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22 March 2009
The Painted Desert and Petrified Forest
(This is the final day of a week-long field trip in Arizona. Get caught up with days 1,2,3,4,5, 6) Friday was the last day of the field trip, and we spent it at the Petrified Forest national park. We were there to study the colorful clays and river deposits, but we began the day with an unexpected bonus: our guide, Bill Parker, is a paleontologist at the park, and he …
20 March 2009
Grand Falls and Sand Dunes
(This is day 6 of a week-long field trip in Arizona. Get caught up with days 1,2,3,4,5) Today we visited Grand Falls and the nearby dune field. Grand Falls is especially interesting because it combines many of the processes that are active in shaping planetary surfaces. The falls are the result of a huge lava flow pouring into the ancient canyon of the Little Colorado river, filling the canyon and …
19 March 2009
Meteor Crater, Walnut Canyon, and Red Mountain
(This is day 5 of a week-long planetary geology field trip to Arizona. Get caught up with days 1,2,3,4) Today was a long and awesome day. We started out at meteor crater, the youngest and best preserved impact crater on Earth! Our guide today was Shaun Wright, a colleague from the Hawaii field workshop, among other places. He showed us infrared images of the crater taken from an airplane and …
18 March 2009
The Grand Canyon
Today we visited the Grand Canyon. If you haven’t been there before, there is no way to convey what it is like. It is the only place I’ve ever been with a view that literally took my breath away. John Wesley Powell, a one-armed civil war veteran and geologist wrote extensively about his pioneering voyages through the canyon and summed it up quite well: “The glories and the beauties of …
16 March 2009
SP Flow and Sunset Crater
(This is day 3 of a week-long field trip to Arizona. Catch up with days 1 and 2!) Today was all about volcanoes. We started early, driving north out of Flagstaff and skirting around the huge San Francisco peaks, which are the remnants of a huge stratovolcano (think Mt. Fuki or Mt. Rainier). The volcano formed between about 1 and 0.4 million years ago. It is currently 12,633 feet high, …
Sedona and Oak Creek Canyon
Today we made our way from Phoenix north to Flagstaff, and on the way stopped to check out some interesting geology in Sedona and Oak Creek Canyon. Sedona is famous for its spectacular red rocks, such as Bell Rock, which we clambered around on today. Bell Rock is made mostly of very fine-grained sandstone formed by windblown sand reworked by the advance and retreat of oceans in the early Permian …
7 March 2009
Carnival of Space #94
This week’s Carnival of Space is up at the Planetary Society Blog! Alas, I am not in the carnival, I’ve been too busy. I’m afraid things are going to be pretty quiet here for the next week, but consider it the prelude to some really exciting blogging coming up: Next saturday I’ll be joining my officemates and adviser on a weeklong geology field trip to Arizona, where we will be …
15 December 2008
Blogging from the Bottom of the World
Did you know that most of the meteorites ever found come from Antarctica? It’s the perfect place to look for them because it’s dry and cold, so they are well preserved. Plus, when you’re out on a kilometers-thick ice sheet, all the rocks are meteorites! Just drive around and pick up anything that isn’t ice! Anyway, I bring this up because there is now a blog chronicling the adventures of …
3 September 2008
Hawaii Field Work – Ground Truth
I posted a while back, right before I left to participate in the NASA Planetary Volcanology Field Workshop, describing what exactly I was going to be doing there. Our goal was to study a set of images and come up with a geologic map of the area, and then actually go to that location (something we can’t usually do for other planets) and see how good our geologic maps were. …
25 August 2008
Hot Lava: Types of Lava
We’ve talked about how lava becomes molten, now let’s discuss how it behaves once it erupts. As liquid rock erupts from a volcanic vent it is glowing hot and can be very fluid. But, it cools rapidly, and as it does so it behaves more like rock and less like a liquid. Depending on the rate of eruption (among other things) there are two main types of lava flow: a’a …
