Sunday, December 14, 2008

You People Wouldn't Believe the Things I've Seen

Oh Noes! Another Geomeme! Rules and index case here.

1. See an erupting volcano [St Helens, several times]
2. See a glacier [Glacier NP, Cascades, Canadian Rockies]
3. See an active geyser such as those in Yellowstone, New Zealand or the type locality of Iceland [Yellowstone, Lakeview OR]
4. Visit the Cretaceous/Tertiary (KT) Boundary. Possible locations include Gubbio, Italy, Stevns Klint, Denmark, the Red Deer River Valley near Drumheller, Alberta. [I have undoubtedly crossed it at Drumheller, but didn't spend the time to actually find it. No bold on this one]
5. Observe (from a safe distance) a river whose discharge is above bankful stage [many times]
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) [many, many- least known but worthwhile is probably OR Caves Nat. Monument, near Route 199 in the SW corner of the state]
7. Tour an open pit mine, such as those in Butte, Montana, Bingham Canyon, Utah, Summitville, Colorado, Globe or Morenci, Arizona, or Chuquicamata, Chile. [Nickle mine at Riddle OR, but none of the giants listed here, and numerous small operations]
8. Explore a subsurface mine. [generally stay out of these, but a few, and several guided tours]
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)[Josephine ophiolite along 199 in N Cal, Klamath Mts.].
10. An anorthosite complex, such as those in Labrador, the Adirondacks, and Niger (there's some anorthosite in southern California too). [I don't think so]
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. [Zion]
12. Varves, whether you see the type section in Sweden or examples elsewhere. [Pleistocene and Proterzoic both in Ontario, Canada]
13. An exfoliation dome, such as those in the Sierra Nevada. [Sierra Nevada]
14. A layered igneous intrusion, such as the Stillwater complex in Montana or the Skaergaard Complex in Eastern Greenland. [Beautiful cumulate ultramafics in the Strawberry Mts, OR; Compositional zoning at Marys Peak, OR, and Palisades, NY... do those count?]
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). [East Coast, West Coast]
16. A gingko tree, which is the lone survivor of an ancient group of softwoods that covered much of the Northern Hemisphere in the Mesozoic. [very pretty this fall; golden like aspens]
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) [Glacier, Ontario]
18. A field of glacial erratics
19. A caldera [Yellowstone, Long Valley, Crater Lake, Newberry, Harney Basin is a suspect Caldera]
20. A sand dune more than 200 feet high [Oregon Dunes]
21. A fjord [British Columbia, Ushaia, Argentina, Antartica]
22. A recently formed fault scarp Owens Valley, Death Valley, East side of Steens in SE OR]
23. A megabreccia [Titus Canyon, Death Valley]
24. An actively accreting river delta [many from the air, New Orleans area]
25. A natural bridge [remember seeing it, don't remember exactly where- I think Virginia]
26. A large sinkhole [Florida, Mammoth Cave area]
27. A glacial outwash plain [common in Ontario]
28. A sea stack [Many from N Cal to BC]
29. A house-sized glacial erratic
30. An underground lake or river
31. The continental divide
32. Fluorescent and phosphorescent minerals [If you get a good black light, you'd be surprised how many minerals are fluorescent and phosphorescent- the trick with the latter is to let your eyes get really dark-adapted, then close them when you use the UV lamp to "charge" them. Open your eyes as you turn off the light; the phosphorescence may only be perceptable for a few seconds, but once you learn to spot it, it's unmistakeable]
33. Petrified trees
34. Lava tubes [more than I can count in central OR; Ape Caves on the south flank of St Helens]
35. The Grand Canyon. All the way down. And back. [in one day, February '78. Long story, but on a broken leg that I didn't know at the time was broken]
36. Meteor Crater, Arizona, also known as the Barringer Crater, to see an impact crater on a scale that is comprehensible [Also Sudbury, Ontario; much bigger, but I found it comprehensible. Older, mashed, yes, but you could get the sense of a big impact]
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. [I've seen these, as well as Wisconsin and Minnesota, but the ones I've really looked at carefully are near Temagami, Ontario]
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. [I've been close, but not all the way to the top, but I see others are ticking off having seen it]
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
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.
55. The Giant's Causeway and the Antrim Plateau, Northern Ireland, to see polygonally fractured basaltic flows. [I've seen much very similar, but not these particularly]
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 [This one would be jaw dropping...]
61. The moving rocks of Racetrack Playa in Death Valley [Finally made it here last spring over break... Thanks Vance! Very cool]
62. Yosemite Valley
63. Landscape Arch (or Delicate Arch) in Utah
64. The Burgess Shale in British Columbia [Can the public visit this site?]
65. The Channeled Scablands of central Washington
66. Bryce Canyon
67. Grand Prismatic Spring at Yellowstone
68. Monument Valley
69. The San Andreas fault [I wish I'd had more time to poke around though]
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 [Frank, Alberta, plus many, many of lesser scale]
76. The giant crossbeds visible at Zion National Park
77. The black sand beaches in Hawaii (or the green sand-olivine beaches)
78. Barton Springs in Texas
79. Hells Canyon in Idaho
80. The Black Canyon of the Gunnison in Colorado [this is another wanna]
81. The Tunguska Impact site in Siberia
82. Feel an earthquake with a magnitude greater than 5.0. [with an asterisk- I mistook it for a particularly big thump in the roadwork that was going on nearby; but when I got into work and was asked about it, I knew exactly which thump it was. I had noted the time.]
83. Find dinosaur footprints in situ [Conneticut Valley Triassic sediments]
84. Find a trilobite (or a dinosaur bone or any other fossil) [Trilobites in Ontario, Dinosaur pieces in Drumheller, Alberta, other fossils all over the place]
85. Find gold, however small the flake [Quartzville OR, Smith River CA, Gold Beach OR]
86. Find a meteorite fragment [bought several, but never found]
87. Experience a volcanic ashfall [St Helens]
88. Experience a sandstorm [Darwin, CA]
89. See a tsunami [I was there, but the "tsunami" was later reported to be only a few inches. So I was looking for it, but I didn't see it.]
90. Witness a total solar eclipse [August, 2017, I will. Probably a few feet from where I'm sitting right now]
91. Witness a tornado firsthand. (Important rules of this game). [Another I wanna, and I guess dust devils don't count]
92. Witness a meteor storm, a term used to describe a particularly intense (1000+ per minute) meteor shower [No, never with that intensity]
93. View Saturn and its moons through a respectable telescope.
94. See the Aurora borealis, otherwise known as the northern lights. [Ontario, northern Michigan, and oddly enough, northern Nevada- I was there with an astronomy person, and we decided what we were seing couldn't be anything else]
95. View a great naked-eye comet, an opportunity which occurs only a few times per century
96. See a lunar eclipse [never miss them, if the sky is clear. Miss them every time if it isn't]
97. View a distant galaxy through a large telescope [how large is "large?" 16 inch reflector count? It was still a fuzzy blob. An impressive blob, but still...]
98. Experience a hurricane [don't wanna]
99. See noctilucent clouds [I don't think so, though I had a brief false alarm this summer, and I've been looking hard. Reports say they seem to be on the increase]
100. See the green flash [pretty sure about this one. I was crossing the Columbia River between OR and WA at sunset, looking out over the ocean, and for a few moments the color was very odd. But I'm somewhat red-green color blind, so I've never been completely convinced I saw what I think what I saw]

I count 38 no's, giving me 62 yes's. I count loosing count more times than I can count.

Followup: This seems like a particularly virulent meme, at least to geoblogospherians. Here (in no particular order) are the victims I've seen: BrianR, Silver Fox, Christie, Bryan, Chris, Callan, Saxifraga, Kim, SciGuy315, Hypocentre, ReBecca, Suvrat, Seablogger, Maria, Volcanista, Lost Geologist, Tuff Cookie, JJ, and as noted at the outset, the index case, MJC Rocks. Chris has the scores posted at the end of his list. My post title, by the way, is an allusion to Roy's final speech in Bladerunner. If you're not familiar with it, the quote is under "Roy," here.

1 comment:

Dean Wormer said...

Observe (from a safe distance) a river whose discharge is above bankful stage

I saw the same thing in an adult film once.

Very neat list which makes me feel like I should get out more.