Field Photos & Stuff
Here are some photos from some field trips I have been on since being a graduate student at UNLV.
Convergent MarginsThis class was a seminar in petrology centered on the geology of convergent margins. The instructor for the class was Rod Metcalf . We read and discussed many papers on a variety of subduction zones including the Izu Bonin-Marianas system, the Andean margin of south America, and the western North American margin. The class ended with a week long field trip that traversed from east to west across the western North American arc, forearc, and accretionary wedge to the coast.
Geologic Evolution of Western North AmericaThis class taught by Michael Wells is one of the most popular classes in the UNLV Geoscience Department. The course covers the geology and development of western North America from the Archean to the present. It is a course where the students teach each other by dipping heavily into available literature and taking turns lecturing about a segment along the evolution of western North America. A three day field trip through Death Valley, then south into the eastern Mojave Desert emphasizes some of the major events that helped shape the continent.
Joshua Tree National ParkJoshua Tree National Park is located in southern California where the Mojave and Sonoran deserts meet. It is a great place to go camping and hiking. There is rocky terrane perfect for hiking or rock climbing, not to mention the voluminous vegetation. The abundant Joshua trees along with Cholla Garden surely indicate that southwest deserts are not just wastelands.
Great Basin National ParkFellow graduate student, John VanHoesen, studied the rock glacier below Wheeler Peak in the southern Snake Range of east central Nevada for his dissertation. Several of us went along with him for a weekend trip to help collect some ground penetrating radar (GPR) data in hopes of better understanding the internal structure of the rock glacier. Wheeler Peak is the highest peak in Nevada at 13,063 ft. Great Basin is another awesome place for camping and hiking, with high peaks, rugged terrain, Lehman caves, and some of the oldest Bristlecone pine trees in North America.
Mount Charleston, Spring Mountains, NevadaIn the Spring Mountains of southern Nevada is Mount Charleston standing 11,918 ft high, and offering a popular locale for outdoor activities such as camping, hiking, backpacking, and skiing. The Mountains are mostly made up of Paleozoic carbonates containing abundant fossils, and exhibiting east vergent folds related to the Mesozoic Cordilleran fold-thrust belt.
ExxonMobil field course in Bighorn basinIn May 2005, I was lucky enough to go along on an ExxonMobil field course to the Bighorn basin region of Wyoming. We spent several days learning about carbonate sequence stratigraphy, basement involved thrust faulting, and thrust fault geometries related to fault-propagation-folds. Oh, and there was karaoke at the Whiskey River saloon in Cody. The Book Cliffs, UtahOur friend Brett McLaurin (a post-doc here at UNLV) invited Melissa and I to the Book Cliffs in Utah to help out with some fieldwork. Brett did his dissertation work here, and so he showed us around as he collected more data for his ongoing research. We got to see some amazing cliff formations, along with sedimentary structures and lots of petroglyphs. The story Brett is putting together here is that changes in thicknesses for certain units may be a result of folding of the San Rafael swell...but you can ask him more about it. Back to home
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