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It's a SUPERMOON, But Then Again, the Moon is Always Pretty Cool
The Moon has an elliptical orbit, which means that it is sometimes closer and sometimes farther away from the earth. Today the moon is full and making one of its closer approaches (perigee Moon), at...
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"Supervolcano" Causes Road to Melt! Hmm, About That...
"Parts of Yellowstone National Park closed after Massive Supervolcano beneath it melts road!"screams the headline in a typical treatment of a modest story out of one of our nation's premier national...
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The Road Goes Ever Ever On: Getting Into the Field Again!
 Roads go ever ever on,Over rock and under tree,By caves where never sun has shone,By streams that never find the sea;Over snow by winter sown,And through the merry flowers of June,Over grass and over...
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Ah, the Life of the Mariner! Well, Maybe...
Ah, the open sea! The adventures of the water world of planet Earth! The mysteries of the deep! Yes, it's the mariner's life for me. Well maybe, maybe not. It's hard to develop a real opinion on the...
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Nation's Birds at the Northwestern Corner of the Lower 48
Just a nice moment from my day. We were scouting out our impending field studies route with a trip to the Makah Nation's lands near Cape Flattery, the northwesternmost point of the lower 48 states. The...
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I'm Sorry, This Trench is Full; Those Rocks Will Have to Go Elsewhere
Looking south from Hurricane Ridge into the heart of Olympic National ParkThere will be few detailed blogs these next few weeks; I'm on the road leading our Canada/Pacific Northwest field class, and I...
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So Nice When a Plan Comes Together...Chasing Clouds in the Olympics
There's a tenseness that goes with all field studies classes, especially in the Pacific Northwest and Canada. You can't be particularly flexible with the dates when accommodations have been scheduled,...
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That Such Places Exist Unsullied...I am Grateful
“After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with color, bountiful with life. Within decades we must close our eyes again. Isn’t...
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Mystery Photo For a Saturday
So, with no sense of scale or other clues, anyone want to try and explain/describe this surface? For certain people I know, the answer may be in three...two...one...Just a bit of fun for a Saturday...
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Saturday's Mystery Photo Revealed: They're Mima Mounds!
Scale is everything. This morning's mystery photo could have been on another planet, a satellite image of somewhere on Earth, a few inches across, or microscopic. Without scale, we can imagine just...
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Reservoir Closed in Sierra Nevada Village Over Concerns of Possible Failure
National Weather ServiceA flash flood warning in the Sierra Nevada town of Twain Harte has been cancelled this evening after earlier concerns over a possible dam failure. Twain Harte Reservoir is a...
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Whither Go the Redwoods? Smoke in the Temperate Rainforest
Our long journey through western Canada and the Pacific Northwest ended a few days ago, but we lingered in Oregon and Northern California for a few days to visit family, and frankly, to avoid the heat...
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Northern Convergence: A Geological Journey Through Canada and the Pacific...
Some of the world's most dramatic landscapes exist within the strip of the North American continent between the High Plains of Canada and Montana and the Pacific Coast. The geologists call it the...
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Northern Convergence: A Confusion of Orogens, Belts, and Terranes
The first thing to remember about Canada as we start our geological journey is that it is big. Really, really big. It's larger than the United States (including Alaska). And there are fewer people...
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Northern Convergence: The Olympics, Where a Trench Became Sky-Piercing Peaks
Our journey through Western Canada and the Pacific Northwest began as we met with our students in the Seattle area one evening in late July. After a complicated couple of hours of meetings and...
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Having Fun With the SUPERMOON....
So let's face it. SUPERMOON really is overblown. Yes, the moon is closer to Earth, but it does this five times this year. Being closer, it is 14% larger in size, and 30% in brightness than when it is...
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Northern Convergence: America's Pompeii and Sailing to Canada
The first day of our journey through western Canada and the Pacific Northwest continued...Source: WikipediaOn this lonely beach on the far northwest corner of the Contiguous United States a village...
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Northern Convergence: Victoria, Finding Geology and a Rare Ecosystem in a...
We start our blog journey through Canada with a view of alpine peaks, forests and birds. If the picture seems a little fuzzy, it's because it is a highly cropped view down one of the main avenues in...
View ArticleExfoliation in action in Twain Harte
Okay, so this is different. I've never seen exfoliation actually happen. I've seen distant rockfalls that might have been initiated by exfoliation, but this is pretty wild. Twain Harte is the Sierra...
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Northern Convergence: Vancouver Island, the Plan That Was...Part I
Our Northern Convergence tour continues. Our first full day in Canada was to be an exploration of geological sites on south Vancouver Island between Victoria and the ferry port at Nanaimo. There was...
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