A Guatemalan Lago Como: Lago de Atitlán and its volcanoes

Aldous Huxley described Lake Atitlán as "Como with the additional embellishment of several immense volcanoes. It really is too much of a good thing." I completely disagree on the "too much" part, because Atitlan is stunning (and, in my opinion, the addition of volcanoes gives it a leg up on Lago Como!)

At the end of our field work, and after a brief trip to the Santiaguito Volcano Observatory (more on that in the next post!) we took the Pan-American Highway (CA-2) through the mountains to Lake Atitlán. Atitlán is a ~20 km wide caldera in the Guatemalan highlands that was formed by the Los Chocoyos explosive eruption around 85,000 years ago (although activity began 11-12 million years ago). Three stratovolcanoes (Atitlán, around 10,000  years old; Tolimán, a bit younger than 40,000 years; and San Pedro, which stopped erupting 40,000 years ago) have grown on the southern margin of the caldera, partially infilling it and jutting out into the caldera lake. The last recorded activity was pyroclastic flows, lahars and explosive eruptions in the 1850s at Volcán Atitlán, although historical records for this volcano date back to the 15th century; the volcano is still considered active. The lake itself is supposed to be the deepest in Central America, and may be 340 m deep or more. An earthquake that occurred in 1976 seems to have breached the lake at some place, and the lake level has been slowly dropping since then. (Ole Nielsen at olelog has a great post with more in-depth info on the caldera, and Wikipedia's article isn't too shabby.)

Here's a Google Map to get you oriented. Volcán San Pedro is the farthest to the left, Tolimán is the northernmost of the paired cones and Atitlán is the southern one.

View Guatemala Volcanology in a larger map

We had time for visits to San Pedro La Laguna and a boat ride to Santiago Atitlán, and it was a great chance to do some relaxing sightseeing. I've seen some articles recently about the bad aspects of visiting Atitlan - they claim that the lake smells, is sludgy and brown, surrounded by robbers and banditos and all sorts of other nasty things. Well, I don't know what lake they were visiting, but I found very little of that to be the case. True, the lake is contaminated with bacteria from sewage and farm runoff, and I wouldn't recommend drinking the water, eating fish from it or going swimming, but there wasn't a bit of sludge in sight when I was there:

The water was perfectly clear the whole time we were on the boat, and you could see the bottom for a long ways out. (There have been some nasty algal blooms recently, which no doubt account for the warning about staying out of the water, but we didn't see anything visibly yucky on the way from San Pedro to Santiago.)

As for getting to the lake, there is one road (I'm not certain which) where bandits have pretty much made a business out of stopping vehicles and robbing people. It's fairly easy to avoid this road, however, and we had no problems despite being a bunch of gringos in a big shiny SUV. (No problems with people, anyway. The last bit of the road into San Pedro, which is basically switchbacks down the inside wall of the caldera, is crazy curvy, and not a bit of fun if there are buses on it with you. You can make the turns, but the buses can't, and it's impossible to see around the corners on the switchbacks. Drive really slow and honk a lot to let the bus drivers know you're there, because otherwise they'll run you off the road.)

In San Pedro, we stayed at the Hotel Mikasa, which is very nicely appointed (hot showers without exposed electrical wires!) and has a great European-Spanish restaurant on the roof (I definitely recommend the paella.) San Pedro is a bit of a hippie town - there are a lot of transplanted gringos and massage parlors (real ones) and solar-powered hot tubs - but it's pretty quiet, and has some interesting shops. And a great view first thing in the morning:

Santiago Atitlán has a much bigger population of the native Mayan groups, but it seems to be a major stop on the tourist route, because the main road is pretty much lined with shops and crawling with loud, clueless Americans. (It took me ten minutes of waiting to get a photo without a tour group in it!) The shops have some beautiful textiles, however, and there seem to be quite a few local artists who sell their work.

The boat ride was fun, although if there had been any more people in there I think the sides would have been about an inch above the water. Talk about a low rider! The boat service is fairly reliable, though, and only costs about five dollars for a two-way trip. 

It was fun to go shopping there, but I'm sure we would have seen much more interesting things if we'd had more than an afternoon. Alas, we had to drive back to Guatemala City later that night, so we didn't have the opportunity for exploration. The views on the boat ride, however, totally made up for the short trip:

My recommendation is that Lago de Atitlán is definitely not to be missed. The smaller towns like San Pedro and Santiago Atitlán are difficult to get to but worth the trip, and the larger ones (like Panajachel) have a lot to offer as well. And they're all a boat ride away from each other!

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).

2009 AGU Joint Session in Toronto: Days 3 & 4

Having hit conference overload about halfway through the day on Tuesday, I neglected to blog about what I'd been seeing, so I'll be combining two days. Tuesday was definitely talk day; I attended volcanology and kimberlite sesions in the morning and afternoon, in which I heard about:

• How melt inclusions in olivines and glass from eruptive products on Procida Island, Italy could be used to trace the volatile evolution, and thus melt movements into/out of the island's magmatic reservoir (Esposito et al.).
  
• An interesting pyroclast from the Sept. 1997 Soufriere Hills dome collapse. The pyroclast contains shattered feldspar and quartz phenocrysts (with really cool little 'pipes' where melt inclusions erupted out of the phenocryst fragments). Ben Williamson suggests that the pyroclast may have started as an injection into the base of the lava dome, sat there for a bit crystallizing cristobalite (also present), and was then ejected in the dome collapse while still somewhat viscous.
• Roger Mitchell and Steve Sparks (and a number of other folks) sparring over kimberlite origins and evolution (and even over whether some deposts are kimberlites). This was particularly amusing, because there was much implying that the volcanologists who were involving themselves in kimberlite geology didn't know as much about the subject as the petrologists who'd been working on it, and vice versa. I get the feeling this has been going on for a while.
• An example of a sub-glacier eruption in Iceland a few tens of thousands of years ago that created eruption ridges of pillow basalts, fissures similar to Hawaiian spatter ramparts on Kilauea, and possible sub-glacial ponding of water from the melted ice (which could have affected glacier dynamics).
  

My non-conference time was taken up by a visit to the St. Lawrence Market, which is in the Old Town portion of the city. I love these markets; I've been to the Reading Market in Philadelphia and a similar market in Quetzaltenango, Guatemala, and I'm always excited to see all the different fresh foods. In the St. Lawrence Market, I discovered custard tarts, a fantastic Portuguese dessert that seems to be pretty popular in Canada, as well as cheese curds (a favorite treat from my field work in Utah); I also got to peruse whole sides of beef, giant king crab legs and tiger shrimp, and quite possibly one of the best crepe combinations I've come across (strawberries, Nutella, and mozzerella). (Did I mention at some point that I thought I would lose weight at this conference? Scratch that.)

Wednesday was fairly relaxed - in the morning, I listened to a talk by Don Dingwell entitled "When melts start behaving like rocks (very bad things can happen)", which focused on the brittle-ductile transition at magma/lava fragmentation. I'm not sure I totally agree with Dr. Dingwell that the "essence of eruption is decompression" - there are certainly other factors involved - but it's an interesting point. I also listened to a talk about Mount St. Helens dome rock by Rosanna Smith, whose study results show that high-frequency earthquakes caused by brittle fracture of rocks is possible in the interior of lava domes, and a discussion of the effects of volcanic edifice collapse on hydrothermal systems and ore-grade mineralization.

It's good to be back in Buffalo, even if it was a slow trip getting out of Toronto, and we had to stop at the border because my car was full of foreign people and still has VA plates. This is apparently a cause for alarm, despite the fact that it also has several decals that someone could use to figure out that I came from a different state than I now attend school in. (Mostly it was a cause for fingerprinting and for the Department of Homeland Security to charge my French passenger to take the electronic fingerprint scans. Talk about moneygrubbing!) I'm also convinced that DHS guards are chosen for their ability to look surly and hulking.

Photos to follow as soon as I can find the right camera cord...

2009 AGU Joint Assembly in Toronto: Day 2

Today started out with the early (7AM) student breakfast, in which we got to meet some of the AGU big shots. Our table seemed particularly attractive, since I was chatting with the president, president-elect, the manager of AGU's education and career services, and one of the Union's lobbyists. I immediately discovered a few connections to my previous job, and was steered toward the only volcanologist present, who turned out to be Steve Sparks, who was my advisor's advisor.

All in all, it was a very successful morning, and I even got a chance to mention (in response to the general call for concerns from students) that AGU's policy on student travel grants is somewhat unfair. (You can only apply for a grant if you're a presenting author, and only if it's your first meeting, which means I wasn't eligible for this meeting and won't be for any others.) I will be very happy if this is changed, and from the conversation, I think there's a good chance it will be. This is especially important, given how expensive it is to attend an AGU meeting (even as a student), and how few perks there are (no free coffee or snacks for anyone, for example, which I think is a little cheap for how much the meeting costs).

Today's lecture lineup wasn't quite as engaging for me as yesterday's. I stopped in on a talk about multi-melt origins for anorthosite, one about the Fawakhir Ophiolite in Egypt, and the Daly Lecture, which was given by Mark Harrison about Hadean zircons. This was probably the most interesting of the bunch; Dr. Harrison suggested that zircons found in conglomerates in the Jack Hills, Western Australia challenge the prevailing belief that the Hadean was a hot, dry, water-less period in Earth's history. He gave as lines of evidence high delta O-18 values, which he said suggests clay protoliths, and inclusions of quartz, feldspar and muscovite in the zircons, which suggest crystallization from hydrous melts. The ultimate model was of a sediment cycling system that involved liquid water, and possibly some sort of subduction and tectonic activity (although crustal recycling has probably erased much of the early crustal record). One of the UB students working in paleoclimatology also gave a very good talk about the records of advance and retreat on Greenland glaciers in the morning; it was nice to hear about non-volcanology research in my department, since the research groups are often pretty insular.

The afternoon I spent sightseeing in the city. I'm becoming rather fond of it; Toronto is like a shorter, greener version of New York City, and everyone seems to have been careful to preserve a little open space here and there. I saw the headquarters of the original Hudson River Company (which boasts a pedigree even older than my alma mater), the old City Hall, a number of cathedrals, the biggest shopping mall I've ever been in (and most of it underground!), and some really inspired architecture along the way. I also wore my feet out with all the walking, and I'm very glad that the hotel has a hot tub.

2009 AGU Joint Assembly in Toronto: Day 1

After a long drive up to Toronto from Buffalo, encounters with surly border guards and confusing elevator mechanisms, and a really wonderful dinner at an Indian Restaurant on Jarvis Street, I'm finally diving into my first AGU. It doesn't seem like there are a lot of people here, which is nice - not too overwhelming. The conference organizers decided to put together a mostly useless session guide that doesn't actually tell you what talks are going on in each session, although we can still waste paper by visiting one of the printing stations and getting copies of all the talk titles.

Talks started early for me today; my advisor was running the 8AM volcanology session, in which the audience was mostly the speakers and a few of their students. But it was all about pyroclastic flows, a subject I consider worth an early start.

• Mike Manga from UC Berkeley compared the transport capacity of pyroclastic flows over water and solid substrates, and concluded that large particles in overland flows are transported farther when the flows are concentrated and there is momentum transfer from the fines to the larger particles.
• Sylvain Charbonnier of Keele University showed two different mass flow model results (TITAN2D and VOLCFLOW) as applied to block-and-ash flows on Merapi, and also talked about using ground-penetrating radar to map flow deposits internally.
• Joe Dufek from Georgia Tech talked about ash production in eruptive flows, and how friction and collisional fragmentation help create fines.
• Elke Hanenkamp from the University of Canterbury described decoupling processes in block-and-ash flows.
• Eliza Calder from the University at Buffalo described a mathematical shortcut for reducing the number of "runs" needed to produce good mass flow models of pyroclastic flows.
• Mike Sheridan (also from Buffalo) talked about modifications being made to TITAN2D to better represent multi-phase debris flows.
  

The meeting itself is in the Toronto Metro Convention Centre, which is right next to the CN Tower and is actually a very nice setting. The rooms are a bit bigger than the audiences in most cases, but it's nice to not be overwhelmed by the sheer number of people attending the meeting, as I heard was the case at the past Fall AGU. I'm finding it a bit hard to pop in and out of any talks that don't involve volcanology, since many of them are very over my head (or concern things that I haven't worked with for a few years), but it's a good chance for me to brush up on my mineralogy (for example).

So far I've also discovered that, at least at the convention center, the universe is trying to keep me from spending money. Not only do the ATMs not accept VISA cards, the food stands don't accept any cards. Since I'd have to walk a block just to get out of the building to the street, and the street is full of unaffordable, high-end steakhouses, it looks like I'm living off of gum until dinnertime. Usually stress over an upcoming presentation makes me lose weight, but I may manage to do that without presenting anything at this meeting.

UPDATE: After about five ATMs, I finally managed to find one in the back of a convenience store that would take my card. I also went to dinner with my group at a really great Thai fusion place, and took care of the food concerns by ordering a fried rice dish that was served in half a pineapple. The food situation is definitely improving.

For my spring break...

I will not be blogging, because I will be here:


View Larger Map

Staying out of the way of this:




And looking for things like this:

Some people spend their spring breaks at the beach. I spend them hauling my butt up a steep, very active Guatemalan volcano looking for clay and structural weaknesses in a bunch of lava domes.

Ah, life. Well, I'll at least have some very good photos to share, providing I make it back to the States with myself and my camera intact.

100 (geologic) things meme

Looks like another fun meme going around the geoblogosphere. Let's see how I score... (Things I've done are in bold, and my comments are in italics.)

1. See an erupting volcano

2. See a glacier
3. See an active geyser such as those in Yellowstone, New Zealand or the type locality of Iceland
4. Visit the Cretaceous/Tertiary (KT) Boundary. Possible locations include Gubbio, Italy, Stevns Klint, Denmark, the Red Deer River Valley near Drumheller, Alberta. - I've sat on it - or at least very close to it - in Big Bend National Park. See the Ks and Ts? Yeah, we were all dorks.

5. Observe (from a safe distance) a river whose discharge is above bankful stage - The Potomac flooded a few neighborhoods near my family's house when Hurricane Isabel came through.
6. Explore a limestone cave. Try Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico, Lehman Caves in Great Basin National Park, or the caves of Kentucky or TAG (Tennessee, Alabama, and Georgia) - I've made it to Carlsbad, Mammoth Caves and various small ones in Virginia.
7. Tour an open pit mine, such as those in Butte, Montana, Bingham Canyon, Utah, Summitville, Colorado, Globe or Morenci, Arizona, or Chuquicamata, Chile.
8. Explore a subsurface mine.
9. See an ophiolite, such as the ophiolite complex in Oman or the Troodos complex on the Island Cyprus (if on a budget, try the Coast Ranges or Klamath Mountains of California).
10. An anorthosite complex, such as those in Labrador, the Adirondacks, and Niger (there's some anorthosite in southern California too).
11. A slot canyon. Many of these amazing canyons are less than 3 feet wide and over 100 feet deep. They reside on the Colorado Plateau. Among the best are Antelope Canyon, Brimstone Canyon, Spooky Gulch and the Round Valley Draw. - Lots of these in various places out West.

12. Varves, whether you see the type section in Sweden or examples elsewhere.
13. An exfoliation dome, such as those in the Sierra Nevada.
14. A layered igneous intrusion, such as the Stillwater complex in Montana or the Skaergaard Complex in Eastern Greenland.
15. Coastlines along the leading and trailing edge of a tectonic plate (check out The Dynamic Earth - The Story of Plate Tectonics - an excellent website).
16. A ginkgo tree, which is the lone survivor of an ancient group of softwoods that covered much of the Northern Hemisphere in the Mesozoic.
17. Living and fossilized stromatolites (Glacier National Park is a great place to see fossil stromatolites, while Shark Bay in Australia is the place to see living ones) I can only claim half of this one, but I saw some fantastic stromatolites on the Niagara Escarpment near Lockport.

18. A field of glacial erratics
19. A caldera

20. A sand dune more than 200 feet high
21. A fjord
22. A recently formed fault scarp - Wait, define "recently" - we're geologists, after all. Recently could mean a few million years ago.
23. A megabreccia
24. An actively accreting river delta
25. A natural bridge
26. A large sinkhole
27. A glacial outwash plain
28. A sea stack
29. A house-sized glacial erratic
30. An underground lake or river
31. The continental divide

32. Fluorescent and phosphorescent minerals
33. Petrified trees - At Petrified Forest National Park, where you get in serious trouble just for touching one, and about five minutes outside the park, where no one cares.

34. Lava tubes

35. The Grand Canyon. All the way down. And back. I wasn't in good enough shape to make it all the way down and back in one day, like some crazy people on that trip did, but I have seen it from the South and North Rims, so I'm counting it. :P
36. Meteor Crater, Arizona, also known as the Barringer Crater, to see an impact crater on a scale that is comprehensible (and it is quite BIG)
37. The Great Barrier Reef, northeastern Australia, to see the largest coral reef in the world.
38. The Bay of Fundy, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, Canada, to see the highest tides in the world (up to 16m)
39. The Waterpocket Fold, Utah, to see well exposed folds on a massive scale.
40. The Banded Iron Formation, Michigan, to better appreciate the air you breathe.
41. The Snows of Kilimanjaro, Tanzania,
42. Lake Baikal, Siberia, to see the deepest lake in the world (1,620 m) with 20 percent of the Earth's fresh water.
43. Ayers Rock (known now by the Aboriginal name of Uluru), Australia. This inselberg of nearly vertical Precambrian strata is about 2.5 kilometers long and more than 350 meters high
44. Devil's Tower, northeastern Wyoming, to see a classic example of columnar jointing
45. The Alps.
46. Telescope Peak, in Death Valley National Park. From this spectacular summit you can look down onto the floor of Death Valley - 11,330 feet below.
47. The Li River, China, to see the fantastic tower karst that appears in much Chinese art
48. The Dalmation Coast of Croatia, to see the original Karst.
49. The Gorge of Bhagirathi, one of the sacred headwaters of the Ganges, in the Indian Himalayas, where the river flows from an ice tunnel beneath the Gangatori Glacier into a deep gorge.
50. The Goosenecks of the San Juan River, Utah, an impressive series of entrenched meanders.
51. Shiprock, New Mexico, to see a large volcanic neck - Even if the van was traveling 60 mph at the time, I still saw it!

52. Land's End, Cornwall, Great Britain, for fractured granites that have feldspar crystals bigger than your fist.
53. Tierra del Fuego, Chile and Argentina, to see the Straights of Magellan and the southernmost tip of South America.
54. Mount St. Helens, Washington, to see the results of recent explosive volcanism. - Maybe this summer!
55. The Giant's Causeway and the Antrim Plateau, Northern Ireland, to see polygonally fractured basaltic flows.
56. The Great Rift Valley in Africa.
57. The Matterhorn, along the Swiss/Italian border, to see the classic "horn".
58. The Carolina Bays, along the Carolinian and Georgian coastal plain
59. The Mima Mounds near Olympia, Washington
60. Siccar Point, Berwickshire, Scotland, where James Hutton (the "father" of modern geology) observed the classic unconformity
61. The moving rocks of Racetrack Playa in Death Valley
62. Yosemite Valley
63. Landscape Arch (or Delicate Arch) in Utah
64. The Burgess Shale in British Columbia - Only the display at the Smithsonian.
65. The Channeled Scablands of central Washington
66. Bryce Canyon
67. Grand Prismatic Spring at Yellowstone
68. Monument Valley
69. The San Andreas fault
70. The dinosaur footprints in La Rioja, Spain
71. The volcanic landscapes of the Canary Islands
72. The Pyrennees Mountains
73. The Lime Caves at Karamea on the West Coast of New Zealand
74. Denali (an orogeny in progress)
75. A catastrophic mass wasting event - Only after the fact, in Utah and the Virginia Blue Ridge.
76. The giant crossbeds visible at Zion National Park
77. The black sand beaches in Hawaii (or the green sand-olivine beaches) - Both, baby!
78. Barton Springs in Texas
79. Hells Canyon in Idaho
80. The Black Canyon of the Gunnison in Colorado

81. The Tunguska Impact site in Siberia
82. Feel an earthquake with a magnitude greater than 5.0.
83. Find dinosaur footprints in situ
84. Find a trilobite (or a dinosaur bone or any other fossil)
85. Find gold, however small the flake
86. Find a meteorite fragment
87. Experience a volcanic ashfall - Just wait until March!
88. Experience a sandstorm
89. See a tsunami
90. Witness a total solar eclipse
91. Witness a tornado firsthand - I'm pretty sure there was a brief and minor one near our house when I was really little, but we were too busy cowering in the basement to see it.
92. Witness a meteor storm, a term used to describe a particularly intense (1000+ per minute) meteor shower
93. View Saturn and its moons through a respectable telescope. - Does it automatically become respectable if it's most of the way up Mauna Kea?
94. See the Aurora borealis, otherwise known as the northern lights.
95. View a great naked-eye comet, an opportunity which occurs only a few times per century - Hale-Bopp, when I was twelve. Gee, I feel awfully young.
96. See a lunar eclipse - Quite a few of these in the past few years, actually.
97. View a distant galaxy through a large telescope
98. Experience a hurricane - Just a few years ago, in Florida. Weak hurricanes are boring - I think my flight was delayed and I spent the day at the mall.
99. See noctilucent clouds
100. See the green flash

26 out of 100. Well, I certainly don't measure up to most of you all in the geoblogosphere, but I'm still a young'un yet. Besides, I'll be fixing that ash fall and earthquake deficiency when I get to do field work in a couple of months. In fact, my dearth of bolded items is clearly unacceptable, and I'm just going to take a few years and go visit all these places* so I can update this post.

*This, of course, requires money, which I do not have in large amounts. So those few years aren't going to happen anytime soon, darn it.