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Photos by Tim Vick, Bill Titus and Gabe Nelson '04
The whole field area was divided into five subareas, with two people assigned to each subarea. Here Tara makes notes in her area.
Cam found some sole markings on the underside of a bed.
The tourists quickly figured out that Cam knew something, and they made him tell the story of the rocks.
Bill put his hand over the uncomformity that represents the mind boggling period of over 1.5 billion years of missing Earth history.
Another bit of geology in the canyon walls.
Melissa and Leah, our faithful lab assistants, shared data between their hard drives.
At the end of the day, Cam took us to the mouth of the canyon to show us the San Andreas Fault. Here he tries to get us to see it... but we want him to prove it.
Finally we accept it and pose for a group shot. The fault is just too big to be dramatic on a human scale.
California Dreams Faulted Awayby Melissa Keevil '03 and Leah Morgan '04 Even the most ignorant of geology folk knows what the San Andreas Fault is. They might think a fault is some flaw created by crazy Berkeley residents, but they know about the San Andreas shaking up the west. Professors start raving about the fault in Intro to Geology, and the excitement just grows as we progress into Structural Geology. Given all the hype, and knowing that the San Andreas is one of the largest active strike-slip faults in the world, the fault conjures up images of cavernous cracks in the ground, stream channels and fences offset by tens of meters, and even severed barns. Our expectations were high as we set out to see the Queen Fault in person. After two days of scrambling up and down anticlines, around faults and through unconformities juxtaposing Jurassic green schist and Quaternary sediments, we came upon a mound of clay. It was a huge mound, maybe 20 meters high, and we didn't know what to make of it. Why would a big hunk of clay not have been eroded away? Cam thought he had the answer: fault gouge. Of the San Andreas? Very funny. Soon the group was in a ranting state of disbelief. There wasn't even a threat of falling in!!! The grumbling slowly diminished as we drove around and saw some offset stream channels, and the extremely straight path of the fault gouge - we gave in, though we are still in a state of shock. We guess that one never knows what to expect, and the next thing you know someone will probably be telling us stories about sand volcanoes!! |
That night we rewarded ourselves with a good dinner at a Mexican restaurant in Indio.
Next day, our last day, we toured the geology of Joshua Tree National Monument. Gabe and Leah fell in love.
Here we are under a big Joshua Tree.
Linda Reinen, a geology professor at Pomona College, finished off our trip with an interesting tour of landslide morphology and risk factors in the canyon above Claremont.
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