More on the Geology of Glacier

Sorry for the poor grammar in the last post.

Now more on Glacier.

The structure that the Glaciers in the Park have carved amazing valleys out of is known as a thrust belt. This means basically that older rocks due to a compressional force find a plane of weakness and move up and over younger rocks which they sit beneath. The maximum extent of this movement has been estimated through illite crystallography to be around 100km. If you consider that one earthquake registering 8.0-9.0 (a world class earth quake) on the Richter scale general moves rocks only about 1 meter you start to realize that the amount of force it takes to build up mountains like that. The end result if you can imagine the world 60-65 million years ago would have been mountains about 5km higher than they are today's erosional level.

We didn't get to spend too much time talking about the Glaciers but evidence of them abounds the park. Unfortunately, according to NP research all the Glaciers will be gone by 2020.

Some of you may have heard of the channelized scablands in Washington state. It has been hypothesized, as early as 1903, that they were caused by a rapidly melting glacier. Today, we got to see some of the best evidence supporting the idea that glacial lakes, glacial melt water clogged up by a moraine (a huge pile of dirt deposited at the maximum extent of glaciation), breaching their confines caused the release of water needed to create the scablands. Research done on antidunes (they were 30 feet tall) and dunes created by the bursting of Paleo-lake Missoula suggest that a lake larger than lake Eire (spelling) emptied towards Washington in under 2 days. Additionally, it is entirely possible this has happened more than once.

Really really cool stuff huh.

Okay, I am going to go review some notes and hit the sack.

Dad and Mom, I got both of your letters. Thanks!

Glacier NP - Wow.

The trip up to Glacier was amazing. We only had 2 and a half hours of free time. But, me and a bout ten others took up Professor Ed's challenge to complete a 6 mile trek to Hidden Lake and go swimming. None of us had bathing suits but the reward, not to mention the stress relief, if you can believe it, of swimming in 40 degree water, was well worth it, a nice cold ginger ale.

The wild life up there is crazy. We saw a wolverine and a plethora of mountain goats and marmots.

Glacier's natural majesty is by far one of the coolest things I have ever seen.

What little geology we did was quite amazing as well. I took a piece of float rock from a 1.2 billion year old mudstone that has RAIN DROP imprints on it. How cool is that, evidence of rain from before any animals besides cyanobacteria existed.

This is my last night of freedom before the last major project starts. So, instead of sitting on the computer I am going to go play ping pong and volleyball.

Maybe, more tonight or tomorrow. Hope everyone is doing well!

Ps. Frannie I saw you posted on Facebook. Don't lose hope on Geology because of the blog. All the struggling and complaining I have done on here are WELL worth it.

Field (boot) Camp

Morale is running low the past few days. The strict rules and intense work of this camp, combined with today's mapping project in the pouring rain, we are talking nearly the entire year's rain in the last 2 days, has caused a bunch of people, including myself to get pretty edgy.

On the plus side, i (this computer won't capitalize i's) did see some amazing views today in the Sawtooth Range. i also got to see a wild coyote run within 25 feet of me.

i am pretty tired and fairly cranky tonight so i won't write much. i will be in Glacier NP tomorrow, which should be pretty exciting.

Some Background and the Weekend Review

I got an email from Uncle Tom suggesting I provide my readers with some info on the camp. The camp sits on a decent sized chunk of land (maybe 10 acres) in the South Boulder area of the Tobacco Root Mountains. The camp is composed of a main meeting hall, which served as an army mess hall pre 1950s. The 50 campers (2 got quit or were kicked out)left stay in 1960s "cabins" which are unheated and uncooled wooden shacks. The cabins each have 2 lights and variably sleep 8 people. The shower facilities are communal, but at least they have plenty of hot water. The 50 students represent 31 universities from across the nation. The age spread of the group is fairly large from about 20-31. Some of the students have graduated and some are already in graduate school. The nearest gas station is 25 minutes away and the nearest town, Whitehall, is 35-45 minutes further.

On Thursday, I wrote of a death march. Friday was exactly the same, only worse because in addition to hiking up and down all day we had to come back and finish our maps by 10pm. I didn't even finish my work so I had to speculate on the geology far more than I would have liked.

Saturday, we went to an abandoned silver mine and mapped the geology of the region. Afterwords, we combined our map data with a bunch of stream chemistry looking for point sources (seeps) of acid mine water. Later, we had a bbq and then went into town for "frontier days" which was marketed as a festival but ended up just being a bar with a live band.

Today, I went into Virginia City. The town used to be the territorial capital of Montana. Of course, the town was built just about over night when Gold was struck about 6-9 miles away in Alder Gulch. Without even knowing it, I ate lunch at a pizza place in what was once the capital of the Montana Territory. The town has been preserved exceptionally well by a private family and then sold to the state upon their death in the 80s or 90s. It is now a remarkable tourist trap but was well worth the time spent poking around. After getting back to Camp, I ended up playing volleyball and horseshoes to relax because for the first time in a million years I have no work to do.

Bruce's Death Marches Part 2

Today we had another death march. We went up and down what on the east coast we would call mountains but here are only 6000 foot high hills. We are working on constraining the pre-Cambrian deformation events in the region. I saw a bunch of cool rocks that I have never seen before including metagabbro and metaperidotite (come from both ultra mafic igneous protoliths). The rocks are for the most part granulate grade metamorphics meaning they reaches temperatures of about 875-950 degrees Celsius and about 10 kilobars of pressure.

We had beef lasagna for dinner and afterwords I played a few games of ping pong. The ping pong break was short lived however, as I had to return to computing some of the geochemistry on the rocks we mapped today. Geochemistry is how we model the P-T (pressure/temperature) conditions of metamorphism.

While working on the project tonight, I was talking to the girl who I played the game show with this weekend. She works in a gold mine in Nevada and says that even with just a Bachelors degree you can get staff geology positions at mines for starting salaries of between 50,000 and 70,000 grand with about a 10-14% profit sharing bonus every year. That is pretty good money for a just graduated college student. Perhaps, in addition to grad school applications, I will see if there are any entry mining or oil jobs available. However, the most recent oil industry data suggests getting a masters can get you starting jobs between 70,000 - 90,000 grand a year.

I am looking forward to this weekend. The town we are near, Whitehall, is having their annual festival called frontier days. Unfortunately, we will still be at the Bullion Gold mine doing acid mine drainage surveying Saturday afternoon when the rodeo is scheduled to take place

From Wednesday

So today we got to tour the Butte copper mine, which is home to the Berkley Pit. The Berkley pit is the largest Superfund site in the US. The 40 billion gallons of water now filling this abandoned open pit mine has the pH of around 2, meaning it is about 5 orders of magnitude more acidic than your average water. In addition to learning about acid mine hydrology, we got to spend some time looking at the Continental pit, which is still in production. They mine Cu and Mb with very small quantities of silver. I got to take some cool samples home of some copper carbonate precipitates that are green and blue along with some amazing copper-pyrite minerals.

I got my scores back from the Saturday field test. I made well above average which was nice. The average was 6.78 and I got an 8.35 out of ten.

Today was the first day in a long time that I haven't had a lot of work to do in the evening. I ended up playing two games of horseshoes and 3 rounds of volleyball to relax. It has been extraordinarily nice to have nothing to do in the evening for once.

Weekend Review

Sorry, I haven't written much recently. I have generally been burned out. This weekend was far from relaxing. We turned in a huge project Friday. Then we had an all day field test Saturday. Then on Sunday night had a 3 hour cross section mapping exercise. By Sunday night, I was on the verge of snapping mentally.

I will say though that Saturday night and Sunday during the day were fun though. Saturday the local bar in town had a trivia night type thing going on. Merilie (spelling) and I were on a team and won the thing. Though, I was the one who ended up answering all the questions. I didn't miss a single answer.

Sunday we all went into a small town called Ennis, famous for some of the world's best fly fishing, and which has a great lake for swimming- minus the leaches that live there. We stopped for ice cream after. Everything was going perfect 'till we got back. The cross section project was insanely tough. I have never felt so consistantly underprepared for the level of work given me than this summer.

Today and yesterday, we worked on mapping an Igneous pluton structure just north of the Mt. Doherty complex we have worked on previously.

Tomorrrow, we are going to take a tour of a huge copper mine in Butte. I am really excited for the trip both because it means we won't be in the field and becuase it is known for having some excpetional mineral samples, which I hope to be able to take with me.

Sleepy Hollow Stratigraphy

Today we used all the stratigraphy we have been compiling in the Whitehall area as a comparison to some new stratigraphy to the south-west of here. We ended up learning a decent bit about the regional geology of the MT area. It appears that during Jurassic times there was belt uplift (belt island) then immediately afterwords in the Cretaceous there is evidence of an active foreland basin forming over the same area, drawing its main sediment sources from the mountain ranges to the west of the Tobacco Roots where camp is located.

We spent all day working down near the Pioneer Range, a likely source of sediment for the foreland basin, mapping a thrust sheet overtopping an anticline structure.

I managed to go all day without seeing or hearing a rattlesnake. The snakes were probably all really trying hide out today because it was HOT. The sun was really beating on everything today, even the cows I saw out in the field were trying their best to stay in the shade.

We had a great dinner today. BBQ chicken, corn on the cob, rolls, rice with black beans, and cherry pie for dessert.

I have a big all day project to do tomorrow; so, I am going to cut the post short.

Blue Birds, Prong Horn Antelople, and Cougar's caves on Mystery Hill

So today, the mapping project we were working on took us past a few bluebirds nesting, a herd of maybe 15 prong horn antelope, and 2 or 3 small caves filled with bones. My friend found a broken canine tooth in one of the caves. I only saw 2 rattlesnakes today, sweet.

We finished up the mapping project today. It appears the faults I mentioned yesterday are connected at depth. I spent the last 5 hours trying to draw a cross section of what it all would look like.

We also checked out a cool spot along the Jefferson River today where Lewis and Clark once camped. They called the rocks they saw there "black granite". They could not have been more incorrect about what they saw. The rocks they were looking at are Lahood Fm. metamorphic conglomerates, which means they were originally sedimentary rocks rather than igneous as Lewis and Clark had imagined. Conglomerates are pretty cool rocks, especially this set of them. In the LaHood there are conglomerate clasts (meaning pieces of previous rocks washed out and eroded then deposited on either an alluvial fan or marine fan) the size of a small bus.

Breakfast today was horrible. I think the cooks attempted to make apple crepes but it ended up basically just being apples with almost no crepes. I had to switch to cereal to get enough food.

It looks like the rainy weather has broken for now. The last 2 days have been sunny and HOT. Just about everyday now, after lunch, I get really tired and start to lose focus because of the energy my body is spending on keeping myself cool. I am averaging about 4 liters of water consumption in the field each day, not including all the water I drink at the camp.

There is a short line for the computer so I am going to let the other people get on.

Rattlesnakes on Mystery Hill

*This computer does not have spell check. If, that throws you off sorry. I am tired and have work more work than I can complete tonight that I need to get back to doing.

So, I have now seen more rattlesnakes, 6, in one day than I have ever seen in the wild total, 0. Indeed, I even managed to come way too close, we are talking 2 feet, to stepping on one twice. In particular, one time, I was bent over about to hammer a rock, when I heard a rattling sound. My friend right behind me saw it in the bush next to us and we both went sprinting away. I managed to drop my hammer in the process and had to carefully retrieve it.

Thankfully, for the most part, it seems that rattlesnakes would generally prefer to avoid you as much as you them.

The crux of today's geologic problem, whose geometry is still unclear to me, involves the highway to hell mapping project and a set of two faults which contain between them, in less than 40-50 feet both and anticline and a syncline. I can tell you right now, it will not be easy to make a map of.

We had pork chops w/ apple sauce, potatoes a gratin ((spelling?) the kind with cheese mixed in), garlic rolls, salad, and carrot cake. The pork was dry but the apple sauce made it acceptable. The potatoes were delicious. I love bread in general and the carrot cake was mediocre.

I one my 3rd through 7th games of table tennis today, which was pretty exciting given I have lost almost all of my matches to this point.

I have to go back to work. Hope everyone is doing well.

*Aunt Sallie, my mom forwarded your email. Glad you are enjoying the blog!

On a Highway to Hell, Route 2 mapping project

Today, we started mapping an extremely tectonic section of Mesozoic stratigraphic section. Due to the number of reactivated normal faults that now behave as reverse faults (very hard to map and visualize mentally), the area has been dubbed the highway to hell. I was doing quite well all day until I ran into a ridge of the Kootenai formation where I found diagnostic mid-unit salt and pepper sands sitting directly next to black shales, which do not form in the Kootenai formation. Then immediately following the black shales in stratigraphic succession I found the top of the Kootenai, which is characterized by gastropod rich limestones. The interesting thing about that confounding fault interface is that it is typical of thin skinned faulting rather than the initial thick skinned faulting that created all the structures I had mapped previously. After a while, I realized what I related to you previously, which is that this area contains many reactivated faults, whereby recent thin skinned faulting makes use of deep seated, old fault geometries. Ha, that was confusing and probably not worded well.

In other news I stopped at a home made chocolate store in Harrison, MT and ended up holding the caravan up by about 5 minutes. This earned me the nickname "the candyman". I ended up buying a few truffles and some chocolate covered potato chips. The candy was well worth the nickname.

Dinner was pretty tasty tonight. We had shepherds pie, carrots, salad, and cheesecake for dessert.

I got my grade back for the 5 hour field test today. I got a 7.7/10, even though I got the geometry of the fold wrong. The class average was a 7. I realize the average may not represent how well I truly did compared to the rest of the class because of chance for skewing if people did really really poor. So, I asked the prof. today if it would be possible in the future to post the median score as well.

I have to go do some more work on this mapping project now before bed.

Belt Island

I got to spend my day looking at the rocks that make up the Belt Island suite. Unfortunately, Belt Island is not a island today but it was in Jurassic times! It used to be an anomalous uplift zone in the middle of a continental seaway. It's origins perplexed the Geologic community until 2005 when a seminal paper on the topic cleared up a lot of the questions surrounding the mysterious absence of certain rock layers in the area of the Belt Island. The entire day was spent doing sedimentology recon on the Mesozoic rock (mostly sandstones) of the area. This work will hopefully prove to be helpful for the next three days as we start a major mapping project that deals with many of these sandstone units.

One of those sandstone units was the source rock unit for the oil field I mapped in WY a week or two ago.

For part of the mapping this morning, we used some of the Moonies' (spelling? - they are some kind of cult with a Korean leader) ranch. While still on the ranch, I tried to ask one of the professors about it and the answer I got was not to bother myself about it. I would look up what all they are into, but I have stuipd bandwidth restrictions.

In one of the Jurassic units, the Morrison (world renowned for dinosaurs), I managed to find one vertebrae, possibly of a dinosaur (hard to speculate with any certainty though). I couldn't manage to get it out of the rock though- bummer.

It rained again today. It also hailed a good bit. Sweet.

I got a steak for the cook out coming up this Saturday, 16 oz. bone-in rip eye.

Weekend Recap

So, I would like to address all the spelling comments people have made. In general, when I write these posts, I am too tired to care about spelling. But, I promise I will be more diligent about my spelling.

Bad news: The first big project went miserably.

Good news: It's not worth that much of my grade.

Bad news: I missed dinner tonight because I was talking to a guy about getting into grad school.

Good news: I went to mass today and found out that next Sat. the Whitehall Catholic Church is having a Polka music mass.

Bad news: The teaching assistants say this weeks mapping is really really tough.

Good news: I spent an amazing day out in Butte today. The yearly folk festival was on and I got to see a boot maker and hat maker talk about thier trade. A good cowboy hat can run you 700 bucks.

Bad news: I didn't get a chance to call home tonight.

Good news: While I was walking up to the cell service spot and ran into 2 local cowboys - and I mean like real real- and ended up spending an hour talking to them about life out here instead. They had these great hound dogs they used to track bears and mountain lions while they were out looking on thier cattle.


- It's way past my bed time. Sorry, I didn't write more.

Bruce's Death Marches

So, excluding yesterdays rain out, we have been hiking everyday. Two of those days in perticular, monday and today, stand out was what I have decided to call Bruce's Death Marches. Bruce is the director of the field camp and he hikes at a fervent pace up and down the sides of mountains and cliffs. It is truely a sight to see and an aerobic challenge to match. Today's Death March took us up 5 seperate "hill sides" each with at least 300 feet of verticle relief. In actuallity, I probably only scaled 2000 feet or so. But, the fun thing about doing these climbs is that there are no trails. This means you are walking in a field of cow pies, sage brush, mountain moghany (spelling?), varrious grasses, and trees. I had the good fortune today to be scalling back down the side of the first hill side and knock into a dead mountain moghany brush. I, of course, struck one of the pointy ends of the brush right into my shin. I immediatly screamed out "****, that hurt". I looked down at my pants to find that they had not ripped so I kept walking no big deal. By the time I got down to the valley beneth the hill, the group had stopped for water and to document the igneous sill that had intruded the area. I happened to bend over and look at my pants, low and behold my shin was covered in blood. Hurray! So I pulled up my pants and found a small puncture wound. I got antiseptic and a band aid, which it promptly beld trhough. I decided I needed a cover story for why my pants were bloody. The best one I could think of, and the one I mentioned to anyone who asked about my pants, was that I had been attacked by a cougar. In all seriousness, though, I am fine just a small cut. But, in the middle of the hike with all my gear, and having very little clue about the geology of the area I was supposed to be mapping, it made the march just that much more frustrating. About 3/4 of the way through I managed to make at least one postive out of the hike. On a huge ledge of Cambrian Pilgrim Fm. limestone, my friend took a picture of me with a visibility of some 50 miles or so in the background looking back at the moutain range and showing the cliffs I had already climbed.

In other news, I am getting pretty excited for the weekend. Ha, the local bar in Whitehall, MT may have 2 stepping lessons for us on Saturday night. Sunday, I will either go to the Montana Folk Festival in Butte or panning for Saphirres (spelling) in some of the gulches around south west MT where numerous Tertiary (young geologically speaking) igneous batholiths have been subjected to hydrothermal alteration creating the conditions for outstanding mineral deposits. In the meantime, however, I have the mapping project to finish by 10:30PM Friday for the hike just described above and our first independent exam (a 4 hour solo hike/mapping project) to complete by 5 PM Saturday afternoon.

I have gotten my grades back for the first two projects. They say the average grade for the first assignment, mapping the plunging anticline in Lander Oil Field, was around a 6/10. I managed to get 7.8/10. The second assigment, keeping a field notebook for the Geology stops on the way to MT, had a similar average annouced, but somehow, even with all my horrible organizational skills, I managed to bring back all 10 points. Ha, I can only hope to keep that up. It's going to be damn near impossible though.

We had the most miserable dinner in the world tonight. It was some sort of jalepeno chicken dorrito casserole. It was disgusting and didn't sit well in my stomach. I hope they never serve it again. The only side they served was a fairly gross salad. I went up and asked if they had any rolls or anything and the old cook lady looked at me like I was crazy and said, "there are dorritos in the casserole."

I have written a tun for the day and have to get back to working on this mapping project. I hope everyone is doing well. I'd love to hear from you either by comments in the blog, email, or if you are really daring by snail mail. The address should be on the IUGFS website.

Weather

The weather out here is crazy. It has been raining sooooo much.

We were suppsoed to start a huge mapping project today on Mt. Dourghty (spelling?) but the rain has caused the clay to expand, making the terrain untravesable. So, instead, we got to spend most of the day hanging and wasting time in Butte. We got to see the awe inspriring Mineral Musesum at Montana Tech...

I forgot to elborate on where I have been since getting into the Tobacco Root Mountains. We have already done a bunch of sedimentoloy in the Sappington area, which is famous for Talc depostits and to geomorphologists for the "Water Gap". Last sunday, I also climbed up Mount Brownback which is a fairly high peak in the region (near 11,000 feet I think).

Lots of work ahead. I am about to go draw the topographic profile of the traverse I will have to map tomorrow.

We had apple pie tonight. It was very tasty though I have never seen it with pecans in it before.

Cardwell, MT and the trip from SD

I have very very very limited computer access. We are talking like maybe 10 minutes every couple days. I am now in MT. We have traveled through a great deal of terrain to get here from SD.

Since leaving the Black Hills, I have been through the powder river basin in WY (where they have huge coal seams visible from miles away), the Big Horn Basin (where I got to see some great examples of thick skin laramide style uplift -ie rocks 2.7 billion years old being pusshed up from the mantle- ), the Owl Creek range ( where I mapped part of a still active oil field and saw a 6 foot rattle snake), the Teton range, Yellowstone (I was there on the 4th of July - go america), and got to see a lake in MT that was created in the 1950s because of a mass wasting event that tore down a mountain after an earthquake.

At the field camp the food has been great: meatball pasta, bbq ribs, chicken (it was too dry- so I added a tun of hot sauce), and burritos (my first experiance with them wow I have been missing out).

The weather is absolutly crazy here this summer. It has rained every day and hails a good bit. The weather is really abnormal- last summer it rained once the entire time.

It took a while to get used to the altitude (and the miles of hiking every day). But, I think now I am getting the hang of it. I am learning a tun and the profs are great. Everything is super hard though- one girl has already had to drop out.

I am really exhusted so I am going to pass out. I'll try to post as much as I can and call you guys when I get a chance. But both internet (bandwidth restrictions) and cell (4 mile hike up a mountain) are really a challenge to get access on.

*ps sorry for the awful grammar and spelling- I have been up now for 15 hours today and have been working and hiking for most of them.

Hope you all are well- send emails or call and I'll get back to you.

BLACK HILLS!

Today was our first full day in the field. We mapped out the geology of the entire black hills. We even got to see Mount Rushmore from a far. Then of course right as lunch time came, we got hailed on. It was really suprising to be hit in the head by ice in the middle of June (or is it July now). I have completely lost track of time. Anyways, there is a line for the computer. More to come.

N 43 50.585' W 102 11.764

The last time I visited the Badlands, I was very little and hardly remember it. Man, it is a sight to see. Amazing. The ony regret is that we basically just stopped through. I wish we had time to go on the fossil hike. We did a brief mapping trip looking at a major fault system. Ended up spending the night in Rapid City. We had mediocre Mongolian for dinner. Who would have guessed that Mongolian stir fry in SD wouldn't be the best.

N 41 32.940' W 95 55.197'

We stopped the night in a very very sleepy town called Missouri Valley, IA. The motel was in a great location right next to the only working bar in town. The bar was called the edge and its motto is "if you ain't livin on the edge, you are taking up too much space". A big group of us went there for dinner and $6 pitchers of bud light. The next morning we stopped along the Missouri River and looked at the Pierre Shale, which will be a major sed unit we will trace across the west.

N 41 28.499' W 90 37.819'

Crossed the mighty Mississippi. Further down the road into Iowa we overheard on the CB radio some truckers talking about our caravan. They thought we were "corn people" looking for "crop circles". Then apperintly one of the truckers got cut off by us and pulled off at the rest stop we were at and started screaming at us. It was quite a sight to see. Iowa also seems to be ontop of the alternate energy game. I saw a big wind farm some where past Des Moines.

N 39 41.714' W86 11.553'

So, the trucks we drive in have CB radios and of course immediatly upon arriving in indianapolis we hear over the CB "If you want to see a grown man cry... keep watching Kyle Busch." We stopped in Gilesville, IL for lunch. The town was one of your typical midwest one street towns. Ha, I even saw a man riding a bike towing a lawnmower.