Los Alamos & environs

While I was visiting Los Alamos recently, I made sure I got out of the lab to do a little hiking. Here are the photographic results:

This hike was on the Quemazon trail, which starts in the western part of the town of Los Alamos. (There are a number of trails that can be accessed from the neighborhoods around the lab - even a few you can hike to get to work in the morning!) The trail makes several loops up a mesa, depending on how far you go, and gives you some great views of the area.

The trail itself is, in many places, worn down into the relatively soft Tshirege member of the Bandelier tuff. The volcanic tuff was erupted about 1.25 million years ago in the collapse of the Valles Caldera, and underlies much of the town. (The path on the left is used for foot and bike traffic, although it looks like something mechanical came in and roughed up the tuff on the right side.)

A vesicular example of the tuff:

And a close-up of a hand sample. This stuff is chock-full of feldspar, and the sandy parts of the path sparkled pretty dramatically in the sun.

A "hand sample" of sand from the path. There's almost more feldspar than matrix in this, though it could be because the feldspars were just collecting in the area that I happened to scoop it up from. (Some of these feldspars were iridescent, which sometimes happens with sanidine feldspar; it's probably a safe bet that they are sanidine, which is a very common mineral in explosive volcanic rock.)

The hills above Los Alamos are unusually bare for this type of high desert, and that's because they're still recovering from the May 2000 Cerro Grande fire. The fire, which was started as a controlled burn, destroyed  48,000 acres of forest, more than 400 homes and part of the Laboratory in Los Alamos. (The houses that were burned in the fire were scattered all throughout the neighborhoods in town, and there were quite a few instances where one house was destroyed but another just across the street was untouched. Even now, there's quite a bit of rebuilding still going on.)

One (minor) advantage of the fire is that it made the views of the Lab a little clearer; I can imagine that ten years ago, this shot would have been mainly taken up by pine trees, like the dark green ones further downslope. This is only a small part of the Laboratory - there are more sites elsewhere in town - but it's the main area of office buildings and includes a research library.

Thinking about the Cerro Grande fire made me a little nervous while I was out there, because there were a number of smaller fires burning in the Jemez Mountains to the north; fortunately, they were about 15 miles away, and not likely to threaten the town. Still, it was a bit unnerving to walk home every afternoon and see this:

I am also, it seems, allergic to the combination of burning pine trees and pine tree pollen, so it was a bad week for my sinuses.

Geo-image Accretionary Wedge

My geo-photo of choice is a bit of interplay between the forces of geology and biology: an ohi'a shoot growing from a crack of a lava flow on the flank of Mauna Ulu, on the Big Island of Hawaii. The photo is significant to me for a number of reasons: This was my second trip to Hawaii, but the first time I'd had a chance to learn the techniques of volcano monitoring; it was also the first time that I'd really begun to understand the workings of an active volcano. This hike, part of a volcanology field course run by UH Hilo, took us up a lava channel to the summit of Mauna Ulu, through more forms of basaltic lava than I'd ever imagined existed. It was fascinating stuff. It was also a surprise to come across little enclaves of plants every so often - the first colonizers of a totally inhospitable environment. The contrast of the green leaves of the ohi'a and ferns against the dark lava flows was striking, and quite beautiful. 

This photo reminds me that even the destruction caused by volcanoes doesn't last forever. Tomorrow's anniversary - that of the May 18, 1980 eruption of Mt. St. Helens - brings to mind the amazing transformation that the blast zone has undergone in the 30 years since the event. The same persistent forces were at work on Mauna Ulu since its eruption ended in 1974, and the patches of life that I saw in a lifeless terrain were a subtle reminder of the processes of change. 

Italy (Part II)

...and the rest of my favorite Italian photos.

The Valle del Bove on Mount Etna, with the current lava flows steaming at the summit (upper left of the photo; click to see it larger!)


Dikes in the Valle del Bove on Mount Etna.


A cinder cone (maybe two?) on Etna's south flank that was active during the 2001 eruption, with a channelized a'a lava flow at its base.

A Norman castle in the town of Aci Castello, Sicily. (This was a coolness overload for me; not only is it an 11th century castle, which makes the archaeologist in me drool, it's built on pillow lavas. How's that for geoarchaeology?)


Hydromagmatic deposits and dune structures on the island of Procida, just outside the Bay of Naples. These were chock-full of accretionary lapilli (which unfortunately disintegrated on the trip home).


The neatest spot on Procida, even if there was a lot of trash around - an angular contact between hydromagmatic deposits and the welded layer underlying fines-depleted breccias. The breccias were amazing - huge chunks of pumice, trachytes, obsidian, scoria, all packed together with almost no matrix, and grading into a "typical" ignimbrite. (Volcanologists don't understand a lot about how these are emplaced, but one of the PhD students in my department is working on it for her dissertation.)


The summit crater at Vesuvius, minus the dozen or so souvenir stands.


The Roman city of Hercolano (Herculanium), with Vesuvius in the background. We were lucky that there was almost no one visiting, unlike Pompeii (which I'll have to see another time). It was beastly hot, though.


A street in Herculaneum. You can actually still see all the charred roof beams and window frames - it's almost a little creepy, when you realize that people not only lived here, they died here.


Part of a map painted by Ignazio Danti in the Vatican Museum, showing the Aeolian islands from a 16th-century point of view. Looks like Vulcano and "Strongoli" were both active at the time!


And one of my favorite discoveries on the whole trip...the Pope's rock hammer. He's a closet geologist!*



*Okay, so it was a commemorative builder's hammer from the construction of some ostentatious overly-decorated edifice somewhere. I bet it would make a pretty decent fossil chipper, too.

Italy (Part I)

I'm finally in one place for a couple of weeks this summer, and that means it's time to start posting photos while I delay writing real blog entries. (There's some cool stuff I saw on both my Italy and Utah trips that I definitely want to discuss, but my brain is still adjusting to the DC-area sauna, so they'll have to wait until I"m feeling more creative.)

Anyway, here are a few of the best photos from my trip to Italy in June. (I've also discovered that, while the heat and humidity are nasty in Italy in June, they're nothing like the heat and humidity we have around DC at the same time. I can't speak for August, though.)

Some of the beautiful marbles used to decorate the Vatican (which is, by the way, big and elaborate and overdecorated enough to make your head explode). A lot of the churches in Rome look like this, but the Vatican takes the cake. (This is the tomb of one of the Pope Alexanders, but I was too distracted by the inlay to notice which.)


A medieval street in Rome near the Vatican. All those cobblestones are basalt!


The first Roman mile marker on the Via Appia (which is not only made of basalt, but built on a lava flow).


Ruts in Via Appia basalt.


The amphitheater at Sutri, which is excavated out of volcanic tuff (and right next to even older Etruscan tombs that were dug out of the same unit).


Probably the most spectacular columnar jointing I've ever seen in my life, in a Vulsini District trachyte. (The bush at the top of the cliff is roughly four meters tall.)
The pines of Rome and part of the Palantine Hill. This explains why Pliny the Younger's comparison of eruption columns to pine trees always confused me - Roman pines don't look like American ones!


The Fossa cone on Vulcano. Vulcano is a lovely island, but not if you can't stand the smell of sulfur vents!


Strombolicchio, a volcanic neck off the coast of Stromboli, where an early calc-alkaline volcanic center existed about 200 ka.


One obligatory cute cat photo from a bookstore on Stromboli.


And an obligatory Strombolian eruption photo. If you look closely through the spatter, you can see the lights of the boats watching from about 850 meters below. (Next time, I'm parking myself on a boat for the light show - much more relaxing than the climb!)

2009 AGU Joint Session in Toronto: Sightseeing

Whoops! Guess I promised some Toronto photos - here they are, full of things I saw when I wasn't at the meeting trying to stuff my head with talks and poster sessions.

The St. James Anglican Cathedral at sunset. I haven't seen so many pretty cathedrals since I was in Paris - not something you expect in a North American city!

The CN Tower was right next to the conference center, which meant I spent a lot of time looking up. Too expensive to go to the top, though.

The Toronto Metro Conference Centre. If it looks a little small, that's because most of it is underground. I guess that saves on the heating bills?

A flatiron building on Front Street. I love the juxtaposition of old and new architecture in Toronto - it's much more interesting than just a bunch of modern skyscrapers. Toronto is also really walkable when the weather is nice, and they've got a pretty good public transit system as well. I love watching the trolleycars go by, although I didn't brave the subway on this trip.
Look really carefully at that building...

The Old City Hall, which has some really beautiful sandstone carvings.

It's a little hard to read, but the sign basically says that this is a Speaker's Corner, where you can say/argue/debate/shout anything you want, although the City isn't responsible for what other people do to you if they don't like it.

Lest you think that Toronto is all urban, there are some very nice parks within walking distance, and some of them even have wildlife (in the form of black squirrels - weird - and some really big woodpeckers).

Your tax dollars at work (at last, for something useful!)

My current job occasionally involves a great deal of searching for public domain images to use in publications, and one of my favorite resources is the USGS Photographic Library. It's the online repository of a portion of the physical USGS photographic collection, which is absolutely massive. In their own words,

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Central Regional Library maintains a collection of over 400,000 photographs taken during geologic studies of the United States and its territories from 1868 to the present.

These images provide a visual history of the discovery, development, and sciences of the United States and its Geological Survey. Some photographs have been used in USGS publications, but most have never been published.

Currently, this website represents less than 10 percent of the Library's images with approximately 30,000 photographs on-line.

Some images are recent - there are collections from the Hawaii Volcano Observatory and the Mount St. Helens eruptions, for instance - but a number of amazing photos come 19th and early 20th century expeditions to the Western US, some of the earliest geologic expeditions in the history of the United States. There are also collections organized by National Park, historical earthquakes, mines and quarries, and photographers. It's a great resource, and even though a lot of the photos are black-and-white images, they're no less useful as teaching aids. Best of all, they're free: since the USGS is a government agency, anyone can use these images in any publication. They come in multiple sizes and resolutions (the largest is more than 1600 dpi, which is more than adequate for a professional publisher's needs).

Here are a few of my favorites:

"Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming. Accumulated frozen spray about 4 meters thick from Africa Geyser in Norris Geyser Basin, melting mainly from the base upward due to high near-surface heat flow in Porcelain Basin. April 1979. Figure 61, U.S. Geological Survey Professional paper 1456. White, D.E." (wde00057)

"Grand Canyon National Park, Arizona. The Cinder Cone near the foot of Toroweap.U.S. Geographical and Geological Survey of the Rocky Mountain Region (Powell Survey). Stereoscopic view. Hillers, J.K." (hjk00905)

(Yes, that Powell. This is a spiffy image - if you cross your eyes at it, you can see the 3D view.)

"Splintered tree on Coldwater Ridge after May 18 eruption of Mount St. Helens. Geologist for scale. Skamania County, Washington. May 19, 1980. Lipman, P.W." (mlip0049)






"San Francisco, California, Earthquake April 18, 1906. Agassiz statue at Stanford University. April 1906. Mendenhall, W.C." (mwc00715)








"Hawaii Volcanoes National Park. 1969-1971 Mauna Ulu eruption of Kilauea Volcano. Mauna Ulu dome fountain (artesian type), 50 to 75 meters in height. Photo by J.B. Judd, October 11, 1969." (hvo00094)





If you're looking for lecture material, photos for a publication, or you just want to waste time drooling over pretty pictures, this is a great resource.