Call for posts for February 2009 Accretionary Wedge Geoscience Blog Carnival

I'm pleased to be hosting the February 2009 edition of the Accretionary Wedge Geoblogospheric Carnival! The Wedge for January has been posted at Clastic Detritus. So it is time to start thinking about February's wedge. I hope you have some fun with it!

A few months ago I posted a list of 100 places that a geologist should see in his or her lifetime, based on a 1990 article in Geotimes by Lisa Rossbacher, and a subsequent web page posted by Terry Acomb. The post took off in ways I never imagined; I got dozens of comments, and Chris at Highly Allochthonous took up a running total of how many places everyone had visited. The best part was the stories; everyone enjoyed describing their adventures while facing down lava flows and climbing mountains, and retreating from floods. Even as I posted the list though, I knew it was missing a lot of important places and experiences. Some people felt like they were breaking the "rules" if they counted an important feature like a BIF on their list, but that it wasn't actually in Michigan. It was North America-centric, too. I found myself wanting to revise the list in a few ways, and so I arrive at the subject of this month's Accretionary Wedge:

What are the places and events that you think should all geologists should see and experience before they die? What are the places you know and love that best exemplify geological principles and processes?

It would be great to have a truly international list. I also want to get a list of those places that don't always make the "must visit" lists. And why should this place be included? Pick one or three, or seven, and note them in the comments to this post, or e-mail me at hayesg AT mjc.edu, or send me a link to your blog, if you have posted something there.

A brief example from my own backyard. Yosemite Valley was on the 100 things list. And it is a truly wonderful place to visit, and I do so whenever I can. It is precious to me. But...if you want to truly understand the history of the Sierra Nevada, there is a another canyon in the California mountains that has a greater diversity of rocks, more evidence of glaciers, far fewer crowds, and get this: it is more than twice as deep as Yosemite Valley! It is pictured above, and will be one of my contributions to a new revised "100 Places List".

Please try to get your submissions in by February 25th. Happy hunting!

The January Accretionary Wedge: Seeing the Future in a Picture

Moonrise over Dziłíjiin (Black Mesa)

This month's Accretionary Wedge Carnival is being hosted by BrianR at Clastic Detritus, and involves speculation about the future of the earth in the context of geologic events and processes. It is a delightfully open-ended idea, and one that I have used as a final exam question in my historical geology classes. After all, historical geology is an attempt on our part to understand the past history of the planet by observing present-processes (the simple definition of uniformitarianism, a founding principle of the science). But a part of the value of understanding the past and present is the ability to project into the future, and when I ask students to "predict" the future, it is an excellent gauge of their understanding of the basic principles of the class. Did they really understand the concept of geologic time? Do they understand the context of human existence with the vast flow of geologic time? Can they relate long-term changes of climate over periods of thousands or millions of years with climate change in a human context of a century or so? Will our activities leave a mark in the geologic record?

Speculating about the future often is rather anthropomorphically-based: it's an ego trip. Will we as humans be around to see and observe the results of our present-day choices over a geologically extended period? I decided that would be the direction of my post...not whether we would be here so much, but would anyone else figure us out?

I wrote in my last post about the mining of coal at Black Mesa on the Hopi and Navajo reservations in northern Arizona, and I chose one of my favorite chance pictures of the place to decorate this post. I was off to a late start on a 500-mile drive, and was only halfway to where I was going by the time the sun set and behind me I saw a bright light that proved to be the rising full moon. There weren't too many choices for parking and framing a picture, so I got what I got, with fences, telephone poles, and highway traffic (that I cropped out). The cliffs of Black Mesa form the horizon. The picture is a nice gathering of the elements for my speculation and musings that follow.

The moon is a remote dead planet, remaining essentially unchanged for the last two billion years, aside from the occasional meteorite impact, and the footprints of a rather small number of humans. But it touches us through the tides, and as a source of light in the night-time. I am told that it is moving farther away from the earth at a rate of a few inches per year. So the tides will continue and the moon will rise in the sky on a regular basis for a long time. Some things don't change very much, even over millions of years.

The atmosphere, the prism through which we observe the cosmos, contains nitrogen, oxygen, argon, and small amounts of carbon dioxide, methane and water vapor. The nitrogen is largely unreactive, aside from being transformed by bacteria into a usable form for plant life. The oxygen is very reactive, and plays an active part in the weathering of the earth's surface; most children are taught (and maybe even remember) that animals consume oxygen and give off carbon dioxide, while plants consume the carbon dioxide and give off oxygen. Even if a giant catastrophe, a mass extinction event, were to disrupt the carbon cycle, it eventually reach an equilibrium state and the atmosphere would achieve a relative balance over time. Thus, I don't expect the atmosphere to change much, with the exception of carbon dioxide and methane. As many are coming to realize, we have been doing a mass planet-wide experiment that answers the following question: if we take a significant proportion of all the hydrocarbons produced by earth processes over the last 400-500 million years, and pump them into the atmosphere in a period of 200 years, what will happen to the climate? Results of the experiment are pending; a preliminary report will ready in a few decades or centuries

The fences, the telephone poles, the asphalt highway are all ephemeral monuments to our existence that will fade within a few decades or centuries. I'm not sure that the fast-food restaurants, motels and houses of the nearby town of Kayenta will even come close to outlasting the work of the Ancestral Puebloan people who built Chaco Canyon and Mesa Verde (I am reminded of the permit for my tract home in California that listed the expected existence of my house as being 40 years; yikes, I used up half of it already!). Is there anything that we will leave as a mark of our passing?

The strip mine on Black Mesa might be something. In 40 years or so, the miners have moved mountains, in the most literal sense of the word. In a sense though, they are hiding the results of their labor as they back fill the coal pits to return the land to the original configuration. The geologists of some future species might detect our presence because of the disruption of the sedimentary sequence, since the coal will be missing, and the waste rock will be a jumbled chaos. There may be some symmetry in the pattern of the chaotic rock, with straight lines and corners representing the edges of the strip mine. But that will only be possible for a few more tens of thousands of years.

In the fullness of time, the entire mesa will be disappearing, along with all signs of human existence. The entire region sits at an elevation of 6,000-7,000 feet above sea level, and is being vigorously eroded by the Colorado River and its tributaries. The massive dams at Lake Powell and Lake Mead will matter little in the long run. Filled with sediment in decades, and removed by erosion within a few thousand or tens of thousands of years, the dams cannot hold back the massive movement of sediment from the plateau to the sea. There have been dams before, made of lava flows, and they could not hold back the flowing rivers for long. In a few million years the entire region will have hundreds or thousands of feet of sediment removed and the only remaining clues of our existence there will be downstream somewhere.

There will be floodplain deposits preserved in parts of the world that will contain deposits of concrete and metal, and even human bones, much as the dinosaurs and other terrestrial creatures have been preserved. I have no doubt that a layer will be discovered that represents a mass extinction event wherein a vast number of organisms disappeared forever, including the mammalian megafauna, and perhaps many oceanic species, especially at the top of the food chain, such as many kinds of sharks and whales. Will we be identified as the cause of the catastrophe? Who knows? Someone or something might figure it out. Or maybe not; it might be another of those mysteries that nag and bother the psyches of those who study the earth and it’s past.

I'm going to close with a story from my youth. If you have stayed with my narrative for this long without laughing or sighing in frustration, well bear with me because you may laugh now. I figured it out once...I figured out as a 12-year-old why the dinosaurs disappeared from the earth (I'm old enough to remember when birds were not dinosaurian species in the eyes of paleontologists).

I had learned how dinosaurs lasted for many millions of years, and that humans had existed for only a few thousand as a dominant species. It occurred to me that perhaps intelligence evolved very late in the Cretaceous, literally within the last million years of the period, and technology evolved in the last few thousand years. The dinosaurs built cities and roads and planes and bombs, and in the blink of an eye they obliterated themselves and most of the ecosystem they occupied in a vast war. So complete was their destruction that no sign remained of their cities and technology. And the world started over without them....

Such are the musings of a child of the Cold War.....

The Cretaceous Parks of the Colorado Plateau: the Black Mesa story

The leaf broke loose from the branch, and fluttered slowly to the forest floor, a forest alive with hoots, howls and whistles from the myriad animal species that dwelt there. In the distance the crashing surf of a wide sandy beach could be heard . The constant rain of leaves and twigs on the forest floor accumulated over the millenia, never quite decaying away because of the moist, swampy oxygen-poor conditions that retarded the activity of bacteria. The carbon-rich layer persisted as the region was covered first by a brief advance of the seashore, than by later forests and swamps, then seas again, and then the world changed. The seas disappeared forever, and the land started to rise. And rise. Eventually the layer containing the leaf was pushed thousands of feet upward, erosion ate away at the rocks, and the sediment was left as part of a vast mesa, covering some 4,000 square miles. After being buried in total darkness for unmeasured eons, something happened; there was the sound of hammering, the rock split open, reflecting sunlight for the first time in 70 million years, and there it was: a fossil in the hands of a geology student.

The huge bear-claw shaped plateau is called by the Navajo people Dziłíjiin, but is known to English-speakers as Black Mesa. The carbon-rich sediments, which are part of the Menefee Formation, are coal beds. And therein lies the source of generations worth of controversy and injustice. The coal is in seams that range from 3 to 18 feet thick, and the amounts are vast. At least one source I ran across suggests that 20 billion tons are present with a potential recovery value of at least 100 billion dollars. It is one of the largest coal deposits in the country.

The coal has been mined since the 1970's. Some of the coal is carried by rail to a huge coal-burning power plant at Page, Arizona, next to Lake Powell. The remainder was ground into pebble sized chunks, and was transported in a slurry mix for 273 miles to a coal-burning power plant on the Colorado River in Laughlin, Nevada. It took something like a billion gallons of water every year to move the coal, water that could come only from underground in this semiarid country. This plant closed in 2005, pending negotiations for a renewal of the mining terms. The company that mines the coal frankly swindled the Navajo and Hopi people. The negotiations ended up providing a fraction of the usual royalties paid to landowners, and the groundwater was sold at rates far less than any farmer would ever pay. One of the more shameful aspects of the whole sordid affair emerged years later when it was revealed the lawyer representing the Hopi people in their negotiations with the coal companies turned out to be on the payroll of the coal company.

The coal company is quick to note the wonderful benefits they provide to the Navajo and Hopi people. You can read their story here. By law, they must return the land to the original configuration, and they seem to be doing so. But the groundwater is not being replaced, and numerous springs on the mesa have already dried up. And the power plants are two of the biggest single sources of air pollution in the southwest.

Some things never seem to change. It appears that Black Mesa was one of the final environmental victims of the Bush administration. A controversial environmental impact statement (EIS) was approved by the federal Office of Surface Mining on December 22, 2008 that helps clear the way for the company to expand by nearly 19,000 acres (roughly 30 square miles), displacing more Navajo families, and continuing to use up scarce groundwater resources.

Black Mesa is not a park like many of the other sites I have been writing about for the last six months in my "short" history of the Colorado Plateau. It is instead the home of two nations of people, and an important part of their spiritual universe. Perhaps something more significant than a park...

"Then the coal company came with the world's largest shovel

And they tortured the timber and stripped all the land

Well, they dug for their coal till the land was forsaken

Then they wrote it all down as the progress of man."

John Prine, Paradise

Update (1/27): As usual, I was writing fast and made an error in the post; the formations of the Mesa Verde Group go by different names in different areas (I knew that, darn it). At Black Mesa, they are called the Toreva Formation, the Wepo Formation, and the Yale Point Sandstone. The coal is mined from the Wepo, not the Menefee, although the units are broadly correlated. Thank you to Stephen for the heads up, and for an additional point of view (see comments).

"Restore science to its rightful place..."

"We will restore science to its rightful place, and wield technology's wonders to raise healthcare's quality and lower its cost. We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories. And we will transform our schools and colleges and universities to meet the demands of a new age. All this we can do. All this we will do."

Barack Obama, last Tuesday

These were good words to hear. Especially if you are a polar bear or a wolf....

The Others Aren't, But This Test is Really Important!

These things are absolutely silly...until you do well on one, and then they are extremely significant and important. I got lucky on some of the questions; I've always known Sputnik went into space during the year of my birth, for instance. I don't do as well on computer-speak tests, but astronomy and the space sciences were literally the underpinning of my life as a child. Actually the quality of the questions was pretty good, and I have been declared to be Uber Space Nerd's Mentor!

I often quiz my students early in the semester on the stereotypes they have about science, and two words that come up consistently are that doing science is "hard" and "boring". That allows me to "launch" into a discussion of how privileged we are to be living in the time we are living in. The riches of new data that have emerged in the last decade or two because of the Hubble Space Telescope, or the Spitzer Infrared, or the Mars Rovers, or the Saturn Cassini orbiter leave me awestruck, being someone who grew up in a time when the telescope images of the planets revealed only fuzzy featureless disks.

And the accessibility! Gone is the time when the spectacular images could only be taken by multi-million dollar machines...technology has advanced to the point that my colleagues at the college have now produced images of planets and galaxies with their own equipment that rival the best stuff that Palomar ever did a few decades ago. A year or two ago, I was at Death Valley and an astronomy buff had set up his equipment, and started projecting the images he was taking in real time on a sheet on the side of a truck. On a sheet, and it was spectacular!

And to top things off, we have a president who thinks science should have some influence over policy decisions! That may be the most amazing development of all...

Watch out for the Green Flash!

A few weeks ago, I stirred things up in the geoblogosphere with the 100 things a geologists should do meme, and number 100 on the list was to see the "green flash", a hard-to-see last-moment-of-the-sunset phenomenom that I have yet to witness, despite numerous attempts. One of my colleagues, Joel Hagen, caught the moment the other night and was kind enough to share with me, and also grant permission to post his photo of the event (please respect the copyright, check with me for contact information if you want to use the photo in some way).

More info on the green flash phenomena can be found here...

The Best Job in the World: A Teacher of Geology

Some reaction around the geoblogosphere about the ranking of "geologist" as the 30th best career out of 200 various fields...dairy farming and lumberjacking rank the lowest. Perusing the list, I don't find my personal field specifically listed; although I think of myself as a geologist, I am actually a college professor who teaches geology, and "professor" isn't listed separately, although "Teacher" is listed at #127. On the other hand, "Mathematician" is numero uno on the list, and it specifically points out that many mathematicians work in an academic setting.

Personally? I think I have one of the best jobs on the planet. I have had the privilege of introducing thousands of people to the world of geology and earth science over the last twenty years, both in the classroom and in the field, including a few far-flung locations overseas. Yes, there are moments of administrative/bureaucratic nonsense I could do without, but these things do not dominate my time. State funding cuts threaten our campus, but either we support education in our state or we go down the economic tubes, so I think there will a reasonable assurance of job security for the foreseeable future. It took me eight years of college (with economic-related breaks) to get the degree that allowed me to seek my job, but it has paid off with 24 years of an enjoyable career, with a hope of 20 more!

Then again, there is this....