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The Department of Geophysical Sciences teaches courses in geography, geology and physics. Students benefit immeasurably when department-sponsored field trips allow them to see the things they have studied in the classroom. The GeoClub helps organize student field trips. For distant destinations, students still benefit when their professors have seen the things they teach about. Here are some of the experiences I can bring to the classroom. |
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Here is a picture of the Guth homestead
in Copper
Harbor , Michigan. When we built the house in 1970, we used the tree
line to indicate how far damaging waves crashed onshore and therefore how
close we could safely position the building. Trees, with their long life
spans, can record growing conditions over 10's or 100's of years. The same
idea allowed Köppen to classify and map the world's climates using
the sparse climatological data of the late 19th century.
Erosion is not a problem here. The shoreline is composed of the Copper Harbor conglomerate that has been around for 1.8 Ga (billion years). The lake level is controlled within a metre by the locks at the Soo, so rising water levels are not a problem either. |
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Ice formations change daily throughout the winter. These pressure ridges could be gone within 24 hours with a wind shift over the open waters of Lake Superior. I have seen ice analogues of all plate tectonic boundaries and accretionary prisms develop before my eyes. The house is in the upper right corner. |
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Sunrise over Copper Harbor. The point of light in the center of the picture is the Copper Harbor Lighthouse built in 1866. The Guth homestead is located at the far right of the photo on the Lake Superior side of the point. |
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Sunset looking west from the house. With a clear horizon and a northern location, the seasonal shift in the sun's position was obvious. Here the sun is setting well over the water. By the time the setting sun touched the furthest point, it was time to go back to school. I got my BS in Geological Engineering from Michigan Technological University about 80 km south of here. |
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Evening thunderstorms over Lake Superior in a view looking due north from the house. When the waters are calm in the summer, a land breeze develops in the evening as the land cools faster than the water. The convergence of the land breezes over Lake Superior provides the atmospheric lift needed to spawn the thunderstorms. |
Guth, L. R., 1991, Kinematic analysis of the deformational structures on Eastern Isla de Margarita, Venezuela [Ph.D. thesis]: Houston, Rice University, 582 p.
I only spent two months at a time because
60 days was the length of the tourist visa, and we didn't want to mess
with the paper work involved in getting some special visa allowing a longer
stay. Except for one week each year, I was there by myself. Unfortunately,
any linguistic ability I might have had was destroyed by the 1960's experiment
to see if a foreign language could be learned by forcing a classroom full
of kids to watch a half-hour TV lesson twice a week. It can't. It is really
difficult to explain in broken Spanish to the justifiably curious local
people that you are measuring the dip and dip direction of a fault which
has not been active since the terrane cooled below metamorphic conditions
so they don't have to worry about earthquakes along that fault. It's hard
enough to do that in English.
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View along the eastern shoreline of Isla de Margarita from Laguna de Gasparico. The mountain in the foreground is Cerro Matasiete and the peak in the background is Cerro Guayamurí. |
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The other side of Cerro Guayamurí from Puerto Fermín. Although composed of igneous rocks and despite its morphology, it is not a volcano. Serpentinite, an altered slice of the upper mantle, is thrust over the Matasiete Trondhjemite, a granitic body that has a volcanic arc trace element signature. |
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Isla de Margarita is a desert island. The sparse vegetation makes the geology relatively well exposed, especially along the shoreline. On the flip side, every plant has spines, thorns, or some other structure used to impale structural geologists looking at the rocks. This site is on the western coast of Paraguachoa between Punta María Libre and Punta Tacuantar. |
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La roca de El
Angel is found on the southern shore of Paraguachoa at Punta Moreno. This
natural apparition is composed of a conglomeratic unit in the Eocene turbidites
making up the Pampatar Formation.
Further west, the Punta Carnero Formation is the distal facies of these Eocene turbidites. World class windsurfing is found near their exposures around El Yaque. |
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The local restaurant where I ate each evening. It was then located on the docks in Pampatar. My favorite dish was filete de pargo Pampatar, grilled red snapper covered in a cheese sauce with squid and octopus and then thrown under the broiler for a crusty top. I have yet to back engineer the recipe. |
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| Dantes View: The high point in the upper left corner is Telescope Peak, with an elevation of 3368 metres. The valley floor is 86 metres below sea level. The two points are only 23 km apart, making this topographic relief one of the greatest in the US. | Vladimir "Volodija" Shevchenko, Cindy Fallgatter (the local grandmother carpenter), and Alik A. Lukk at the Pfizer base camp in Shoshone, CA. The camp is now the Shoshone Education and Research Center , available for student groups through Terry Pavlis at the University of New Orleans. |
Alik flew home. I drove Volodija back to Houston from Death Valley. To reduce meal expenses, Volodija filled a cooler with bags of boiled chicken, boiled potatoes, macaroni and cole slaw. Bread, corn flakes, cheese, deviled ham and milk rounded out the provisions for the road trip. The only other things we needed were a full tank of gas and, the way the Ford Ranger kept stalling out, a stiff tail wind.
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| On our four-day road trip from Death Valley to Houston, we stopped at Zion National Park , Bryce Canyon National Park (shown above), and Carlsbad Caverns National Park . | Volodija Shevchenko examines the dead Ford Ranger at Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park . The black box that substitutes for a distributor had to be replaced. This car repair was one of the high points of the trip for Volodija. Apparently in Russia, the driver brings tools and repair parts to fix his vehicle in the field. Here with just a credit card and AAA membership, we were on our way again in about three hours . |
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| Flying into Bora Bora. The barrier reef and enclosed lagoon are clearly marked by the color of the water. | Flying into Bora Bora. The extinct volcano that forms Bora Bora has been dissected by erosion. Geologists interested in understanding the internal structures of volcanos are condemned to work in places like this. |
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| Bora Bora by boat. | Another fast sunset. At about 18°S latitude, the twilights were much shorter than what we were used to in the summer at Copper Harbor with its latitude of about 47.5°N. | I will always find it remarkable how the Polynesians could navigate the vast South Pacific and hit these tiny specks of land, guided only by the stars and the swells. |
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| St. Kitts and Nevis are part of the Lesser Antilles island arc, where the Atlantic lithosphere is subducted beneath the Caribbean plate. Island arc volcanism typically produces a viscous magma that creates the steep slopes of a composite volcano (aka stratovolcano) as shown above. | Many sugar plantations have been converted into inns. Do you what to learn more? Take Caribbean Cultures (IDIS 2400 in your catalog). An optional seminar visits St. Kitts and Nevis over winter break. |
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A Boojum Tree "forest" in Baja California.
But oh, beamish nephew, beware
of the day
But if ever I meet with a Boojum,
that day,
In the midst of the word he was
trying to say,
Rev. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson
The Hunting of the Snark,
1876
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The UNO departmental van is being loaded in a boxcar for the train trip through Copper Canyon (Parque Nacional Barranca Del Cobre). Our van is on deck. In situations like this, you are glad you bought that Mexico car insurance at the border. Unlike the state-sponsored collusion found in Massachusetts, Texas and most every other state in the union uses a free market to set auto insurance rates and coverage. Even so, our normal policy would not cover damage to the van while riding in a Mexican boxcar. |
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Copper Canyon in Mexico is often compared to the Grand Canyon visited by the GeoClub in 1998 . The morphologies are quite different due to the differences in geology and climate. |
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In the summer of 1977, I worked for Exxon as a field geologist. We alternated one week in the office in New Orleans with one week in the field along a West Virginia seismic line. Surface control was needed to interpret the seismic data. |
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I lived in Utah from 1977 to 1981 while I worked on an MS in Geological Engineering at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. This is Delicate Arch in Arches National Park . |
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Salt Lake City, Utah is located in a valley susceptible to temperature inversions that trap in air pollution. The state capitol dome is in the lower right corner. From that vantage point, state leaders can see smoke from the 370 metre-high smelter stacks across the valley in Magna, Utah hit the inversion layer and spread out horizontally. It is a rare thing when the public price of corporate appeasement escapes the smoke-filled back rooms under the capitol dome and is made manifest for all. |
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In the summer of 1978, I worked as a field
hydrologist for the Water Resources Division
of the US Geological Survey . I was
supposed to collect water quality data from springs and seeps on National
Forest land in the Wasatch Plateau of central Utah. As shown, much of the
plateau is near timber line. All National Forest land is open for multiple
uses, and base-line water quality data were needed in case the area was
opened up for coal mining.
On Mondays, I would check out this Jeep CJ-7 from the General Services Administration (GSA). By Wednesday, I'd have blown a head gasket which routed the blue exhaust up the steering column. Old timers finally told me they took their own tools in the field and would retorque the head bolts before they bedded down for the night. Sleeping next to a hot exhaust system is almost as good as a dog. |
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Joes Valley Reservoir in the Wasatch Plateau. As you might have guessed from the straight cliffs on the far side of the reservoir, the dam was built along the strike of Joes Valley fault . It is therefore considered a high-hazard dam by the state of Utah. (It's the dot in Emery Co. below the "E" of "SANPETE".) You might want to think twice about taking that corporate transfer to Orangeville or Castle Dale, Utah -- the towns located downstream of this dam. |
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Leaving Utah to join my wife in the swamps
of Louisiana was a shock. We spent a year in Lafayette, LA working for
Conoco
as geophysicists. This is the Atchafalaya just east of Lafayette.
Cajun country had great food, great people, great music, but a rotten climate. We can get some food by mail from Konriko Rice Mill or Zatarain's . Boudin is harder to get. |
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After a six-month research and seismic
processing stint in Ponca City
OK, Conoco told us they just had one job for the both of us. Wisely, they
kept the person having some hope of fitting into the Big-Oil corporate
mold and transferred her to Houston. I started my Ph.D. in Houston at
Rice
University .
Unlike Salt Lake City, Houston, TX (shown at the left) is one of those cities built on the coastal plain with no physical barriers to urban sprawl. Houston has done this in typical Texas style -- BIG. A big city with a miserable climate and a "Wonder-Bread" culture has no redeeming features. |
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Conoco transferred my wife and family
from Houston to Corpus Christi in 1987 and then back to Houston in 1991.
The corporate line is that frequent transfers gives employees
varied experiences. In reality, it is done to destroy family and community
ties so that The Corp. becomes mother and father ( you
thought J. Michael Straczynski could just dream up the Psi Corps? ).
In Corpus Christi, we lived just across the bridge from Padre Island National Seashore . Our house was across the street from the Naval Air Station where the Blue Angels performed each year. The house backed up on a pond created from the borrow pit used for fill in building the air station, and the pilots used the pond as a target to line up their maneuvers. As a result, they flew right over our roof (at left). In 1992, Conoco told my wife to transfer back to Lafayette or be down sized out of a job. Looking at the 5th transfer in 10 years, we went home. |
