Interested in Teaching Earth Science/Geology in California?

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

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

"Miss"-adventure! So close and yet so far...

Chris over at Highly Allochthonous asks an interesting question: "Has anyone else driven past cool geological sites without getting to see them?" Call them "Miss-Adventures". It immediately brought up several memories of intense frustration...

The very first international field trip I led was to Scotland in 2001 to see the great geology, but especially to visit some of the famous James Hutton localities. We made special arrangements with the tour company (for a price) to deviate from their usual tour (to St. Andrews to see golf courses), so we could instead head into the southern uplands of Scotland to Siccar Point, site of the famous Hutton/Playfair unconformity* . We committed to the trip 1 1/2 years in advance, having no idea that hoof and mouth disease was about to be detected in the British Isles, including the farms around Siccar Point. So near, so far is so right! Access was impossible. In total frustration, I pulled out the topo maps, and we made our way to a campground about a mile north of Siccar Point. I read the passage from John Playfair to the students, and than I ran as far as I could along the beach cliffs to where I could see the point, but not the relationships (although we could pick up the associated rocks along the coast). The story in pictures is here.

On the same trip, we intended to visit the grave of Hutton at a church in Edinburgh, but as luck would have it, the particular section of the cemetery was locked up because of past abuse by the perpetrators of the the "Ghost Walks" in the town (yeah, yeah I did a ghost walk too, tourist that I was).

John Playfair wrote this famous passage about his visit with James Hutton to Siccar Point:

"What clearer evidence could we have had of the different formation of these rocks, and of the long interval which separated their formation, had we actually seen them emerging from the bosom the deep? We felt ourselves necessarily carried back to the time when the schistus on which we stood was yet at the bottom of the sea, and when the sandstone before us was only beginning to be deposited in the shape of sand or mud, from the waters of a superincumbent ocean. An epocha still more remote presented itself, when even the most ancient of these rocks instead of standing upright in vertical beds, lay in horizontal planes at the bottom of the sea, and was not yet disturbed by that immeasurable force which has burst asunder the solid pavement of the globe. Revolutions still more remote appeared in the distance of this extraordinary perspective. The mind seemed to grow giddy by looking so far into the abyss of time...."

The photo is my best shot of Siccar Point, in the far distance of the scene.

What are your best "miss-adventures"?

A Whatizit? Photo for the Day

A nice little photo "what is it?" for the day. The dark chunks are about a foot across and the location is at the south end of Joshua Tree National Park. I was going through the photo archives of one of my meetings of the National Association of Geoscience Teachers, preparing a post about our roadguide for the geology of the Coachella Valley and surrounding mountains. You can check it out here.

Brad Paisley, A True "Rock" Artist?

Caught a hilarious spot on Prairie Home Companion last weekend. Did you know that Brad Paisley, famous country singer, would rather be a rock star? And I mean a rock star; he wants to sing songs of geology. Guy Noir, private eye, is brought in to bring him back from the brink...

The script and MP3/Real Audio can be seen here: http://prairiehome.publicradio.org/programs/2009/05/02/scripts/noir.shtml

Here's a bit....

BP: This is a volcanic hot spot in Hawaii. It’s for a TV special I’m writing a soundtrack for. I just can’t explain how the sight of red hot lava bubbling up from the ground — I just find it moving— the earth reforming itself.....continents shifting......earthquakes......I want to learn more and more about geology— have you ever read John McPhee’s book, Rising From The Plains?

GK: Yes, I’ve been reading it for ten years every night just before I fall asleep.

BP: I just find the science of geology so exciting....so fulfilling— I don’t want to sing about love anymore. I want to sing about the earth.

And a little ditty from "Al Gore":
Let other people hang out in bars.
I lie on the rocks and look up at the stars.

(I thought we geologists did both....)

Kudos to Prairie Home Companion!

Nice Media Catch: The Ahwiyah Slide

The largest rockfall in Yosemite Valley in two decades thundered off Ahwiyah Point in late March of this year, setting off seismometers in Berkeley, which recorded a magnitude 2.4 quake from the impact. I posted a number of pictures and descriptions at the time. Now the Modesto (and Fresno) Bee has run a front page article detailing some of the research being done on the slide by Berkeley graduate student Valerie Zimmer (details here).

It's great to see some good geology on the cover of the local news, especially when they get the general details right.

This note was also posted at the other blog I run for the National Association of Geoscience Teachers. We have some great geology field guides for the California-Nevada region you might want to check out, including a geologic tour of Yosemite Valley. Part of the Yosemite tour is posted at http://virtual.yosemite.cc.ca.us/ghayes/roadside.htm.

Ode to Field Trip Season: Out on the Coconino

I've been doing field trips to the southwestern United States for darn near a quarter century, enough that there are places out there where I know individual boulders and how they've changed over the years...it's a wonderful, and wondrous place. Regular readers will recall my nearly year-long review of the geology of the region, for instance (and yes, I intend to finish; I only have 65 million years to go out of the original 2 billion).

I'm not going there this year. I'm headed overseas to our 50th state with 25 students instead. When I started considering a trip that involved flights and hotels and vehicle rentals, I thought of letting a travel company make the arrangements, but from experience I knew the expenses pile up rapidly and the profit margin demanded by the tour companies makes the cost prohibitive. So I made all the arrangements myself. I have found that holding and spending tens of thousands of dollars of student's money, knowing that if I screw up the trip won't work, well, it's intimidating. You can't really commit to hotel and flight reservations until you know you'll have enough people, but people like to wait to the last minute to commit because they don't know if they'll have the money or the time off, so there is a delicate balancing act. But it is working out well so far. Thank heavens for the wonderful folks who are helping me out!

In the meantime, for those of you who will be headed out to the open range this summer, especially the southwest that I love so much, I offer another bit of poetry from the archives. In honor of the Beach Boys, it can be set to the tune of "Kokomo" (thanks to our department poet laureate Vicki)

Out on the old plateau
Far away from Modesto
We're camped out on the Navajo
With no place to go
Out on the Coconino

Arches had the wind
Lovely was the Grand Canyon
Cedar Mesa was the best there'd been
It felt like Heaven
Out on the Coconino

Zoraster, disaster, drive a little faster
Chinle, please hurry, we're all a little weary
Jurassic, Triassic, we say it's just fantastic
Colorado Plateau
Out on the Coconino

Just when we start to snooze
CB crackles with Garry's news,
"Hey guys? Can you name that rock,
back there at six o'clock?"
Out on the Coconino

Her Garry! It's scary!
Those cliffs were really hairy
Arches and bridges, volcanoes, faults and itches
Surprises, moonrises, this trip has had some hitches,
but best of all, we're still all
out on the Coconino!


The photo of the day takes in the view from Cedar Mesa in the Four Corners region. The Cedar Mesa Sandstone is sort of correlative to the Coconino Sandstone that is most famously exposed as the white cliff near the top of the Grand Canyon. Both units date from the late Permian, and represent coastal and desert sand dune environments. The deep canyon in the distance contains the San Juan River. The encised meanders are the famous Goosenecks of the San Juan.

Rock Stars! Geology's Greatest Hits

Well, ok, it's one of our more cliched geo-jokes, but some kudos are in order for VIA Magazine, the publication of the American Automobile Association. The cover of their May/June 2009 issue features a photo of the Grand Canyon (not the photo above, that one is mine), and a lead article featuring ten of the best geological parks in the United States! The article, by biologist Chris Woolston, is to be commended for including not only the familiar sites like the Grand Canyon and Yosemite National Parks, but also places like Mono Lake in eastern California, Palouse Falls in Washington, and the badlands of Makoshika State Park in eastern Montana. It's nice when geology gets a bit of credit for the scenery!

Here's some food for thought: What ten parks would best display the geological history of your country? I'll have to think on that one a bit...I live in a very big country.