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sharperblue
Mountain climber
San Francisco, California
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Feb 16, 2019 - 04:32pm PT
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a bit of a tangent, but alpinist/geologist Mike Searle has a fantastic (and fascinating to the layman) book on the geology of the Karakoram & Tibet, "Colliding Continents" - packed full of great graphics and beautiful shots of famous peaks and gorges of those areas. If you've always wondered what the underlying strata of Laila Peak is, now's your chance. Highly recommended
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AP
Trad climber
Calgary
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Feb 16, 2019 - 06:28pm PT
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One of my climbing buddies did his masters in geology doing research in the Makalu region. Jeff is a superb climber and skier and we can discuss the rocks on the way up.
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kpinwalla2
Social climber
WA
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Feb 16, 2019 - 08:14pm PT
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As an academic geologist I made 8 trips to northern Pakistan over 15 years and conducted research for several years in one of my favorite spots on the planet - City of Rocks and Castle Rocks, Idaho.
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tuolumne_tradster
Trad climber
Leading Edge of North American Plate
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Feb 17, 2019 - 08:58am PT
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Anticlinal structure Powder River basin, Wyoming...
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Contractor
Boulder climber
CA
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Feb 17, 2019 - 09:18am PT
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On the East side of the Peninsular Range, there's this strange flow that looks nothing like the surrounding ridges that drop to the desert floor.This concentration of massive boulders has me curious on how this singular formation is so different than anything nearby.
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Contractor
Boulder climber
CA
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Mar 13, 2019 - 07:07am PT
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NERD ALERT!!!
As previously discused, I identified a striking, expansive concentration of massive desert varnish covered rocks. Again, strange because these rocks are massive in size, similar in size and very angular in shape- did I say expansive?Anyways, a disclaimer here- I'm no geologist. Infact, I'm a homebuilder who dropped out of high school. I tend to make random observations by habit which usually leads to some form of temporary obsession; so I'm hoping for input by someone with specific knowledge.
My love of bouldering and natural curiosity lead me and a couple of buddies out to explore.What we found was a desert varnish caused by a fine, light grey clay being blown onto the rock and not the quatzite or mudstone I had hoped for. http://www.abdnha.org/anza-borrego-desert-geology.htm
What really caught our eyes was that this massive talus field had the appearance of a glacial moraine. The rocks were clearly hitchhikers on some form of substate and had been broken by force to similar size and shape, like having been milled in a giant coffee grinder. The possible common denominator to the varnish and the flow aspects of this huge formation was the clay- We were, infact on a massive clay deposit, hence the concentration of varnish. This area is also just a few miles from the San Andreas fault and on the boundary of ancient sea and lake beds. And by the way, these beds were supplied with clay silt from the Colorado River. So my guess is that a massive clay deposit was uplifted into an unstable position and let loose in one cataclysmic event by water and possible seismic activity. Please offer any intel you can- I could find no research on this specific formation, minimal evidence of human activity and certainly no evidence of bouldering. Did I mention the bouldering was amazing with thousands and thousands of 10 to 20 foot boulders and hundreds and hundreds of 20 foot plus boulders. Several boulders were more than 80 feet across. I only made it to one terrace, another expansive terrace lay a few hundred feet up and about a 1/4 mile away.
Ok, back to the clay cataclysm. The other evidence of this is the dozens of vernal lagoons that exist in this specific area. We all know that natural ponds and lakes are virtually nonexistent in Southern California. But here, there were dozens of them, from the size of a living room to an Olympic stadium. What appeared to cause these natural dams was that the leading edge of the slide zones ended up higher in elevation and the center zones settled.
Ok, either I stayed at a Holiday Inn Express or my weed was particularly kicking this day- let me know please.
Note: I did this post on my phone, in a hurry so please excuse the errors.
https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&source=web&cd=&ved=0ahUKEwieytytlP_gAhUQoZ4KHbNzB30QzPwBCAM&url=https%3A%2F%2Farstechnica.com%2Fscience%2F2014%2F11%2Fone-of-worlds-largest-landslide-deposits-discovered-in-utah%2F&psig=AOvVaw2Ld5It0qrZ0PqcHFKrC_r2&ust=1552567923410750
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quick_clay
http://www.sci.sdsu.edu/salton/AncientLakeCahuilla.html
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Contractor
Boulder climber
CA
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Mar 13, 2019 - 09:01am PT
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So this possible quick clay slide is about 1/2 a mile wide, 4 miles long and several hundred feet thick by my estimation.
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Contractor
Boulder climber
CA
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Mar 13, 2019 - 09:14am PT
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Good question, I'll check.
Also, the local tribe of Cahuilla had a history of making earthenware that traces to the tribes near the Colorado River basin. Earthenware is not so common amongst the California tribes West of the mountain ranges. We saw plenty of naturally baked clay in the flats.
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Grippa
Trad climber
Salt Lake City, UT
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Mar 13, 2019 - 10:40am PT
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Geology is the best! I'm a hydrogeologist and and while the petrology stuff is a little over my head granite is still my favorite rock type.
If you guys think that rock avalanche is cool check out the largest mass movement event documented in North America - The Markagunt Gravity Slide (2000^3 Km!!!). I was lucky enough to sit in on a talk by the field geologist Bob Biek who discovered it in the south central Utah.
https://blogs.agu.org/landslideblog/2014/11/17/markagunt-1/
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Contractor
Boulder climber
CA
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Mar 13, 2019 - 11:03am PT
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Wow, thanks for posting! The visual commonality, thanks to Google Earth, is the pillowy cauliflower shape of the leading edge of the flows vs. the "v" or pyramid shapes of the surrounding mountains caused by the more typical interaction of uplift and erosion.
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BASE104
Social climber
An Oil Field
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Mar 13, 2019 - 12:14pm PT
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That anticline above....are you sure that it is in the Powder River Basin? Looks more like the Bighorn Basin, which is heavily folded. I always thought that the Powder River basin looked flatter at the surface. A blind man can see where to drill in those structures. I mainly work stratigraphic traps. You don't have to pay for all of that seismic.
I still dabbled in wellsite geology, so I get to look at real rocks, albeit drill cuttings seen through a microscope. Whoever mentioned getting to look right at the Permian extinction is lucky. That one was much larger than the K-T extinction. Cores are a real luxury in the oil field. There is a huge core library a few miles from my house, so if I want to look at a core of a zone to figure out the depositional environment, I can usually find a nearby core up there.
It is mainly Permian and older in Oklahoma and Kansas, so I get to see a lot of extinct microfossils. There is a helical looking bryozon that I always see in the Marmaton section:Archimedes . The Gulf of Mexico geologists know a lot of paleontology to date the rocks. There aren't well correlated beds to use. Those guys know their forams.
Kansas is like a layer cake. You can trace a ten foot thick bed from its outcrop near Kansas City all the way to the Colorado state line, so you know where you are to within a few feet. I can drillstem test a five foot thick bioherm. In Kansas, the geologist runs the rig. In Oklahoma it is the Engineer.
Kansas has super cool carbonate sequence stratigraphy. The oil and gas reservoirs can be really thin oolitic or skeletal, but with great porosity and permeability. There is no gas after you go a hundred miles or so north of the southern state line, so the rigs don't even have blowout preventers. The rig floors are 4 or 5 feet above ground level and drilling is cheap. Oklahoma is much more expensive.
Anyway, everyone in Kansas uses a real geologist to run the rig. So it pays very well. I'll do it if I get five in a row or so. The drilling only stops if you need a new bit or if you are running a test, so you have to sleep strategically. I did it a lot when I was younger.
It is a lot of fun to see the rocks instead of just getting a mudlog in your email every morning, and of course downhole logs. I've looked at logs for decades, all day long, well after well. I can read them in my sleep. I rarely need to pull out a calculator anymore. I can just see it.
Steering horizontal wells is fun until you get stuck.....and you do get stuck. Scary, with that million dollar tool down the hole.
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AP
Trad climber
Calgary
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Mar 13, 2019 - 01:13pm PT
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Everything is a lot more subtle with unconventional reservoirs.
Logs from conventional reservoirs are (usually) straightforward.
Now that we are playing nanodarcy and microdarcy reservoirs things are trickier and we need more data (MICP, RockEval, Qemscan) to calibrate the logs.
I am the lucky one who gets to look at lower Triassic core, some of which crosses the Permian boundary.
Unfortunately the oil industry is in a real bad way in Calgary now. Calgary now has the highest unemployment rate of any urban area in Canada. Even ahead of St Johns
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Nick Danger
Ice climber
Arvada, CO
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Mar 14, 2019 - 01:52pm PT
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Base,
You pretty much nailed the well site gig pretty good there. I also like your take on the differences between drilling in Kansas and drilling in OK. I have done a bit of well site work over the years, some in southern
and western Kansas, western Nebraska, and various intermontane basins in Colorado and Wyoming. All good stuff. Also got to drill a bunch of volcanic stratigraphy in Nevada for the DOE, as well as some granite batholiths for same. As interesting as drilling is, what I have enjoyed the most are my field mapping projects for the USGS, the DOE, and the USAF. Lord, but I love field geology. Did a bit of mineral exploration back in the day in California, Nevada, and Oregon. This has just been the best career of all for me. I think only fighter pilots and astronomers love their work as much as I have loved mine.
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bobinc
Trad climber
Portland, Or
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Mar 14, 2019 - 02:00pm PT
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Routes and Rocks is tremendous. I have the 1965 edition in original hardcover. From the Preface: 'WE speak to those who wish to savor the many byways of this varied region. The guide is written and designed to be carried in the rucksack...Our tendency to rush the hiker out of canyon forest up to timber-line alp and crag is not necessarily because more rocks are to be found up there, or because we mean to belittle the impressive jungles, but because we so often meet people who think of the North Cascades only in terms of trees. Though we know that evaluation of view or campsite is subjective, we have tried to inspire as well as to direct, to give the flavor of a route as well as useful details. We are alpine pedestrians by hobby as well as by profession, and hopefully we hear the same music as our readers.'
And, a sad note about the wife of one of the book's authors (as well as the author himself):
https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/A-Sorrowful-Coincidence-in-Activist-s-Death-2735922.php
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Lorenzo
Trad climber
Portland Oregon
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Mar 14, 2019 - 03:25pm PT
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I had one partner who was a geologist employed in finding oil. Lots of money, time off, and retired early (40-ish)
Another partner was an academic working on earthquakes at the Vancouver (WA) center and on ice dams in the arctic.
A third partner with a geo degree ran a climbing school and died from rockfall.
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AP
Trad climber
Calgary
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Mar 14, 2019 - 03:27pm PT
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The glory days of field geology in the Alberta and BC oilpatch was back in the 50s and 60s when structural geologists spent entire summers in the Rockies mapping structure/faults and correlating. They had lots of pack horses.
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Grippa
Trad climber
Salt Lake City, UT
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Mar 14, 2019 - 03:48pm PT
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A full career of oil well drilling...I bet you've logged miles and miles of cuttings-I'm no where near a mile yet. The geology of Utah is an interesting study in structure, and it's influence on groundwater. The Sevier thrusts overprinted by the Laramide thrusts cross cut by Basin and Range extension make for some fun cross section creation. I'm just the new guy on the team, but am enjoying my time learning from the veterans.
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tuolumne_tradster
Trad climber
Leading Edge of North American Plate
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Mar 15, 2019 - 07:40am PT
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BASE104: ^^^ that anticline photo is from a scanned slide taken in
mid-1980s during a structural geology field trip. I thought it was the PRB but you are probably correct that it is Big Horn.
I think we flew out of Casper Wy
EDIT: looked at my notes & the photos are indeed Big Horn basin. Here's another photo from the same flyover...
This is geoporn at its finest ;-)
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