As of today, I'm now an Assistant Professor of Geology at NOVA. (I used to be an Instructor.) Yee-ha!

The Rank ladder at NOVA has four rungs: Instructor, Assistant Professor, Associate Professor, and Professor. With positive evaluations and the credits I accrued from my MSSE program, I qualified this summer to climb up a step. (NOVA does not have tenure; just contracts of increasing duration.) In another couple years, I'll be able to apply for promotion to the rank of Associate Professor, but I won't be able to make the jump to full Professor unless/until I get a PhD.

I'm a bit torn about the PhD: I feel like it's a research degree, whereas I'm not doing research in my job at NOVA. I'm an educator. And it's a fair bit of effort, that whole PhD thing: getting a degree specializing me to do research that I don't do. On the other hand, it sure would be nice to be finished with explaining to people that I'm not a doctor. And I'm sure it would help inform my teaching -to some extent- it's just a question of gains versus effort.

Time will tell; I get the feeling I'm going to start itching for another degree come next summer...

Anyhow, for the moment, I'm pleased with the validation of being promoted. Yesterday, I updated my main NOVA webpage to reflect the change. ...And the moustache.

Labels: msse, nova

A quick note here, just for the sake of completeness, on my final MSSE class of the summer: "Examining Life in Extreme Environments." This was a cool class, but structured in a different way from my other MSSE courses: it was set up more like a conference, with a variety of different speakers on different topics, interspersed with activities. The organizers, Susan Kelly and Monica Brelsford used a grant from NASA to help fund the course, which meant they had the money to fly speakers in from NASA Ames, the University of New Mexico, and the Wrigley Marine Science Center on Catalina Island, California. We also had a presentation piped in from Woods Hole. The goal of the class was to look at living organisms that manage to survive in 'extreme' environments, like really salty, really hot, really cold, really acidic, and so forth. Why study these bacteria and archaea? We're hoping they will give us insights into (a) the origins of life on Earth, and (b) the possibility of life on other planets or moons elsewhere in the universe. We had a field trip to Yellowstone National Park to look at microbial mats; we looked at cultures of hyperthermophiles; we listened to excellent talks by Mark Young (viruses as a source of genetic diversity), Ed Adams (new subzero lab tour), and Robert Szilagyi (thermodynamics of the origin of life). As you can see, it was pretty diverse -- all week long, always something new and interesting. I really enjoyed it!

Labels: archean, astronomy, cold, hot springs, montana, msse, wyoming, yellowstone

Back in Bozeman again after a great four day stint in Yellowstone National Park. I was up in the Lamar Valley ("Serengeti of North America"), checking out megafauna as part of my "Wildlife Ecology of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem" course. The hyper-enthusiastic course instructor, Dave Willey, took us to see this amazing ecosystem, using the wolf-elk relationship as a platform for understanding ecological connections. Dave knows a lot about wolves, and showed us plenty. We mainly observed the Slough Creek Pack, but we also saw one of the Druid Pack (the 'original' pack that was reintroduced to Yellowstone in the late 1990s). We also got to observe black bears, elk, bison, grizzly bears, coyotes, bighorn sheep, and a bunch of birds-of-prey.

One bear encounter is worth recounting here: We had hiked from the Lamar Valley out to Cache Creek, where rumor had it the Druid Pack had holed up. We spent the morning "glassing the slopes" (searching with binoculars), but didn't locate any of the wolves. No one had seen them in three days, and we were having the same luck. We began hiking back to the Lamar and our van. At one point, our group separated into two groups. I was at the tail end of the front group, and stopped to answer the call of nature before dropping down to the flat Lamar Valley floor. This short break to take a pee ended up preventing a major bear encounter, as it turned out. Why? It gave the front group time to get down ahead of me, so instead of staring at their backs, I was looking out over the valley. And there I saw two grizzlies heading through the sagebrush, on a direct line towards my colleagues! I called out to warn them (they couldn't see because they were on the same level as the bears, not elevated like I was). We all moved up onto the hill, so we could see the bears and the bears could see us. The tail end of our group caught up, and Dave shouted at them to get up to the high ground. Then we noticed another group of hikers, heading in on the trail. Through the binoculars, we could see that they were oblivious of the bears. We shouted to them too, and they moved up towards us. At that point, the lead bear huffed up and started galloping! "Oh shit," Dave said, "Who's got the bear spray?" When your wildlife ecology professor says "Oh shit," it's time to start worrying. Fortunately the bear's gallop lasted only twenty feet or so (a mock charge?) and then the pair resumed their amble through the sage. They crossed the trail a few feet from where the other group of hikers had been, and headed up a small wooded valley.

We all breathed a sigh of relief, and ventured down off the hill and onto the trail again, keeping a wary eye on the wooded valley. Safely past it, we relaxed and began hiking normally again, at which point we got a great look at a big black wolf trying to cross the Lamar River to our left! It was definitely the closest we had been to a wolf all week! The wolf got spooked by some fishermen, however, and retreated up the hillside on the other side of the road. Pretty cool stuff to see. The Yellowstone Ecosystem appears to be alive and well, even with wolves being "delisted" as threatened species in March, and then reinstated as "endangered" yesterday.

Also, while we were there, a man was attacked by a (probable) grizzly in his tent two campsites up the road. Pretty scary stuff, no longer being at the top of the food chain. These animals will eat you! For me, it was really insightful to get to experience some of that firsthand. This trip was the first time I had camped in the park (in spite of numerous visits over the years), and I really enjoyed the early morning and late evening wildlife viewing: that's the time to be out there!

Labels: critters, fossils, msse, national parks, yellowstone

Got back yesterday from six days out in eastern Montana, at Makoshika State Park. I was there on one of my four MSSE classes this summer, and I learned a lot. As many of you know, I'm trained as a structural geologist, not a sedimentologist. Though I use a lot of sedimentology (and fossils) in my Historical Geology course, there is much I have left to learn. Some of those gaps got filled in this week during "Dino Camp," though. Plus we had a lot of non-geologic fun!

The Hell Creek Formation is well exposed in Makoshika, as well as the overlying Fort Union Formation. The Hell Creek is latest Cretaceous, while the Fort Union is earliest Paleocene. The boundary formerly known as "K/T" is therefore between the two, and it records the changing of the eras: from Mesozoic to Cenozoic. I say "formerly known as K/T," since Tertiary is an archaic term that has been replaced (sort of) with Paleogene. The Paleocene is the first epoch in the Paleogene period. The sedimentologically-defined boundary between the two formations is the lowermost "significant" coal layer. We found this coal, the so-called "Z Coal," and you'd think that would be the K/Pg boundary, but it ain't that simple. True, there are dinosaurs below and no dinosaurs above, and it's also true that the Z Coal has been shown (rather shoddily, by the description we got) to have an iridium anomaly at its base. But there aren't any dinosaur fossils at all for 3 meters below the Z Coal, so the dinosaurs could have gone extinct well before the Z Coal was deposited (and before the iridium-rich clay layer was deposited). And of course, there's nothing in the deposition of a layer of coal that indicates it should be contemporaneous with a mass extinction -- it's just coal. Furthermore, the coal is lake coal, and the lake wasn't necessarily regionally extensive. It's a funny way of defining a critical geochronologic boundary: by the lowermost layer of lake coal in an area -- a criterion which could vary temporally from one place to another. Tricky business!

Anyhow, we prospected for dinosaur fossils. The course had two instructors, Jim Schmitt and Frankie Jackson. Frankie is a paleontologist, and she had a permit for collecting fossils on behalf of the Museum of the Rockies here in Bozeman. We found a lot of vertebrae, some five or six inches across. Plus, we found a bunch of leg bones, some rib fragments, and one of our team actually found the top of the frill on the back of a Triceratops skull! It was all pretty impressive.

In the evenings, we discussed scientific papers about field technique, the Hell Creek Formation, taphonomy, and the extinction of the dinosaurs. All our meals were cooked for us by Frankie's cool husband Bob, and so it was really ideal: Go out and learn all day, come back to camp to a hot meal, a cold beer, and a discussion of big picture ideas. My fellow teachers and I also played a lot of horseshoes and frisbee. To top it all off, when we got back to Bozeman yesterday, a group of us rented Jurassic Park and watched it over pizza and ale.

Next up: tomorrow I begin my Wildlife Ecology of Yellowstone course. Ought to be a similar high-octane experiential blast! More at the end of the week...

Labels: dinosaurs, fossils, montana, msse, yellowstone

It's been a busy week for me. I've really enjoyed my first MSSE class of the summer, Dave Lageson's "Northern Rocky Mountain Geology." Dave led us on a series of field trips within driving distance of Bozeman: the Bridger Range, the Paradise Valley, the Spanish Peaks, the Hebgen Lake earthquake scarp and Quake Lake, and today out to Ringing Rocks, the Lahood Conglomerate, and a descent into Lewis and Clark Caverns. It's been a lot of cool geology, as well as a lot of driving! In the evenings, I've been keeping busy with Shakespeare in the Parks, seeing the B Side Players, and socializing with fellow MSSE teachers. All good stuff, but it leaves little time for blogging. Tomorrow morning, I'm off to the south. I'll be on the road for another five days or so, going to Las Vegas to pick up my father and brothers and then we're going rafting down the Grand Canyon starting next Wednesday. Along the way, I hope to visit some sites in Utah, and I hope to post some updates en route. After the Canyon float, I'll head back north, again through Utah and probably western Colorado (Black Canyon of the Gunnison), before returning to Bozeman for another three MSSE classes ("Dinosaur Paleontology of the Hell Creek Formation," "Life in Extreme Environments," and "Wildlife Ecology of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem"). Then back east, hopefully with some Niobrara Chalk and Pierre Shale site visits along the way.

Also, along similar "rock and road" lines, I had an article published in Geotimes this month on the roadtrip I did two years ago from DC up to Alaska and back. You can check it out here.

FYI, I got a new camera for this trip, and haven't been able to download any pictures off it yet (a stupid software issue), so that's the reason for the lack of photos lately. My apologies!

Labels: grand canyon, montana, msse, utah

Sooo.... I've been "delinquent" about posting (if five days off counts as delinquent). But the long and the short of it is that I made it to Bozeman, and started classes, and have settled into life up here. After leaving Denver, I spent a couple days in Fort Collins, Colorado, staying with my undergaduate mentor professor Larry Wiseman. When I was at William and Mary, I forged a strong relationship with Larry, and that persisted even though I defected from biology (he's a developmental biologist, and chair emeritus of the department there) to geology (basically because they had more field trips). Anyhow, he and I would gather once a month or so for coffee and talk about life, the West, Ed Abbey, art, and science.

Now he's retired and pursuing bird rock art and also teaching cell biology at Colorado State University (in Fort Collins). We drove up to Rocky Mountain National Park and toured the various microbreweries and restaurants of Fort Collins (and Lyons). It was, in short, a good time.

Departing there on Saturday morning, I drove north through Wyoming, and camped at the end of the day at Buffalo Bill State Park, on the east flank of Yellowstone. On Sunday morning, I drove through the park, marvelling at six-foot-deep snow on Washburn Pass, and cruising along past tourists and bison galore. I stopped once, to look at the single petrified tree there, and then rocked and rolled on up the Paradise Valley to Livingston, and thence westward on the interstate to Bozeman.

In Bozeman, I'm enrolled in the Master of Science in Science Education program at Montana State University. It's essentially all science educators who are taking graduate coursework to become better science educators. And it's fun! This week, I'm taking Dave Lageson's class on the geology of the northern Rocky Mountains. More on that later, perhaps, but the point for now is that I'm enjoying it, and enjoying interacting with my fellow MSSE educators.

Tonight, I had a bonus, when we had a mini-conference of geobloggers. I guess there's somewhere around 50 geobloggers out there now, but we had four of them sitting at one table in Montana Ale Works, talking rocks and fossils and blogging and whatnot. That's got to be a record for the geoblogosphere. It was a lot of fun. Thanks to Mel, Brian, and Jeannette for making it happen!

Labels: field trips, montana, msse, travel, wyoming, yellowstone

Cleaning up my hard drive today, before switching over to the laptop for my summer travels. Thought I would share a few annotated photos from my "Geology of Glacier National Park and surrounding areas" class that I took last summer.

Here's Chief Mountain:


On the trail to Firebrand Pass, here's the contact between the Altyn Formation (lowest of the Belt Supergroup exposed at Glacier) and the overlying Appekunny Formation:


The Purcell Sill is a readily recognizable feature high on the glacially-carved walls of Glacier National Park. This shot is from the trail on the way up to Grinnell Glacier:


Here's a shot from Sun River Canyon, showing one of the many imbricate thrust faults there, with some glacial till thrown in as a bonus feature:


Just outside of Sun River Canyon, we saw some nice recumbent drag folds on some thrust faults in the Cretaceous rocks:


This one was from early in the trip, on the road from Helena up north towards Glacier. Specifically, we stopped in Little Prickly Pear Canyon, near Wolf Creek, and saw these chevron folds in the Cretaceous rocks there:


Along those same lines (folded Cretaceous strata), here's a gorgeous fold just outside the park's boundary, on the road leading north from Two Medicine towards Many Glacier:


No annotations on this one, but I wanted to share it anyhow: a blind thrust / drag fold complex, in the Grinnell Formation (exposed on the trail up to Grinnell Glacier):


Lastly, some snow photos. I took this shot on my way up the trail to Grinnell Glacier, because the holes in the snow reminded me of the scary mask face from the Scream movies. But then on the way down, I realized I had the opportunity to document how much snowmelt occurs in six hours of Glacier NP summer weather. Hence, the bottom "after" shot:


That's it for today... Enjoy!

Labels: field trips, montana, msse, plutons, proterozoic, sediment, structure

Ahhhh.... the semester's just about over. Yesterday, I gave my last lecture and delivered two lab practical exams, and now all that's left to do is give the final exams on Tuesday. Not a moment too soon! It's been a very busy time over the past couple of months. What with my regular teaching duties, my Audubon class, my online MSSE class, GSW, various talks (like Wednesday's "Geology along the C&O Canal" at NSF), supervising homeschoolers visiting the NOVA chemistry lab, grant finagling, writing projects, and just life, I'm dog tired. I'm seriously ready for a nice break.

This ought to mean I'll have more time for posting on this blog, and hopefully that the posts will be richer and more thoughtfully composed.

Anyhow, let's share some pictures today. These are photos I took last summer on Dave Lageson's "Geology of Glacier National Park and Surrounding Areas" course at Montana State University - Bozeman. Dave is a great field trip leader, and I'm looking forward to another of his courses this summer: "Northern Rocky Mountain Geology."

For the Glacier course, we loaded up the vans in Bozeman and drove northwest through Helena and up to Sun River Canyon, one of the best areas in the world to look at multiple imbricated thrust sheets. Dave's been taking students here for a long time, and in fact "wrote the book" on it as a field trip location. In the photo below, the prominent cliff is Paleozoic limestone. The gently-sloping hill in the foreground, however, is Cretaceous shale. As is often the case, tectonics trumps superposition. Compressional tectonic forces have shoved the older rocks up on top of the younger rocks. (An analogous situation in the east is the Blue Ridge's Grenvillian rocks thrust up and to the west over Cambrian and Ordovician carbonates of the Shenandoah Valley.)


Here's a map showing how the Canyon trends east-west across the north-south strike of these mutliple thrust sheets:

Next up: Waterton Lakes Park, Alberta. We slipped over the border and spent an evening drinking beer in the southernmost of the Canadian Rockies. ...Purty.


Here's us looking at the next day's field stops.


Still life with fun stuff:


The next day, crossing back into the U.S., we stopped to get a good look at Chief Mountain, another scene of thrusting older rocks on top of younger rocks. Again, the lower unit is Cretaceous, but this time the upper rocks are older, much older. They're Mesoproterozoic rocks of the Belt Supergroup, thrust eastward along the Lewis Thrust, which underlies the base of this mountain. Chief Mountain is an erosional remnant of the Lewis Thrust sheet: that is to say, erosion has cut into the thrust sheet and left behind this one isolated outpost of what was once a continuous sheet of allochthonous rock. (It's a klippe!) The thrust sheet picks up again in the mountains of Glacier National Park.


Next day: a hike up to Grinnell Glacier, a classic glacier in a park named for classic glaciers. Like all of Glacier's glaciers, however, Grinnell is melting. It's receded quite a lot, as repeat photography shows:


Here's a view looking down the Grinnell Valley at a string of pater noster lakes blue with "glacial flour."


Here's what's left of Grinnell Glacier:


Where the glacier once stood, there's now a new lake. Several of my classmates decided that they would go for a dip. Note: all these guys are from Montana...


As for myself, I stayed out of the water, amusing myself with the amazing sedimentary structures displayed by the Belt rocks. Here's an outcrop of the Grinnell Formation, showing amazing Mesoproterozoic mudcracks. (As David Byrne said, "Same as it ever was, same as it ever was...")


Glacier's Belt Supergroup rocks are reknowned for their stromatolites, fossilized cyanobacterial mats. Here, a stromatolitic layer in the Helena Formation was exposed in cross-section by glacial erosion. Penny for scale (atop middle stromatolite).


And here's another view of the same stromatolitic layer, exposed in map-view section (a horizontal slice, as opposed to the vertical outcrop above). Enthusiastic geologist for scale, imagining doing the backstroke through the Proterozoic Belt Sea.


And... that's it for today. I'm off to the Blue Ridge this weekend, so I won't be posting again until Monday or so. But hopefully I'll have some cool new images from Virginia's oldest rocks to share at that time. Be good.

Labels: canada, montana, msse, primary structures, proterozoic, structure

I'm also psyched about joining NAGT's ranks because they offer a series of grants. Getting small educational grants is my new hobby, so I'm looking forward to making some good stuff happen at NOVA with some sum from NAGT.

Labels: conferences, field trips, google, msse, teaching

We've had a cold week in the mid-Atlantic this week, and increasingly my thoughts turn to warmer conditions and the summer. Last year, this year, and next year, I'm scheduling time in Bozeman, Montana, to take classes at Montana State University. I'm working on a second master's degree in science education. It's a pretty cool program which mixes educational practice and "action research" with science elective courses, including plenty of geology offerings.

Today in the blog, I thought I would begin the process of share some images from my time out west last summer. I'll start with the Bridger Range, north of Bozeman. Here's a meadow where we parked the vans before hiking up into the hills on Dave Lageson's excellent Alpine Field Studies seminar:


Once we had huffed and puffed up about tree line, we started to see some pretty cool geology. Here for instance, you can see tilted, folded, faulted Mississippian-aged strata that have been carved into by a glacier. A few minutes after this photo was taken, the class walked straight down into this cirque and climbed up the other side: there's some serious gravity-fighting going on with a route like that. We had lunch on the other side at the top of that orange-colored chute in the upper left:


In the photo below, my hands bracket a tilted zone of paleo-karst in the Mississippian-aged Madison Limestone. With massive limestone above and below, this orangey zone speaks of a time when the limestone deposits of this area were exposed at the surface. Caves and sinkholes developed, as did an iron-rich paleo-soil. It probably looked a lot like modern-day Florida, without the strip malls and retirees. Later, the sea returned and deposited more limestone on top. The paleo-karst is obvious because it contains big blocks of limestone from cave-roof collapse, and is stained by hematite and limonite:


Fellow DC resident and geology educator Nez Nesbitt follows Dave Lageson (the instructor) south along the crest of the range. The drop to either side was substantial, including the headwall of a cirque to the left (east). The loose scree we were walking over added an additional challenge:

In all that scree on the slope we're walking over, there were some cool fossils, including this awesome crinoid calyx ("head" region) - front and back views:


Atop a peak, we paused for a break, and Dave unfurled his Tibetan prayer flags to flap in the wind. I was struck by how a simple little string of cloth imparted a really cool aesthetic to the mountain-top:


This is the trail leading down Sacagawea Cirque. There's some substantial switchbacking going on here:


Here's me atop the highest peak in the Bridger Range, Sacagawea Peak. The views are pretty good from up there:


The class spent the next day mapping glacial landforms in Sacagawea Cirque: it was fun, but I didn't take as many pictures then. When the mapping was over, I prowled through the lateral moraines for fossiliferous chunks of limestone, and found some awesome rugose corals and other treasures. These samples now reside in the NOVA Historical Geology teaching collection.

Labels: fossils, geology, glacial landforms, montana, msse, structure