of the Earth through my experiences as a community college professor. It's been a great life and career, and I couldn't be happier about my life choices.

When I started the blog, I had just finished my stint as the president of the Far Western Section of the National Association of Geoscience Teachers, and some of my first entries were abridged versions of my president's letters that appeared in the section's twice-yearly bulletin. These notes described some of the reasons it was important to teach geology, using the Burgess Shale of British Columbia, Kartchner Caverns in Arizona, and Mt. St. Helens as a springboard. The gist of my thesis was that geology was a fascinating science, but it was also critical to produce informed citizens who could vote intelligently on issues of science such as fossil-fuel dependence, global climate change, and land-use decisions.

A garnet crystal in quartz

Today brought me a different perspective. What does one get from teaching? It's taken me six years to get around to discussing the particular issue, and here is a clue: it's not the money. It's a good job and relatively secure, but it won't make you rich. It is a career that includes necessary dealings with complex bureaucracies that can be frustrating at times. And sometimes one must deal with students who don't seem to care about their education, and others just don't have the skills or tenacity to stick with it. Sometimes we lose them.

But sometimes it works and there are success stories. One is given the privilege of changing lives for the better. There is nothing quite like seeing people who seem hopeless find something deep within themselves and assisting them in their efforts to overcome economic disaster, mental illness, or cultural limitations to succeed and make their lives better. I've been buoyed up by watching people who were illiterate as adults fight their way through reading courses and eventually earn a degree.

These thoughts occurred to me because I had a bit of a surprise today. A big surprise, really. I was rushing to my office after teaching three hours of classes after getting home from our field studies trip late last night feeling tired and frazzled, when I hear my name. I turn, and there is a former student who has dropped in for a visit. He has a gift for me, he says, and hands me five or six very small pebbles. You were probably wondering why I was showing you pictures of rock samples in an article about teaching. On the face of it, they aren't overly remarkable: a nice little piece of tourmaline crystals in pegmatite, a garnet crystal in quartz, a couple of pieces of schist, and a rounded sphere of granitic rock. What's remarkable is where he picked them up...they were on the flanks of Mt. Everest. My student was part of an attempt to climb the world's highest mountain. Despite all the privations and exhaustion he must have felt, he thought to pick up a few stones for me, the person who taught him about rocks so many years ago.

To say I was touched is a huge understatement.

So, what do you gain from teaching?

Sometimes they come back to say thank you.

Come and See Joshua Tree National Park with the Far Western Section of NAGT, November 11-13

(Cross-posted with minor edits from Teaching the Earth Sciences, the blog of the Far Western Section of the National Association of Geoscience Teachers)

Joshua Tree National Park is one of the most unique desert environments to be found anywhere in North America (See a representative journey with Geotripper here). Sitting astride the boundary zone between the Mojave and Sonoran deserts, the park displays a startling variety of plant and animal species, and stunning displays of a Proterozoic metamorphic complex and Mesozoic plutonic rocks. It is a great place to learn about geology.

Copper Mountain College will be the host for the Fall 2011 meeting, which will include explorations of the park, and a journey to the interior of the Mojave to see the scarps from the 1992 Landers earthquake, still starkly obvious after two decades. The magnitude 7.3 quake killed two and produced a fracture that crossed fifty miles of desert.

The Far Western Section of the National Association of Geoscience Teachers invites anyone interested in the geological sciences to join them, including students (especially students!). Membership in NAGT is not required. This is a wonderful opportunity to see a fascinating corner of California's geology, and a chance to meet earth science teachers from all over California and Nevada (Hawaii is in our section too). It is an exciting and economic way to see some of southern California's most incredible geology.

Friday November 11, 2011

6:00 PM Meet at Copper Mountain College Bell Center Community Room for Registration 

(On-site registration cost estimate is $50.)

7:00 PM NAGT Far Western Section Board Meeting

8:00 - 9:00 PM Registration

Saturday November 12, 2011

8:00 - 10:00 AM Meet at the Bell Center Community Room for Registration

10:00 AM – 5:00 PM Field Trips (Choose One)

Field Trip Number 1

Landers Earthquake: Scarps still visible after 20 years plus Pioneer Town: Dating of a Miocene(?) erosional surface – Bob Reynolds

Field Trip Number 2 

Geology of Joshua Tree National Park – Bruce Bridenbecker

Presentation: 6:00 – 9:00 PM Evening Social with Lecture on Mines and Mining in Joshua Tree National Park - Dee Trent

Sunday November 13, 2011

8:00 AM Meet at Bell Center Parking Lot for Field Trip to Desert Queen Mine – Dee Trent

Field Trip should conclude by 2:00 or 3:00 PM.                                           

Logistics:

Joshua Tree Area Services

For a directory of area motels and restaurants visit the Joshua Tree Chamber of Commerce Web Site at http://www.joshuatreechamber.org/.

Joshua Tree Area Camping

Indian Cove is located 13 miles east of Joshua Tree Village and 10 miles west of Twentynine Palms on the north side of the Wonderland of Rocks. Indian Cove Road dead-ends at this secluded area. Campers register at the ranger station located at the entrance to the Indian Cove area. Water is also available there.

Contact Bruce Bridenbecker for additional information.

Dispatches from the Road: The Last Moment Before Apocalypse...

Hollywood disaster movie-makers don't have much in the way of imagination...a movie like 2012, with pieces of California sundering into the sea, explosive chunks of lava chasing recreational vehicles, continents moving thousands of miles, and arks taking a remnant of the human race to a brighter and more hopeful future...nothing of this can compare to real life adventure that took place here 760,000 years ago. I'm gonna go screenwriter on you and compose a movie idea...

Imagine the group of unlikely compatriots thrown together east of the Sierra Nevada, a giant wall of rock rising thousands of feet above the valley floor, which despite the relative aridity of the region is well-watered by streams coming off the mountains. We can ignore the fact that nobody actually lived in North America 760,000 years ago; this is Hollywood after all, and we can make things up. There's the plucky child, the quiet guy who seems to be hiding something, the excitable guy who complains a lot, the hero type leader, the beautiful woman, the other woman with suspicious moral character, the slightly addled drunk, the old couple who love each other, even after 50 years...you can add some other stereotypes as you wish. Thrown together, they argue, but then up the hill the first eruption begins, throwing a shower of fine ash particles across the landscape. The unlikely band pulls together and starts their quest to redemption.

Every so often, as they make their way across the ash covered landscape, someone dies, either being picked off by hungry predators, or falling off a cliff, or falling into a muddy river while making a desperate crossing. The survivors hold together, finding new truths about themselves and each other, and in general growing in admiration for the pluckiness of the human race.

The ash eruptions continue over the next few days or weeks, leaving behind a layer after layer of cinders and ash particles amounting to several feet in thickness. Our band of people carry on, seeking that redemption that lies just over the next hill.

Then, the paroxysmal eruption begins. The ground shakes violently as a vast plume of ash rises on the horizon. The wall of ash is 18 miles across, and 10 miles wide, and rises into the stratosphere, far higher than any airliner can fly. The amount of ash exceeds 120 cubic miles. It is incandescent, so hot it glows in the night. The hot ash spreads rapidly across the landscape, instantly incinerating anyone and anything in its path. The layer is hundreds of feet deep, and covers thousands of square miles. Areas as distant as Kansas and Nebraska are covered in several inches of ash. World climate changes to the cool side for decades, at least. In the aftermath of the explosion, the land collapses into a giant hole 10 by 18 miles wide, and two miles deep.

Needless to say, our plucky band was incinerated in the first moments of the giant pyroclastic surge, and everyone was dead. But they were plucky and all, and we recall their memory while the screen credits roll...

OK, there's a reason I never went to work in Hollywood as a script writer. But, isn't it cool that you can lay your hand across a moment of catastrophe? That's what is happening in the picture below. There are many such thrilling moments of imagination in geology (and not always catastrophe, either). When you know something about the rocks, you can visualize a practically infinite number of worlds that have passed away, worlds with strange life forms and moving continents and giant earthquakes, and mountains rising and being eroded away.

This was the first stop of our geotour through the Long Valley Caldera this last weekend, courtesy of the National Association of Geoscience Teachers, and the National Earth Science Teachers Association. The site is a pumice quarry in the Chalfant Valley northeast of Bishop.

I took lots of pictures, so more soon...

For a more detailed look at aspects of this incredible eruption, check out this post from Callan Bentley at NOVA Geoblog (now Mountain Beltway)

My First Day of "Summer"...

Well, this is what a "compressed academic schedule" looks like...my first day of summer employment hiatus. A few years back the school wanted to run three full semesters a year, so shortened our fall and spring semesters to 15 weeks, adding a few minutes to every class and laboratory section. Some people like it, but it has had an unfortunate impact in the sciences, as we went from 17 labs to only 15. You can't spread the content of the two missing labs very well among the others. Unfortunately the summer semester was decimated by the California budget crisis, so I am presently idle, as my summer classes were canceled.

Well, I don't want to vegetate, so I am off to the eastern side of the Sierra Nevada for a conference of the National Association of Geoscience Teachers. To get there, we had to drive over Carson Pass on Highway 88 through Kirkwood Ski Resort, to Genoa, Nevada, then to Lee Vining and Bishop, a little over 300 miles. It's April 30, and it was snowing in the mountains yesterday! Luckily, the roads were dry and clear today.

The snow pack is obviously still pretty thick, so the geology is a bit obscure, but along the way to Carson Pass we passed Caples Reservoir, where we could see the high peaks composed of andesite lahar deposits from around 10-20 million years ago. They have been extensively modified by the Pleistocene glaciers, and make a beautiful backdrop to the lake.

We made our way south to Conway Summit, where we had a startling view of Mono Lake and Mono Craters. Mono Lake is the very salty remnant of an ice age lake that was hundreds of feet deeper, and once spilled over into the Owens Valley. The only way the water leaves to day is by evaporation. The story of the near destruction of the lake ecosystem because of the diversion of water by Los Angeles could fill many blog posts (and probably will before too long).

The Mono Craters are actually rhyolite plug domes that have erupted between about 35,000 years to only 600 years ago (the youngest, Panum Crater, is the small one in the foreground). They may be part of an evolving caldera, but mass destruction is probably hundreds of thousands years away.

In the late afternoon, we crossed through the Long Valley Caldera, which did cause massive destruction across the entire region 760,000 years ago. An eruption explosively tossed 130 cubic miles of ash across most of the western United States, and the ground over the magma chamber collapsed to form a hole that is 10 miles by 18 miles, and once may have been two miles deep. The high peaks of the Sierra Crest that form the western and southern edge of the caldera are composed of Paleozoic and Mesozoic metasedimentary and metavolcanic rocks that have been intruded by Cretaceous granitic rocks.

Tomorrow we will be geotouring through region, and more pictures will undoubtedly follow! Mrs. Geotripper took the top and bottom photos, I took the others.

Interested in Teaching Earth Science/Geology in California?

I've posted the current teaching opportunities in the California Community College system over at my blog for the Far West Section of the National Association of Geoscience Teachers, Teaching the Earth Sciences. Forgive me for shamelessly plugging the site every so often: It doesn't get a lot of traffic, but I think it has great deal of useful information available on teaching and geo-touring in the California-Nevada-Hawaii region. They sell an excellent selection of guidebooks, with the proceeds going to a scholarship fund for earth science students in the region.

Please also catch this important post on the need for support for a change in attitude by the University of California towards the earth sciences in their admission requirements. Earth Science has always taken a back seat to chemistry and physics, and yet is most vivid example of chemistry and physics at work in the real world. We need to support the teaching of the earth sciences at the secondary level.

Ever Wished for a Guide to the Geology of Southern California?

Speaking of places I once lived, you can all have a chance to see and learn about the geology of Southern California at the meeting of the National Association of Geoscience Teachers, Far West Section, taking place on April 17-19 at Mt. San Antonio College in Walnut California. These meetings are a great place to meet students and teachers of geology from California, Hawaii and Nevada, and represent a grand opportunity to learn about the geology of the region from some experts. The meetings are inexpensive, and the organizers have also made arrangements for discounted rates at local hotels.

Field trips will explore evidence for Tertiary floodplains, oceans, & volcanoes in the Santa Monica Mountains; Martian analogs in the Mojave Desert; geology of the Conejo Valley & Western Santa Monica Mountains, Ventura County; natural hazards in the eastern San Gabriel Mountains, and engineering geology on the Palos Verdes Peninsula. Conference attendees will also receive a really nice guidebook containing all of the field trip narratives. Other activities at the conference will include seminars on teaching college-level earth science to high school students, the science of global warming, and strategies for teaching K-12 students about earthquakes in their area. There will also be a walking tour of wildlife sanctuary at Mt. San Antonio College.

Information and registration forms for the conference can be found on the Far West Section website at http://nagt-fws.org/. I am a past president of the section and the current webmaster, and I can attest to the value of these meetings. Much of whatever success I have had at teaching can be attributed to ideas and inspirations I have received from interacting with the hundred or so teachers and students that I meet at these conferences. And they're fun!

Anyone with an interest in geology and education is encouraged to join us (non-members are welcome), and if you live outside the region, this is a great way to see some interesting west-coast geology. Ontario International Airport is just a few miles away from the meeting site, and I would be glad to answer any questions long-distance travelers might have about getting around southern California. And heck, I would love to meet some fellow bloggers and blog-readers!

Check it out!

The mountains surrounding the Los Angeles basin are spectacular treasures that are not really well-known outside the region. The picture is Cucamonga Peak (8,859 feet) at the eastern end of the San Gabriel Mountains from the vicinity of Ontario, California. One of the field trips at the conference will include an exploration of Icehouse Canyon which is hidden deep on the north flank of the mountain (and yes, I know that Lytle Creek is really the first canyon north of it; Icehouse is two ridges over). Picture is courtesy of Susan Hayes.

Tourmaline Dreams, and the National Association of Geoscience Teachers

Off on another trip this weekend, to the Spring Conference of the National Association of Geoscience Teachers, Far Western Section, hosted this year by Palomar College and CSU San Marcos. We will be participating in a number of field trip choices along the southern California coast, and up in the Peninsular Ranges. The highlight for me will be a tour of a working tourmaline mine in the Pala area.

Tourmaline is a beautiful complex silicate gemstone. The highly variable composition results in a rainbow of colors, sometimes in a single stone. One of the more famous is the "watermelon" stone that is green on the outside and bright pink on the inside. It often occurs in trigonal prismatic crystals. The tourmaline occurs in pegmatite veins associated with batholithic rocks of the Peninsular Ranges. During the early part of the last century, the stone was highly desired in China, although demand dropped off later on in the 1920's. Some of the gemstones are nothing short of spectacular, weighing several pounds, and reaching a foot in length.

The National Association of Geoscience Teachers is a great organization to meet with other geology teachers, and to see some really wonderful parts of the western United States. During NAGT conferences I have had the opportunity to walk around the deepest parts of open-pit gold mines, explore active lava flows, search for fossil fish in old lake beds, and to visit some of the most beautiful places I can imagine. We are always looking to add new members...the Far West Section, covering California, Nevada, and Hawaii has two conferences every year, and offers an extensive collection of geological road guides from past conferences. Our Fall 2008 will be hosted by CSU Chico, and will have trips exploring the northern Coast Ranges and the Lassen Peak region. Other sections around the country have similar programs available. The national NAGT publishes the Journal of Geoscience Education, and has extensive web resources available.

Check it out! The Far West Section website can be found at http://nagt-fws.org/ and the national website is at http://www.nagt.org/