3 December 2013

El Paso geology via GigaPan

Posted by Callan Bentley

This spring, I traveled to west Texas to assist Joshua Villalobos of El Paso Community College in capturing a series of GigaPan images, in hopes of creating a comprehensive virtual field experience revealing that area’s spectacular geology. Since then, my student Robin Rohrback-Schiavone has been using our GIGAmacro photographic imaging system to make a series of hand-sample GigaPans to accompany the outcrop-scale images that Joshua and I made. The whole collection is online here: http://www.gigapan.com/galleries/10948/gigapans

The macro GigaPan of a “xenobomb” is cool in its own right…
link

…but it’s even cooler if you can place it into the context of its home volcano…
link

…but there you see that the blocks and bombs are mixed in with finer pyroclastics. So check out the ash and lapilli from this site, instead:
link

Or you might opt to see the Campus Andesite in outcrop at Cristo Rey…
link

…and then examine a hand-sample of the rock for petrographic analysis:
link

Or how about the contact between the Red Bluff Granite and the Mundy “Breccia” (Basalt)?
link

Here, you can take a look at it close up:
link

Elsewhere, this same granite intrudes the Castner Marble:
link

Further up the road is an instructive outcrop of this metamorphosed limestone:
link

In places it shows remnant sedimentary structures:
link

…and even stromatolites survive:
link

There’s one spot where a clastic dike cuts through.
link

Here’s a piece of it:
link

There are plenty of other pairings possible. Soon we’ll have a website put together to explore the whole scene. In the meantime, this GigaPan gallery of “El Paso geology” is the place to go: http://www.gigapan.com/galleries/10948/gigapans

Doubtless this will be an important resource for our students in the joint EPCC-NOVA field exchange this coming spring semester.