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.
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