16 May 2013

GigaPanning Kilbourne Hole

Posted by Callan Bentley

Kilbourne Hole is the crater of a maar volcano in southern New Mexico, just across the state line from El Paso, Texas.

I went there the weekend before last with a team from El Paso Community College, led by Joshua Villalobos. This is the place where xenobombs come from!

If you go to the right area, you can find dozens of these mantle xenoliths sheathed in fine-grained basalt, like chocolate-coated peanuts. There are also lower crustal xenoliths; gneisses and stuff like that. But nothing beats peridotite for sheer ‘otherworldly’ beauty and awe.

We also saw these beautiful outcrops of volcanic blocks that got ker-plumped down into the pyroclastic surge deposits:

Ron Schott produced a wonderful overview GigaPan of the site back in 2009:
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So rather than the broad landscape, we concentrated our efforts on smaller outcrops, like this informative scene:
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Annotated:
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Same place, zoomed out a bit, and from a higher perspective (and a bit overexposed):
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Annotated:
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Now for the really sexy stuff! Here is one of those volcanic block plopped like a dropstone into the pyroclastics:
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Another, similar scene…
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And closer in:
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I trained Josh and his students on the use of their new GigaPan, and we had a great time. Here’s the El Paso CC / UTEP team on the rim of the Hole: