What's the Most Alien Landscape You've Ever Explored? Here's a Candidate

What is the strangest landscape you've ever explored? That is, the kind of place that makes you think that this just isn't part of planet Earth. I got to experience one of those places last week during our field studies trip to Death Valley National Park.

Only this bizarre landscape is not in Death Valley National Park. It's part of the California desert southwest of Death Valley in the Searles Lake valley. It's not part of any national or state park. It's administered by the Bureau of Land Management as an Area of Critical Environmental Concern and more recently as part of the California Desert Conservation Area.

The Bureau of Land Management has always had an uncomfortable fit with land use priorities in the American West. The Bureau began as a land disposal operation under the direction of the Homestead Act back in the latter part of the 1800s. The land that was not selected by settlers from the east was seen as sort of a wasteland of little interest to most people. But land ethics change and by the 1970s many people began to recognize that many BLM lands were every bit as precious as the adjacent national parks and monuments. This is one of those landscapes. They're called the Trona Pinnacles, and I saw them up close for the first time in my life last week.

When one realizes the richness of Death Valley National Park and all of the strange and wonderful features within, one can almost understand why I haven't been to the Trona Pinnacles before. By the time we arrive in their vicinity, we've already seen four days full of strange landscapes and on the last day we have two important geological localities and then a six-hour drive home. There just hasn't been enough time.

This year was different. We arrived at the park in midst of one of the most intense storm events of the year. Record snow and rain was falling in the coastal regions and the Sierra Nevada, but we had mostly benign conditions during our journey. But the storms caused the closure of the road that we needed to access Aguereberry Point, and construction had closed the access to Mosaic Canyon. We needed a last geological stop and I remembered how we often could see the pinnacles in the distance as we headed home. Why not see if we could get there? We headed south on the five-mile gravel road outside of Trona and had little problem reaching the pinnacles. We started exploring. I was awe-struck.

There are 500 of these pinnacles in three groups. They range in size from a few feet to more than 140 feet high, with an average of around 40 to 50 feet. They occur in three groups (the north, central, and south groups). We were exploring the north group, consisting of some 200 pinnacles. But how did they form? Are they volcanic? Are they alien landing beacons? According to the Star Trek canon, that might be the answer...in what is widely regarded as the worst Star Trek movie, The Final Frontier, the pinnacles formed the setting of the final confrontation of Captain Kirk and the "God" who needed a starship to escape his planetary prison ("What does God need with a starship").

So what really happened?

Today the bottom of the Searles Valley is a sun-blasted dry lake full of salts and other soluble chemicals that are mined on a large-scale basis. But between 12,000 and 25,000 years ago the landscape was much different. The last of the major ice ages, the Tioga, produced extensive glaciers throughout the Sierra Nevada. The Sierra rain shadow prevented many glaciers from forming in the mountains to the east, but glacial meltwater filled the basins. One by one they spilled over into the adjacent valley forming a series of large lakes: Mono, Owens, China, Searles, Panamint, and ultimately Manly in the bottom of Death Valley. These are called pluvial lakes. The surrounding valley floors sported grassy prairies and the hills had forests of trees like pinyon, juniper and at higher elevations, firs. The prairies were grazed by bison, horses, camels, and mammoths. They were hunted by Dire Wolves and Saber-tooth Cats and other fearsome carnivores.

The towers are composed of calcium carbonate, which is the mineral calcite. The porous form of calcite is called tufa. The tufa formed when calcite-rich freshwater springs on the lakebed interacted with the alkaline water of the lake. The location of the springs seems to have been guided by faults running through the area. The towers could only have formed when covered with water, so the pinnacles have been exposed to the elements for more than 10,000 years.

More recently formed towers are visible at Mono Lake near Lee Vining and Tioga Pass in the Sierra Nevada. They were still forming when Los Angeles diverted the water from streams flowing into Mono Lake in 1940. The lake began to dry, exposing the tufa towers.

The snowcapped peak in the picture above and below is Telescope Peak, the highest point in Death Valley National Park at 11,043 feet, more than 9,000 feet above the floor of Searles Lake. Such are the extremes of this fascinating landscape.

There was a lot to see in Death Valley and the surrounding region during our journey last week. More blogs will follow! And while you are waiting for the next entry, tell me about the most alien landscape you've ever seen...

A Gallery of Sierra Nevada Scenes: Part I

Tufa towers on southwest shore of Mono Lake

If Geotripper has been quiet of late, there is a pretty good reason: I've been on the road and off the grid. I may have plenty to say about these scenes later on, but for now I've just gone through the entire collection and picked out the images that caught my eye for some reason or another. In the picture above, it was the one strip of sunlight on the Mono Lake tufa towers in a sky full of smoke. The lake is a vast saline evaporation pond that serves as a temporary stopover for millions of migrating birds.

Bodie Ghost Town

Bodie is a fascinating place. I picked this shot because it shows the close clustering of houses as a hedge against the barrenness of the hills beyond. I visit places like this and realize that you can choose to live comfortably in an equitable climate, or you choose to try and survive in a pitched battle with the elements. Bodie sits at 8,000 feet and suffers horrible bitter winters. It was an outpost of civilization on the edge of a hard wilderness.

Bodie Ghost Town

I still find it hard to believe that a gold mining company wanted to turn the slope behind the town into an open pit mine just a few years ago. Some places should remain as they are.

Owens River Gorge

Owens River Gorge is a little-known corner of the eastern Sierra Nevada that reveals some of the awesome power of earth processes. The 400 feet gorge has walls of rhyolite tuff, erupted in the space of a few hours or a few days in one of the most incredible explosions in earth history. Yellowstone's supervolcano might get all the press, but Long Valley Caldera put 150 cubic miles of hot ash into the atmosphere 760,000 years ago, blanketing the entire American West. Some deposits are found in Kansas and Nebraska. A lake formed in the caldera and eventually overflowed, allowing the Owens River to carve this deep gorge...in only a few hundred thousand years.

Lake Crowley and the Long Valley Caldera

We soon found ourselves standing on the floor of the vast Long Valley Caldera. The eruption caused the crust to collapse in a massive hole 20 miles wide and 11 miles long. The two-mile deep hole was filled with ash and lake sediments over the years, but is still a striking feature. We were standing on one edge of the vast hole, while the mountain ridge in the far distance is the other.

Mt. Tom and Pine Creek

The eastern Sierra Nevada is an astounding wall of rock that developed when the Owens Valley fault graben collapsed and sank, forming a two mile deep valley more than a hundred miles long. Mt. Tom (above) is a 13,652 feet peak rising above Round Valley near Bishop. It lies at the edge of an intrusion of granitic rock and previously existing metamorphic rock. The interaction of the hot fluids around the intrusion produced tungsten minerals that were mined for years in Pine Creek. The mine is currently mothballed.

Minaret Vista

The Minarets lie just west of the Sierra Nevada crest in the vicinity of Mammoth Lakes. The high jagged peaks reveal Triassic metamorphic rocks that developed as an ancient caldera, perhaps similar to  the modern day Long Valley Caldera, collapsed into the underlying magma chamber during a giant eruption. The stunning view is from Minaret Vista on the Sierra crest just above Mammoth Ski Resort.

More to come!

Vagabonding across the 39th Parallel: Mono Lake, the Barren, Worthless Wasteland

Vagabonding across the 39th Parallel is an informal exploration of the geology of an interesting slice of the American West that I followed in July. Our rules were simple: see something new, or see something we'd seen before, but in a new way. We had been to Mono Lake many, many times (our previous visit was only a few days earlier), but in all our visits we had never spent the night or watched the sun set there. We grabbed some sandwiches at the Whoa Nellie Deli and parked on the near by hill top to watch the twilight envelope the barren Mono Lake basin. Click on the panorama picture above to see what we saw...

What a wasteland! It's dry, so there are vast areas of nothing but sagebrush. There's the lake, but the lake is so salty that no fish can live in it, just fairy shrimp and disgusting brine flies and their wiggling grubs. Nobody goes sailing or swimming in the scummy water. It's a worthless piece of real estate...

That's the way we judge a place, isn't it? Real estate...monetary value. And that's the way Mono Lake was judged too, for a long time. The water flowing into the lake was going to waste, so Los Angeles diverted the incoming streams, and the lake started to shrink. It was destined to become another dry lake, like Owens Lake did in the 1920's.

During the ice ages, glacial meltwater filled the fault basin, and the water overflowed into the adjacent basins, eventually flowing into Death Valley. The lake was 600 feet deeper than it is today, and covered a much larger area. As late as 1940, the lake was 45 feet deeper than it is now.

Migratory birds discovered Mono Lake thousands of years ago, and found the fairy shrimp and brine flies a rich source of protein to sustain them on their long journeys. As more and more wetlands disappeared along the coast and in the Central Valley because of human development, the Mono Lake area became an ever more important stop on the migratory flyways. Dozens of bird species (and many millions of individual birds) depend on this lake for survival. What is worthless to humans is life itself to the birds.

The fight to save the ecosystem at Mono Lake began in the 1970s as researchers started to realize the importance of the lake to the migratory birds. A 1994 decision by the California State Water Resources Control Board required that diversions be reduced, and the level of the lake be stabilized at 17 feet above the lowest post-1941 level. The problems are not all solved; the Mono Lake Committee is a good source of information on current issues.

What is the value of a place? If one tries to put a monetary value on a landscape, many places would be deemed worthless. Mono Lake basin once supported a modest agricultural economy, but the Great Depression destroyed the economy in the region, making it worthless enough for Los Angeles to move in. How many places across the country face similar choices...especially in today's economy? Surely it wouldn't hurt to build just one more dam here, or to build another housing development on farmlands, or drill another natural gas fracking well? It's a difficult issue of course. We have to have the homes, the energy, and the water. But who is looking out for the air, the water, the soil, and the other intangible values of a landscape that ultimately make life possible?

By the way, I bet you could pick up some cheap farmland in Texas right now...it's ripe for development.

I can talk about another aspect of the value of the Mono Lake Basin. It is one of the most stunning geological landscapes in the country. It is an active fault basin, with numerous scarps attesting to recent earthquake activity. Some of the youngest volcanic features in the U.S. are present on the south shore of the lake at Panum Crater and the rest of the Mono Craters. The islands in the lake (Negit and Paoha are shown in the pictures above) include a recent cinder cone and uplifted lake sediments from intrusions below the surface. The tufa towers, built by the action of algae and freshwater springs, have become a world-famous attraction for tourists.

What a shame that the state of California has decided to close their part of the lake, Mono Lake State Park, because the legislature can't see their way to an agreement to fund the park and 69 others that are slated to close next year. Maybe we can sell the worthless land to someone who can profitably develop it?

Anyway, what a beautiful, peaceful sunset, with the moon rising over the Mono Craters. Despite any misunderstandings about my title for this blogpost, Mono Lake is a treasure, one worth protecting.

A Convergence of Wonders, Day 16: Our Home Mountains, Giant Swimming Reptiles, and a Bunny

After 15 days and 4,200 miles, we woke up to the last day of our Convergence of Wonders, the geological tour of the Pacific Northwest and Northern Rocky Mountains. It was June 30th. We had traveled through the Cascades and the Coast Ranges, the present-day manifestation of convergence along the Cascadia Subduction Zone. We had traveled across the Columbia Plateau and the Channeled Scablands, and looked at evidence of past convergence in Montana's Glacier National Park, and Sun Canyon. We explored the inner parts of the earth's crust along the Beartooth Highway, and saw the evidence for a gigantic mantle plume (hot spot) at Yellowstone National Park. We saw the vast heavings of fault lines in the crust at Grand Teton National Park. And now, after a series of adventures in Utah and Nevada, we were finally headed home.

In the most technical sense, we could have started driving and made it home for a late lunch. But we couldn't pass up several of the most spectacular geological sights of our trip. We were almost home, but we could still be distracted by geological sights!

When we arrived at Berlin-Ichthyosaur State Park very late the previous night, not a few of our students were just a bit spooked by finding we were spending the night in a ghost town. The menacing looking ruins of the dark night were a little less nerve-wracking in the morning sun, so we packed and headed up to the quarry for a tour. Berlin-Ichthyosaur is a two-fer park: it preserves a late 1800's gold mining town, and a 200 million year old paleontology dig.

The ichthyosaurs were the dolphins/whales of the dinosaur era, the Mesozoic, aside for being in the wrong biological class. Whales and dolphins are mammals, of course, and the mammals were a rather minor part of the Mesozoic ecosystem, and as far as I know, none of them were adapted to marine conditions. Ichthyosaurs were air-breathing reptiles that were wonderfully adapted to life in the sea. They had the four limbs of their terrestrial ancestors, but their body shape was streamlined for fast swimming in the oceans. There were many species, ranging in length from a meter (3 feet) to 20 meters or more (65 feet). They had huge eyes, exceeding the size of pie plate in some of the larger species. That's a full-scale model of a Shonisaurus popularis in the picture above (the fat one is Geotripper himself, providing scale), the species found at Berlin-Ichthyosaur.

The bones of the ichthyosaurs were first noted by the miners, who used the massive vertebrae as doorstops and dinner plates. The site was excavated by paleontologists in the 1950s and 60s, who discovered more than three dozen more or less complete specimens. Nine or ten specimens were left in place for public viewing, and a structure was built over the site.

The bones don't differ overmuch in color from the surrounding rock, but the shapes are fairly obvious. The parallel bones above are ribs. Below are a number of vertebrae.

The skulls were the most delicate part of the skeleton, and were often crushed during preservation. Some portions of a skull are present in the photo below. Few teeth were found at the site.

One of the mysteries is why so many of the ichthyosaurs ended up dead in this one place. Numerous ideas have been suggested, including strandings, volcanic eruptions, spawning behaviour and others, but the favored explanation of the moment based on available evidence is that they died from mass poisoning, much as marine animals are killed today by red tides (toxic microorganisms). For more information on the topic, check out vignette 14 in Geology Underfoot in Central Nevada, by Orndorff, Wieder and Filkorn.

After our excellent tour by ranger Robin Riggs, we hit the road, and after a few hours we passed a welcome sign, the one that said we were back in California. Our beautiful home mountains, the Sierra Nevada, filled the horizon.

 Highway 167 is a very straight road in this part of the country!

Lest the students get lazy, we still had a few classes to go! We stopped in at Mono Lake County Park to sit in the grass under the Cottonwood trees. Mono Lake is an interior drainage lake; water flows in, but doesn't flow out. During the ice ages, glacial meltwater filled the basin, forming a lake 600 feet deeper that overflowed into adjacent basins, with water ultimately reaching Death Valley. In recent times the lake was 45 feet deeper than it is today, but in 1940, Los Angeles started diverting water from the incoming streams, and the lake started drying up.

 The spot we were walking on (below) was underwater half a century ago...

The lake is a critical stop for millions of migratory birds, as it has plentiful food in the form of fairy shrimp and brine flies. The birds need the nourishment to allow them to complete their long journeys. The conflict of human use and ecosystem preservation has dominated the politics of the region for decades. Recent agreements may stabilize the situation...maybe.

The mountains on the skyline are the Mono Craters, a series of rhyolite plug domes that have all erupted within the last 35,000 years or so. The last eruptions were only a few centuries ago. That makes this 9,000 foot ridge the youngest mountain range in the country.

Freshwater springs in the lake caused the formation of tufa towers, masses of calcium carbonate that stand like frozen sentries in the water.

After a quick lunch at the Whoa Nellie Deli, we headed over Tioga Pass and passed through Tuolumne Meadows in Yosemite National Park. By now, even the instructors wanted to go home, despite the incredible scenery. We will go see this stuff on a day trip later! Meanwhile we stopped for a wrap-up lecture and group photo at Olmsted Point. Half Dome loomed in the distance...

I snapped a quick picture of Mt. Conness and Tenaya Lake, and we got in the vans for the final hundred mile drive to Modesto.

We got in about 6 o'clock, and there were many happy shouts of reunions with loved ones. There was also a huge mess, but most of the students were cool enough to stay and help clean up. I love these folks! We were home. Mrs. Geotripper and I headed to the house said hi to our animals and managed to hang around the house for ten days before we got restless and hit the road again.

 As promised, here is the bunny. Mrs. Geotripper caught it in the early morning at Berlin-Ichthyosaur.

 It didn't fully cooperate in the careful posing category...

And that is the end of our Convergence of Wonders! I hope you enjoyed traveling with us!

Dispatches from the Road: Far Western Section Conference in Bishop, California

A few preliminary views from the road at the joint NAGT/CalESTA field conference at Bishop California. One of our stops: the Mono Lake Tufa Towers. The tufa is made of calcium carbonate, and forms near freshwater springs in the intensely salty and alkaline lake.

The lake supports brine shrimp and brine flies which in turn provide sustenance for millions of migrating birds. The lake has been threatened by water diversions that caused to shrink to a shadow of its former size, but lawsuits and legal agreements are stabilizing lake levels.

The lake formed in a volcanic-tectonic depression, and active volcanoes are found in and near the lakeshore. The white island in the distance is formed by uplift of the lake sediments by volcanic intrusions.

NAGT stands for the National Association of Geoscience Teachers, Far Western Section (Hawaii, California and Nevada). We welcome anyone with an interest in the geological sciences: you don't have to be a teacher or major to be a member. NESTA is the National Earth Science Teachers Association, and the trip was organized by their Far Western Section. The NESTA organizer was Wendy Van Norden, director of the Far Western Section, and the NAGT organizer was Mark Boryta, president of the Far Western Section.

These trips are a blast! And you learn stuff, too. More pictures will be forthcoming, although you might check the blog of the NAGT-FWS for more info and pictures. Meanwhile, the sun is bright, and the road beckons! Y'all have a wonderful day; I'm intending to...