5 posts tagged “geology”
Took my first trip down to Boise a few days ago. The drive down there is 477 miles from Bigfork, so for me that would normally be about 7-8 hours. Well, as I have learned, they don't make straight roads in Idaho, it is look me about 9 1/2 hours to get down there. Which for that distance is unconscionable to me. So that means there won't be any whirlwind interstate trips between Boise and Montana. It is gonna be a bitch of a drive with a moving truck, since it is never ending windy ass roads the whole way, and a couple of mountain passes a in 100 degree temps. I am hoping all goes well, but I am guessing it will be even slower going.
The town of Boise was a somewhat pleasant surprise thought. I expected Boise to be this sprawling suburban metropolis baking out on the north side of the Snake River plain. But to my pleasant surprise, the down town area where the campus is located, and I was looking for apartments was well laid out, with some class old town neighborhoods, and a nice downtown area with bars and restaurants.
My apartment search went like most of them do. The place I thought looked great over the net was terrible, and I didn't find the apartment I ended up renting until the morning I left, and it turned out better than any of the others I had viewed. The apartment is actually a 2-story town house off of the main drag, nestled back against a 3-4 million dollar estate in the old part of town.
The place met most of my criteria, in that it was 2 bedroom, 1.5 baths, with a garage, and a carport, relatively close to campus (about 1/2 a mile away). It is a little more than I wanted to spend (700 a month). I really like the neighborhood the place is in, and it has a great proximity to downtown and BSU.
I got my first taste of the geochronology work I am going to be doing down at BSU, and it is very, VERY time intensive. When I get to a point that I am doing dating, I will be spending many many hours in the lab. Just the time it took to get the datable material out of one rock was a solid 20 hours worth of work. It takes about another 2 weeks to do the rest of the preparation for dating. So I think it will be a busy couple of years down at BSU, but I think I will have fun while I am there.
Today, I saw the first Master's thesis presentation that I didn't believe was actually going to be defensible. I guess I should give some background on how you earn graduate degree in geology. Basically, you go out, do some sort of research, bring the data you have collected back, then analyze and make conclusions about that data that are scientifically "defensible". You then present these data and conclusion to a group of your peers and professors, for them to try to pick apart, and if you have done defensible work they usually will not be able to find any big holes.
So I saw the presentation of Jake Mohrmann, who did a project attempting to find the causation of fluctuation in the discharge of hot springs in Yellowstone NP. The general thought today is that changes in barometric pressure, tidal forces, rainwater input, and earthquakes all affect the discharge of these hot springs. To test this, Jake went down to Yellowstone and placed instruments that would measure how much water was being discharge from a few specific hot springs.
Jake had originally planned to measure several springs for two weeks, a couple of times. Unfortunately he had some hardware issues, was only able to spend two weeks measuring the discharge in 3 different creeks. The result of this was a data set that was too small to make any significant conclusions. But, when you are doing a project like this, and you are raring to get on with your life, it is really hard to convince yourself to go back for another year so that you can make good on the project, which is what I believe Jake desperately needs to do.
Jake's presentation skills are not the greatest, he had a difficult time remembering details of his project, he had a difficult time explaining analytical techniques that he used, and he seemed to have a lot of things that he still wanted to do. It is not unusual to have things that you still want to look at, but in Jake's case, it was unclear that he really looked at anything to begin with.
I will be very interested to see what comes of his defense meeting. Whether they will let him get away with this sloppy work, or if he will be forced to make something productive out of his project. The one thing I can say is that his presentation was a great experience for me; it convinced me that if I don't feel that all of the work on my thesis is done with it comes time to defend, I am much better off to tack on another year, and do things right.
This past weekend was the 3rd of 4 field trips I am taking this month. This one has been by far the best so far. This trip was for my Neotectonics class, and the whole purpose was to better understand how Yellowstone fits into the tectonic picture of North America.
The goal for the first night was to "investigate" Norris Hot Springs, which is a sodic hot springs, seeming related to the Yellowstone Hotspot. The unusual thing about Norris is its sodic composition. The whole area around the springs is made up of limestones, and typically any time sodic water passes through limestone chemical reactions will serve to neutralize the sodic composition. So it is intriguing how this water can get to the surface and maintain its sodic composition with all of the limestone in the area.
After soaking in the Hot Springs for a couple of hours, we headed back to camp to cook up some grub, and hang out by the river. We had a few beers, and I took a few long exposure shot of the moon and the starts, and we headed off to bed around 11 PM
Unfortunately around 2:30 AM some yay-hoos up the road started getting a little rowdy, revving their engines and doing donuts in the road. Which is not that unusual, but when we heard thing coming our way, they definitely got our attention. One of the cars ended up blasting by our tents at about 60 MPH on a gravel road, and we all had in the front of our minds that this could go really bad. The person ended up fly back by us a few minutes later, and finally left, by this time it was about 3:30, and we had to get up in 3 hours.
Today was the Rocky Mountain Geodays, which is the Geosciences Departments portion of the UM Conference on Undergraduate Research. I had to be at school at 6:45 AM to help the Davidson Honors College set up all of their laptops for the UMCUR presentations. So I had a few hours after that to finish putting together the two presentations I had to make.
I ended up getting shuffled to the front of the order to present, which was find with me, I would just as soon get my presentation out of the way early. So I gave my presentation, and afterward had several people tell me that I had done a great job, so I felt pretty good about that.
I had to give another presentation with two other people in about half and hour, so I decided it would good time to read the paper I was having to present, since I had not any more than the abstract up to that point. I had just enough time to absorb the high points of the article before it was our time to get up and make our presentation. We gave our presentation and I was relieved to have things done and over with.
I ended up helping out the DHC a little more, and then I headed home to have a nap, since I had to be back at school at 7:00 PM for the GeoDays barbeque and awards ceremony. The barbeque was good, but I ended up with a partially cooked hamburger, so hopefully that won't turn on me. I also end up winning 1st and 2nd place in the Oral Presentations category. First place for the presentation of my thesis, second place for the group presentation I made for my Geology of the Pacific Northwest class.
So, all in all I would say it was a good day, but I am ready to veg out a little bit. I still have to write up my thesis, but at least I have the thing put together, and it seems to be reasonable to the faculty, so I can't argue too much about that. Anyway, I am tired, and I am going to finish my rambling. Woohoo.
We camped in an area called Little Sheep Creek, which is nestled into a little pocket back with the Tendoy Mountains in the background. With the snow still on the mountains this made for a beautiful place to camp.
The first day we did about a 5 mile traverse along a the Red Rock Hills fault, measuring the strike and dip of the fault, as well as making other mearsurements to try to estimate the amount of recent displacement on this fault.
We found a really cool nest of some kind up on a little rock outcrop. There was no major water bodies for miles, so we doubted this would be an eagle or osprey nest. Whatever it was, it was fairly big and looked like it had not been occupied for quite some time.
In the last pictures you can see the Red Rock Hills fault in the distance. To a geologist the fault trace if very obvious, but in the second picture I drew a line on the fault scarp if you had a hard time picking it out. This are still have a lot of seismic activity, it is only about 50 miles from Hebgen Lake (Quake Lake) where there was a 7.5 m earthquake in the late 1970s, and about 30 miles from Dillon where there was a ~5.7 m earthquake on July 25, 2005.
This was a great trip, and I learned a lot about analyzing faults in the field, which could prove useful since my Masters project will be in mountains with very similar structures to these in northern Nevada.
