Wait a Minute...What Happened to the Rocks I Picked Out?

Something kind of extraordinary happened on campus this week. I was pausing between classes and saw a large truck and a crane downstairs in the staging area for the Great Valley Outdoor Nature Lab. The crane was dumping gigantic rocks onto the ground. "My" rock collection had arrived!! You might remember that early last month I went 'rock collecting' in the Sierra Nevada foothills for the rocks that will be part of the displays and landscaping of the outdoor. All 60 tons or so...

Source: https://media.giphy.com/media/12ScDYWbP4yoBq/giphy.gif

My response about their arrival on campus was predictable...

But if you remember the scene in "Elf" when Buddy thought Santa was in the store only to discover he was a fake, well, I had that moment too. I saw that something was off about the rocks I had selected. Something was different about them. Below was the rock that I selected a month ago, when it was 85 degrees out, and rain had not fallen in months...

And here (below) is the rock they claim I picked out. This after nearly two weeks of rain and cooler temperatures. This rock is clearly on a PALLET of LIES!

Well, okay, maybe it isn't on a pallet like the others, and maybe it is the same rock I picked out. But you can now see one of the main reasons I picked it, and why it will be sitting in a position of honor by the entrance sign to the outdoor nature lab. Not only is it a unique rock that is found in our region (the latite of Table Mountain), it is also a miniature ecosystem of mosses, lichens, grass, and other organisms. To see it, just add water!

In any case, we now have an astounding variety of the rocks that are found in our region. There is marble from the Calaveras Complex, the host rock of the many caverns that are found in the Sierra Nevada foothills.

There is a gigantic chunk of the quartz from the Mother Lode veins, the source of the gold that played such a huge (and devastating) part in the history of California. Sorry, no visible gold (although I'll keep looking).

One of the most striking rocks are the "tombstone rocks" of the Foothills Terrane, large fins of slate and phyllite that were once mud and silt on the ocean floor. The rocks were crushed against the western edge of North America, metamorphosed, and tilted vertically. We'll be putting them in the ground in the same vertical orientation. It will be a dramatic sight at the southern entrance to the lab.

The next step comes at the end of the week. I'll get to help direct the placement of the rocks! I'll try not to be insufferably picky..."Could you rotate that one about four inches? Great! Wait...I liked it better the way it was...". An update will follow.

I Went Rock Collecting Today...For Really, Really Big Rocks

I'm thinking how many times I've been on a field trip looking at a massive boulder composed of some kind of interesting rock and making a joke about how we would need a crane to get the thing back to school. I'll be darned if that very thing didn't come true today.

I was up in the Sierra Nevada foothills, choosing out some really big rocks, and we may very well be using a crane to move them back to campus. At least one of them weighs about 3 1/2 tons, and in total there will be about 60 tons of them. So yes, maybe my rock collecting habit has gotten out of hand. I need professional help.

Well, I might need professional help for something, but it's not for a colossal rock-collecting habit. I was selecting rocks representative of the geology of the Sierra Nevada foothills to become part of the landscaping of our new Great Valley Outdoor Nature Lab that is being constructed right now adjacent to the Great Valley Museum at Modesto Junior College.

At this particular quarry near Knight's Ferry on the Stanislaus River I was selecting boulders of Table Mountain latite (a volcanic rock broadly similar to basalt). These are the rocks that make up the dramatic inverted stream that winds its way among the towns of Sonora and Jamestown along Highway 108. I was also picking out some large granite and greenstone boulders to representing the bedrock found in the Sierra Nevada. We'll also be choosing some of the unique metamorphic "tombstone" rocks that stick out of the ground across the Mother Lode.

Meanwhile back on the campus of Modesto Junior College the outdoor nature lab is starting to take shape. We live in a flat valley, but the lab will have some topography, some small hills at the east end to represent the foothills. They will be planted with native trees and shrubs, and the trails and pathways will be lined with the rocks and boulders that we selected today. One of these days, the lab might look something like the scene below (which is actually at the quarry; they're showcasing what can be done with their rocks). It's incredible that the lab is finally happening. The science faculty at MJC have been fighting for an outdoor lab for three decades. It's been hard to be patient!

28th Anniversary of the Loma Prieta Earthquake - It Was a Warning That is Still Operative

What a different world... on Oct. 17, 1989, there were no smart phones, the internet barely existed, and we still depended on things like newspapers, television and radio to keep up with the world. Most of my current students had not yet been born, and that means that most of my students have never felt or experienced a major earthquake. Today we joke that when the BIG ONE hits, the tweets and Instagram posts will outrace the P-waves across the surface of the planet (there is a small bit of truth in the joke).

Earthquakes are not a joking matter though, and it is sobering to think that damage of a magnitude 7.8 quake in Los Angeles or San Francisco will have effects that will put California into a world of hurt not all that different than what is happening now in Puerto Rico or the Virgin Islands. Although we have had 28 years since our vivid warning in the hills above Santa Cruz, we are still not as ready as we should be, and many of our fellow citizens are complacent about earthquake safety. The ongoing experiences of hurricanes and wildfires across our country remind us of the importance of being ready with water, food, first aid, communications plans, and escape routes. As has been sadly demonstrated, we cannot depend on the federal government to act on our behalf in an effective manner, given the depletion of their resources following other major disasters, and stupid politics currently infecting Washington D.C.

I have yet to be in the middle of a major tremor; I've been on the outskirts of several, including 1989, and the 1971 Sylmar earthquake in Southern California. I was on the scene of the 1992 Landers quake (magnitude 7.3) within a week to see the ripped up ground. My experiences were mostly of the learning kind, not that of personal loss. Still, there is something to be learned in every experience. What follows is an abridged version of my story from a post on the 20th anniversary.

In 1989 I was a brand-new instructor at Modesto Junior College, in my third semester. I taught classes in the old 1950's-era Science Building on our east campus, up on the second floor. I had all the modern teaching technology; there was a chalkboard, and two television monitors hung from the ceiling for showing those newfangled "videotape cassettes". The monitors also served as my decidedly low-tech seismometers. They shook noticeably during the smallest of earthquakes (most memorably during a class test on earthquakes; no one but me even noticed).

On October 17th at 5:04 PM, my physical geology laboratory had just finished and almost everyone had gone home to watch the World Series. A couple of students were helping me (it was Maureen and Sonny; funny how I remember the names of the first students I had better than the ones I had last semester). We were 100 kilometers from the epicenter, so when the seismic waves started to shake our building, the movement was a strong rolling motion instead of sharp vibrations. We looked at swaying TV monitors, and commented that it was an earthquake. It was a most scholarly discussion, actually. We realized the shaking was not stopping, and we thought we could sense the direction of the quake as well. We started to guess where it might be happening, but when the shaking reached the 40 second mark (the energy was spreading out, it lasted only 10 seconds or so near the epicenter), we realized it was a major event, and that fatalities were probably occurring (and unfortunately we were right). The deodar trees out the window were whipping back and forth as if they were in a high wind. The strangest part for me was the unconscious decision I was making as the shaking progressed. Despite having a quiet scholarly discussion, my body was moving from the front of the podium to the back, where there was a nice solid space to hide under. I would have dived under if the quake had lasted any longer.

The Cypress Structure in Oakland where 44 people died

In hindsight, I should have been a bit more aggressive about taking shelter under the desk. An analysis of our building a year or two later revealed an architectural weakness that suggested the building could collapse if the seismic waves hit it from a particular direction. A seismic retrofit a decade later included some massive shear walls in the lab I taught in.

Meanwhile, at the city library, my children were making me proud. At the time of the quake, there were huge sailing ship models on display, in some cases right on top of the book stacks. The stacks were not reinforced or braced, so there was a real potential for injuries if the quake was strong enough to knock those stacks over. I was told that most people were just standing there watching the bookstacks swaying, but my kids, my well-trained and intelligent kids were the only people in the room to take shelter under the sturdy study tables. Luckily, as I said before, we were on the fringes of the effects of the earthquake and no one was hurt.

The Loma Prieta earthquake, a magnitude 6.9 event at a depth of 11 miles, was a tragedy: 63 people died, and 3,700 were injured. The Bay Area was in chaos for days and months passed before life got back to normal. We were on the fringes, so instead of pain and suffering, we had a profound learning experience that was remembered by my students for the next decade and a half. But it has been 28 years now, and as I said, many of my students weren't born when the quake happened. Few of them have felt a quake at all. The large quakes like Loma Prieta and Northridge are ancient history, and there is less of that innate knowledge of what they should do when one hits. Few admit to having any kind of emergency kits at home, and they have no plan for what to do when the next big one hits.

Fault studies across California make it clear that more big tremors are coming, almost surely within the next decade or two. We educators must keep these past events alive in the minds of our students so they will be ready for these events when they come.

I'm sorry I can't provide a source for these photos. They are scans from a slide set that I purchased many years ago, soon after the quake occurred.

Out of the Valley of Death: Explorations in Red Rock Canyon

The next stop on our way to Death Valley National Park was one of the most ideal locations for learning the basics of stratigraphy to be found anywhere: Red Rock Canyon State Park in the El Paso Mountains along the Garlock Fault. The park protects exposures of the Miocene deposits of the Dove Springs formation (formerly the Ricardo formation), aged at about 8-12 million years. The formation of conglomerate, sandstone and claystone was laid down in alluvial fans, floodplains, and lakes in a semi-arid savanna environment. The region was home to a vast array of grazing mammals and predators, including extinct elephants, rhinos, three-toed horses, giraffe-like camels, saber-toothed cats, and bone-crushing dogs as well as smaller animals like ancestral skunks, martens, alligator lizards, rodents, and shrews. (follow the links to descriptions of each type of animal on the Los Angeles Natural History Museum website).

The park has stunning exposures of the sedimentary and volcanic rocks that illustrate many of the basic principles of stratigraphy (superposition, original horizontality, lateral continuity, and cross-cutting relationships). I worked with the students to observe and identify the rocks, and to work out a sequence of events that led to the formation of the exposures. And then I turned them loose to produce a rudimentary map of the geology of the area around the beautiful red cliffs.

It was February, and the sun was blazing! The temperature topped out at about 90 degrees. In a sense it was quite pleasant, especially compared to the frigid conditions back in the eastern United States, but it was also a reminder that we never had winter this year. There has been so little rain that there are parts of the Central Valley that have received less precipitation than Death Valley. It was a bit disturbing to realize how dry conditions are across the state.

Red Rock Canyon State Park has been the setting for numerous movies over the years, including old-time westerns, but my favorite movie scene was the opening sequence of Jurassic Park, where the protagonists were excavating velociraptors from Snakewater Creek or some such place in Montana. I sometimes find myself thinking "your cute little velociraptors wouldn't stand a chance against our bone-crushing dogs and sabertooth cats!".

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.

Strangers in a Strange Land: Discerning the Story in the Rocks at Red Rocks

In the last post, we were introduced to the basic rules of stratigraphy as they stood exposed in the spectacular cliff faces of Red Rock Canyon State Park in California's Mojave Desert. A classroom chalk board can only provide a cartoon of these concepts, so there is nothing quite like being there and laying your hands on these records of the Earth's past. We were on the road with 30 community college students, most of whom were seeing this landscape for the first time. After an introduction to the stratigraphic principles of superposition, original horizontality, lateral continuity, and cross-cutting relationships, I sent the students forth to test their newly acquired knowledge against the cliffs above. We weren't quite to the point where we could do geologic mapping, but I provided them with an outlined photo of the scene (below) and asked them to describe the rocks, and identify any structures.

This is one of the finest moments a teacher gets to have. I wasn't teaching at all; my students were teaching themselves. They were crawling up and down the slopes, taking notes, and discussing what they were seeing. OK, it's true there was no cell phone service, so what else were they gonna do?

The layers were readily labeled on the basis of color alone, and most of the students developed some version of the picture below (click to enlarge):

I climbed up the slopes to have a closer look at some the exposures. What happened here 8-12 million years ago? The red and brown layers (A, C, and D) proved to be arkosic sandstones, the kind of thing one might find in river channels and alluvial fans in a region of relatively high relief (lots of rapid erosion). Some of the finer-grained brown sediments formed in river floodplains. These rocks had clearly formed on land.

The white layers (B) with puffy deposits that kind of looked like ground hamburger were ash deposits, evidence of regional volcanic activity. The ancient environment here was beginning to look a little bit dangerous!

The upper cliffs and slopes (layer F), proved to be evidence of the greatest geological violence possible, a rhyolitic tuff breccia. The rock formed when hot ash rolled over the landscape, picking up gravel and debris and incorporating the material in the nearly molten tuff deposit. This was no place to be hanging about...but plenty of animals did. The layers of the Dove Springs Formation are a treasure trove of Miocene fossils, one of richest beds found in California (or pretty much anywhere, really).

The animals found in the sedimentary sequences here include include extinct elephants, rhinos, three-toed horses, giraffe-like camels, saber-toothed cats, and bone-crushing dogs as well as smaller animals like ancestral skunks, martens, alligator lizards, rodents, and shrews. (follow the links to descriptions of each type of animal on the Los Angeles Natural History Museum website).

Faults in a cartoon drawing on a chalkboard are a lot easier to see than most faults in the real world. A number of the students noticed how the layers ended and identified the fault that caused them to be offset (see the arrows in the diagram above). I headed up to take a closer look at the fault surface...because I think everyone should know their faults...

We only had a few precious days to see as much as possible on this trip, so we couldn't spend as much time at Red Rock Canyon as we would have liked. A fair number of geology programs do mapping exercises here, spending several days on site. It sounds like fun...if it isn't too hot. It was time for us to move on, so we loaded up the vans and drove north on Highway 14 towards our next destination at the south end of the Owens Valley. That will be part of the next post.

If postings seem sparse in the coming week, it would be because we are about to embark on part two of our Strangers in a Strange Land journey: an exploration of the Mojave Scenic Preserve in the desert south of Death Valley. We're attending the spring meeting of the Far Western Section of the National Association of Geoscience Teachers at the Desert Research Center at Zzyzx. Hope to see a few of you there!

Strangers in a Strange Land: What stories can the stones tell?

What does a cartoon tell us? I remember a time when at least certain cartoons had the purpose of communicating an important moral or story at a level that could be understood by anyone (and then there were the other 99% that represented empty brain calories...what have we done to our kids?). I spend a lot of time and effort (with varying success) drawing cartoons on a chalkboard to illustrate basic geologic principles. Part of what is missing is the context. I often draw the above picture to illustrate a fault (and some important principles), but the lines are often meaningless, because students are not yet associating lines on a board with rocks in the real world. So I try to give the picture some "realism" (below). I suppose this is a little bit like the difference between stick figures, and the more complex drawings by comic artists (Superman and Batman!). Or not...

I ask the students to imagine they are walking through a canyon, and that they see rocks in the canyon walls that are aligned like those above. Since many of them have not done such a thing, or they were not looking at the rocks at the time, this can still be a meaningless exercise. As Mrs. Geotripper has led me down the road into art history, I have become aware that artists throughout history have had a similar problem.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Masaccio7.jpg

Understandably, art throughout history has mostly been about gods, people, and to a lesser extent, animals (I'm thinking of cave paintings and petroglyphs, for instance). If rocks were ever included in a scene, they lacked structure, at least through the Renaissance. Note, for example the mountains in the scene above by Masaccio ("Tribute Money", c. 1426). Despite the vibrant colors and the life-like rendering of the humans, the mountains in the background are little more than gray blobs, lacking any kind of detail. The mountains in the image are mere cartoons.

Source

Leonardo da Vinci is often given credit for introducing real geological details in some of his works such as the meandering river in the "Mona Lisa", and the clearly layered aspect of the stones on the water in the "Virgin of the Rocks" seen above. This had a lot to do with the fact that he had observed and studied rocks in the course of his life. He saw, comprehended, and thus recorded the structure of the rocks in his works.

So...what do Leonardo da Vinci paintings and cartoons have to do with our journey to Death Valley last week? It has to do with the intrinsic and tangible value of the field trip in geoscience education. You can show draw cartoons on a chalkboard, you can show digital images on a screen, but nothing can ever substitute for the value of students standing on a mountainside, laying their hands on the rocks and making their own observations and judgements about the story told by the rocks.

For my students, and for the first pioneers of geology, telling the story of the rocks was a huge step. The mere recognition that rocks have a story was one of the great advances in the science, because in the European worldview of the middle ages, rocks were simply created as is, and changes since their origin have been minor. They barely deserved attention unless they contained valuable ores. Nicolas Steno (1638-1686), a Danish physician who spent much of his life in Florence, changed that.

St. Nick (yes, he was beatified in 1988!) first annunciated three of the four founding principles of stratigraphy, and each of them can be connected to the cartoons I used above. Take a look again, only now with labels:

If we recognize that each layer formed uniquely from the others, then we can start to talk about the order in which things happened. Which layer formed first? If you said "A", then you understand the principle of superposition: if sedimentary layers have not been overturned, the oldest layers will be found beneath the others.

Did these sedimentary layers form originally as sloping layers? If you think layers form horizontally, in the bottom of lakes, on the bottom of the sea, or on a floodplain, then you understand the Principle of Original Horizontality: most sediments originate in horizontal layers. If the layers are tilted, some outside force put them that way.

Did layer E or F originally end in a cliff? If you think not, you are on the verge of understanding the Principle of Lateral Continuity: sediments are continuous unless they abut against the edge of the original sedimentary basin, or they thin out. We understand that one can expect to find more of layer E or F in the general vicinity, because although erosion has removed the intervening rock, the original layers continued across a larger area than just this outcrop.

When did the faulting occur? If you think it came after the sediments were deposited, than you would be right, and you begin to understand the Principle of Crosscutting Relationships: faults and intrusive rocks are younger than the rocks they cut across. Steno may have written something about this, but the principle is associated more often with James Hutton in the latest 1700's and Charles Lyell in the early 1800's.

With this basic background (oh my, this post reads like a classroom lecture, doesn't it?), you can begin to understand the enthusiasm with which I presented these topics on our Death Valley trip. I was standing in front of the cliff in the picture below:

It's all there, including a sweet looking little fault cutting diagonally across the cliff face. We had reached Red Rock Canyon State Park on Highway 14 along the Garlock Fault and the El Paso Mountains in the Mojave Desert. The park is a showcase of geological principles, and it doesn't stop with the basic ones; those sedimentary layers are chock-full of fossils, and there are lava flows nearby too.

After presenting the basic principles we walked around the corner and encountered another outcrop, as seen below:

The students set out to identify the kinds of rocks, the order of the layers, and to define any structural complications. After only a few hours on the road, they were already deciphering the story of the Earth, as exposed in this corner of the Mojave Desert. What can you discern from this photograph? Can you do as well as they did?

We're Going to be Shooting Blanks Soon...

There are times when I start feeling really discouraged. I'm trying to imagine a country that is trying to fight a war, but the soldiers are stymied by the fact that their country doesn't want to provide them the supplies and ammunition they need to fight the war. I imagine what it's like to be down in the trenches, firing at the enemy (while they fire back). We call for more bullets and reinforcements, but are told that our citizens (especially the richest ones) don't want to foot the bill for the battle. So we fight on, with dwindling supplies, fewer and fewer bullets, until all of the ammunition is exhausted. Disaster, of course, follows. I have a feeling that some regard this as not being a metaphor (like sending unarmored vehicles into Iraq), but it is one. The enemy in this war metaphor is ignorance.

Welcome to public education in the United States (and especially California) in the 21st century. At the very time that an educated, well-trained work force is critically needed to compete in the world, our society is turning its back on the teachers and institutions that can provide that education. Sure, we are in a recession (I know it is "officially" over, but not here in California and the Central Valley), but it is at times like these that we need to push all the harder for a better education system for all our citizens. An educated workforce is our ticket to beating the recession. But instead we are now rationing education, limiting it to those who can pay, and locking out those who cannot. It's just like rationing bullets in a war. If we want to compete in the world, we need to be sacrificing to give our children and our college students the best possible preparation for the workforce. And those who are best off in this economy should at the forefront of providing assistance.

Like I said, I'm discouraged. I read things like the GSA position paper below (cross-posted from Teaching the Earth Sciences), and at the same time I read an e-mail from my college president and division dean explaining that for the fourth year in a row we have to cut to the bone. We laid off tenured professors last year, and eliminated entire programs, including engineering. We aren't cutting to the bone anymore, we are cutting off arms and legs. And we are told once more to do more with less.

I suppose at this point I am supposed to say "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore" (If you missed the movie Network, check it out; the vision of the future was frighteningly spot on). But I'm not going to do that. I love teaching, and I love my students. I worry for them, and I want to give them the best shot I can. It would be nice just once in a great while to not hear politicians say how greedy we are to be asking for the resources to do our job in an adequate manner. We need ammunition to fight the war against ignorance.

This isn't the way things should be. Rant over...
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From the Geological Society of America

Acute Demand for U.S. Geoscientists Prompts Call for Higher Ed Action

Boulder, CO, USA – A recent American Geosciences Institute workforce evaluation estimates that by 2021, some 150,000 to 220,000 geoscience jobs will need to be filled. The AGI report notes that at current graduation rates, most of these jobs will not be able to be filled by U.S. citizens.

Citing great concern about the acute need for well-trained, well-educated geoscience graduates to fill the geoscience workforce, Geological Society of America President John Geissman is calling for colleges and universities to recognize the value of strong, adequately supported geoscience departments. High-quality geoscience education, Geissman notes, is essential to understanding and adequately addressing the “very pressing needs of our society,” including sustainability and human-caused climate change, as well as keeping the growing number of geoscience jobs filled by U.S. citizens.

Included in his call for action, Geissman refers to two very recently approved GSA Position Statements that focus on the importance of teaching earth science and expanding and improving geoscience education in institutions of higher learning.

Both position statements are online at www.geosociety.org/positions/. All GSA position statements include suggestions for how to implement and support the call to action.

“The Importance of Teaching Earth Science” recognizes that basic knowledge of earth science is essential to meeting the environmental challenges and natural resource limitations of the twenty-first century and notes that earth-science education should begin at the K–12 level and include advanced classes led by well-qualified science teachers.

“Expanding and Improving Geoscience in Higher Education” calls specifically for robust, well-supported geoscience departments not only to ensure an increase in the number of geoscience students available to the workforce but also to provide the training necessary “to address crucial societal issues that have the potential to impact global economic security and the well-being of human populations” across the globe.

John Geissman is a professor at The University of Texas at Dallas, emeritus professor at the University of New Mexico, and Geological Society of America president through 30 June 2012.

Why Geology is Important; Why Education is Important...The Sendai Earthquake in perspective

We learn about geology for many reasons. If you have ever visited this blog before, you know we learn geology because it is just plain fascinating. But sometimes we learn geology because lives are at stake...

It has been a week that will long seared into our collective memories as we watched a tragedy unfold in real time in Sendai, Japan. An earthquake of magnitude 8.9-9.0 struck about 80 miles offshore, with a horrific tsunami that did incalculable damage along the coast of the island. It then spread throughout the Pacific Basin, and the effects of the quake became worldwide in scope. Whether one realizes it or not, every human being on the planet was touched by the shaking. Not in some metaphysical new-age sense, but literally. The waves were detectable for hours on seismometers worldwide, meaning we were all rising and falling whether we were aware of it or not. We were all part of this story.

Many will watch an event like this unfold and try to find some meaning. In one sense, there was no meaning; this was something the Earth does. Subduction zones have been active on this planet for billions of years, and will continue to be active for billions more. The oceanic lithosphere shifted a few tens of feet deeper into the mantle, where it will eventually be melted or distorted beyond recognition. The materials disappearing from the surface today will eventually reappear, as part of a volcanic eruption, or as a fault sliver along some plate boundary in some future era. Events like this are common beyond measure; the Earth has experienced millions upon millions of huge earthquakes like this one, and though life is extinguished in some areas, life in general goes on. This quake meant nothing in the long run.

On the other hand, there was much about this tragedy that has meaning. With our brief life spans measured in decades, we will rarely experience such events in our personal lives. I could never wish such tragedy on anyone, but we also learn that living on this planet means that we are sometimes exposed to extreme deadly events. If not an earthquake, then a volcanic eruption. If not an eruption, a deadly flood. If not a flood, then a searing heat wave, or freezing blizzard. No one is totally safe or immune from these events, and most of the time we are not really aware that they can happen to us at all. They come as a total surprise.

In earlier centuries, such events elicited cosmic and supernatural explanations. It was the capricious nature of the gods that caused these terrible punishments. These people must have done something wrong to deserve such horrific retribution. If we couldn't think of an explanation, we made one up. I would love to say we have somehow moved on from this kind of thinking, but charlatans like Pat Robertson and others remind us constantly that ignorance and hate are alive and well in our society and across the world.

Why is geology important? Geology provides us with a new mythology of the world, one that based on a better understanding of the processes of our planet. We don't just see an earthquake happen on the surface and jump to the conclusion that the giant turtle that underlies our bit of land has taken a few steps. Instead we explored new pathways to knowledge that revealed that the earth itself is releasing energy to space, and that one of the ways that this happens is through the movement of lithospheric plates. Do we know the absolute truth? No, we don't. That's why we seek to learn more. We can now predict where earthquakes are likely to happen, but we cannot tell when, at least not well enough to save lives and property. If we are to live at the limits of sustainability on this planet, we need to know all we can about it.

Why is education important? Everyone has a right to know what geologic hazards may affect their lives. It should be a fundamental human right. It's not, but we can make the effort to make sure that people know what can happen, and help them to prepare for it. I live on a plate boundary, and a major earthquake is likely to strike close to my home. But I know from personal observation that people in California are shockingly unprepared for a major seismic event. Few have an emergency kit in their home, or a plan for what to do in the event of a major quake. Few people know the location of the legendary San Andreas fault, and even fewer can name any of the dozens of other active faults that exist in our state. We see the unfolding disaster of self-destructing nuclear power stations in Japan, and are mostly unaware that we have nuclear power plants along the California coast (there were even plans to build a nuclear plant directly on the San Andreas fault at Bodega Bay in the 1960s). We can't make people learn these things, but we've got to try, and we have to give our teachers and educators and media specialists adequate tools to do so. Recession or not, cutting back on education at all levels is a foolish idea.

Seers and psychics have always sought to see the future. They have used tea leaves or chicken entrails, and consumed hallucinatory drugs to achieve visions. Earth scientists use seismometers and supercomputers to model future activity along fault zones (and consume lots of coffee). They also make predictions in many other fields, including climatology, hydrology, and volcanology. Our society is living, as I said before, at the very limits of sustainability. We need to know when the quakes will happen. But even more importantly, we need to use the tools at our disposal to understand the changes that are happening in our climate. We need to fully understand the behaviour of ocean currents and cycles. We need to have a clear understanding of how much coal, gas and oil is left, and how the continued use of these fuel sources affects the climate. Recession or not, cutting back on basic research is a foolish idea.

Why the flower at the beginning of this post? I wasn't sure at first. I was in the field yesterday with my students, looking at California's Mother Lode. It's early for wildflowers, but a few were visible here and there. This was a beautiful Indian Paintbrush that seemed to be glowing in the sunlight. It occurred to me that the best flower displays in the Sierra foothills actually take place in the aftermath of forest fires. A disaster wipes out the old trees and tangled underbrush, but life springs back, and sometimes there is beauty. I guess I am hoping that some good can come of this disaster; that we might make some smart choices about where to go from here...

POSTSCRIPT: After posting this, it occurred to me that I forget to mention one more atrocity: media coverage. The cable and network news have abrogated their responsibility to produce responsible journalistic coverage in favor of spectacle and high ratings. They long ago let go their science advisors, and their news readers (and that's all they are anymore) have little or no education in the earth sciences. They have very little knowledge or expertise in geology, seismology, or climatology, and they continually make the same factual mistakes every time there is a new earthquake or other natural disaster. FOX, MSNBC, and CNN: your science coverage is an embarrassment to journalism.

Geological Lunacy

The moon rises over Black Mesa in northern Arizona during one of my trips there in 2007.

Today marks the 40th anniversary of one of those seminal events in American history, the landing of humans on the surface of the moon (and getting them back!). It truly was a form of national lunacy, that in the 1960's we would put three men in a small metal cylinder on top of a massive rocket and send them into space. How many of you feel comfortable riding in even a 1960's vintage car or airplane, much less a giant rocket? The lunar module was designed with barely more than slide rules and human ingenuity!

Acknowledging that many of you were not born when these events conspired, it was a different world. We were in open competition with the USSR, and we had choices to fight the war openly, or doing it by proxy, such as, maybe, racing to the moon. It's a pretty poor reason for going to the moon, but scientists of the time were pretty comfortable with the bargain. It felt a lot better designing rockets for space travel rather than for delivering nuclear warheads. And the rewards were legion, not just in scientific knowledge about the origin of the moon, but also all the advances in technology that had to be invented from scratch to make the whole thing work.

I was born the year the first satellite was shot into space. As a child, I was fascinated with telescopes, with models of spacecraft, doodling rockets in the margins of my school work, and watching the adventures of the astronauts as each new milestone was reached.

Somehow, when the moon landing was about to happen, my scout troop had scheduled our summer camp week! I wasn't going to see the great event on television. We wouldn't miss it though. Luckily, the camp staff managed to find a radio station with a signal that reached Circle B Scout Ranch in the southern Sierra Nevada, and they patched the event through the camp PA system. I remember wandering through the pinyon pines, looking at the moon, and listening to coverage as Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin explored the first world other than our own.

Once we landed successfully, there was a new problem. For ten years, it was all about a race to be the first. It was about beating the Russians. Unfortunately, in the eyes of many people, the race was over, and we no longer needed to worry about getting to the moon, or much of anything else beyond our atmosphere. NASA started seeing huge cuts to their programs, and we pretty well lost our collective will to explore as a nation. It was enough that we got there first....

A lot of the people who cut their teeth on the moon shots stayed with the program, and the next decade included some incredible unmanned journeys that have continued the human journey. The Voyager missions stand out, with their incredible photos of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, and their myriad moons. But there was far less interest on the part of the general public (and it is hard to give a ticker-tape parade to a satellite that was on the far side of Saturn).

And so today we have a real job to do, especially those of us in the teaching business. It isn't as easy to get kids excited about astronomy, and geology, and biology, and the other natural sciences, not when there are so many bells and whistles in the media, on their games, on their phones. But where would those cool gizmos have come from if not for space program, and the technological advances that came with it? And what is a life without that spark of curiousity that drives us to go further than we ever have before?

Picture of the Day - A Great Outcrop, Part 2

Today is the broader look at the outcrop in yesterday's post. It doesn't stop with the faults! What the heck is going on with the left side? Please feel free to guess in the comments section, but I'm not trying to make things mysterious or difficult; if you e-mail me I will explain it all to you. I am just wanting to show some examples of the really great teaching moments and places to be had in a treasure like the eastern California desert. If you are curious, this particular roadcut is about 4 miles east of the town of Shoshone on Highway 178 (the Charles E. Brown Highway, hence the Charlie Brown Outcrop).

Why I Teach...Part 2

The massive steel airlock swung open, revealing a long dark passageway. We cautiously stepped into the darkness. The swift change from dry desert air into the damp interior of the cave came as a shock. The thermometer read 78 degrees, but it felt 15 degrees hotter. Sweat began to trickle down my back. It was an uncomfortable moment, but it quickly passed as I began to see the wonders that lay within. Due to the generosity of our colleagues in the Southwest Section, I was attending a special tour of Kartchner Caverns in the desert of southern Arizona near Tucson. It was a unique and strange experience.

(Note: I would LOVE to show you the many spectacular pictures I took while in the cave, but we all had to sign a promise that we would not disseminate our pictures; I'm keeping that promise, but I hope they don't mind if I show the OUTSIDE of the cave. That picture follows)

The caverns were discovered in the 1970’s, but their existence was kept a highly-guarded secret, so that they would not suffer the kind of vandalism and damage that is the fate of so many other caverns throughout the world. Following intense negotiations, the Arizona state legislature approved the formation of a state park without exactly knowing what it was that they were protecting. The philosophy that guides the park is that the caverns should be maintained in as close to their pristine original condition as is possible, while allowing visitors to see the spectacular features inside. To accomplish this, airlocks were installed to maintain the near 100% humidity (difficult in the desert environment), and trails were constructed carefully to protect the incredibly delicate cave formations. It is quickly evident that apart from the constructed walkways, human feet have never touched most of the cave surfaces. In short, a visit to the cavern is not so much a spelunking expedition, but rather a museum tour.

I don’t want that to sound like a negative observation. Few of us will ever have the opportunity to see a more pristine cavern in our lives, and few in the world are as nicely decorated as Kartchner, with all manner of helectites, soda straws, shields, and other rarely seen and easily destroyed features. Wandering through the passageways, I could sense what it must been like to discover a new cavern, and in doing that, I had just mentally checked off another of the items on my own geologist’s life list.

The life list? Many of you may remember an excellent article in the April 1990 issue of Geotimes by Lisa Rossbacher about the places in the world that all geologists should try to see in their lifetimes (A modified version of the list can be found at http://www.uc.edu/geology/geologylist/). Though not explicitly stated, it was also an acknowledgement that our life experiences can have a powerful influence on our teaching success. I hate to say it, but I used to speak somewhat blandly in my classes about Hawaii and hot spot volcanism until I had the experience of standing in front of an advancing basalt flow near Pu’u ’O’o a few years ago. Today I get excited telling others of the experience. I found and held fossils of the Burgess Shale fauna, as related in my last note. My historical geology classes are being transformed as a result. But lately I have started to feel a sense of urgency. The years are rolling by and there are too many places on my list that I haven’t been to yet. Committee work and curriculum planning chews up a lot of the hours of our lives, and though these things are important in their own way, I’m left feeling afraid that we might be getting behind in what really counts in our own lives as teachers and scientists.

But what’s even more profound, and more important in the long run, is that we are the portals through which our students are going to start their own geological journeys. Even if we can’t always take them directly, we transport them to these unexplored places with our pictures, our words, and our enthusiasm. Their view of the geological world begins with your experience. Are you behind on your own life list? How are you going to catch up?

Why I Teach...

I completed a four year stint as the president of the Far West Section of the National Association of Geoscience Teachers this last spring. One of my favorite activities as president of the section was the president's message that accompanied the twice-yearly newsletter. It was the first time I mused publicly about the reasons that I teach, and why I still enjoy it after 19 years in the flat plains of the Great Valley in California. Here are a few excerpts of some of my favorites (all of them are archived at http://nagt-fws.org/nwsltr1.htm)



"...I stepped over the pile of Grizzly droppings and continued up the trail, suddenly a bit more attentive to my surroundings. The clouds above were threatening to let loose with a downpour, and I was getting tired, having already walked 5 miles horizontally, and 2,500 feet vertically, to approach the glacially carved ridge high above. But none of these distractions mattered; nothing was going to disturb my mood. I was almost there, almost to the quarry where Charles Walcott discovered the Burgess Shale fossil assemblage back in 1909. It is hard to describe my feelings as I took those last few steps up to the rocks in the opening above.


No doubt many of you are familiar with the Burgess Shale fossil locality from your earth history and paleontology classes. It is one of the few places where the soft anatomy of creatures was preserved, giving us a unique picture of a moment in time some 515 million years ago, very soon after the “Cambrian explosion”. The usually common trilobites take a back seat to the strange and graceful creatures like Marrella, Opabina, Pikaia, Hallucigenia, and Anomalocaris. What a privilege to pick up and consider these small treasures from a time so different from our own.




I stood there on that high mountain ridge in the Canadian Rockies, thinking about my students back home in Modesto. How would they feel if they were here? I had to think that the earth and its history is so rich, and so stupendous, that not even the most cynical student could fail to be moved by the incredible diversity of life, and the long tectonic story that formed the earth we see today. If they could only just be there.


It is our job to bring the world to our students. We can’t always take them there in person, but we can make the earth alive to them in our classrooms and laboratories. We provide the tools for them, and through our guidance they develop the skills to find answers to their questions about the processes and history of the earth. It is our example that brings to light the scientific method of testing hypotheses and developing theories through careful investigation. "