Brass Compass

I recently graduated with my master's degree in geology and as a bit of a graduation present one of my good friends, who is also a graduate student, gave me a little treasure he had obtained while overseas in the Army. This present is a brass compass, very similar to a Brunton.

The compass part of it still works great, and the dip-bubble works, although the leveling bubble is off-center, but I don't mind. The thing is more of a classy desk piece than a field tool (although I'd still use it). I believe it's made of brass because it's a good deal heavier than a regular Brunton compass. The pictures don't do it justice, it shines like a slightly tarnished penny.

Although the giver of this gift didn't know it, this meant a lot to me for a specific reason. At my undergraduate geology program they would award a gift to two graduating students based on their performance. They can choose between a Brunton Compass or a GPS. I chose the GPS because I'm really into the whole GIS/GPS thing, but the field geologist looks back sometimes and wonders why I didn't choose the compass. Receiving this antique showpiece brass compass has gone a long way of curing that, on top of the fact that it is a wonderful desk piece and conversation starter that has traveled across the world and given to me by a good friend.

Midwest Aerial Geomorph

Over this last Thanksgiving I had the chance to fly back home to Minnesota. Something I really like to do is look at the landscapes through the airplane window (when I get a window seat). Although the midwest doesn't have much topography to look at, there is plenty of geomorphology to keep a geoscience-educated person entertained, along with some meteorology and infrastructure. I happened to have my camera onhand, something I'll try and remember to do more.

Shot of Springfield-Branson National Airport (KSGF) after takeoff

A limestone quarry outside of Springfield. Makes you realize how much limestone there is in this state!

Just making sure the wing is still attached. Yep!

Looks to be some kind of weather front, clear on one side, cloudy on the other.

Again, the weather front. I like this shot because it was difficult to see the land on the clear side due to scattering, so it looked blue, making this shot look like we're flying over the edge of Antarctica, a flight I would love to take someday.

Begin the fluvial geomorphology! A stream with some good meander-bends. Most geologic events take places over millions of years, so sometimes it's a nice break to think about meandering streams which are very dynamic (geologically speaking)  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meander
You also don't realize how close clouds are to the ground sometimes until you see them from above.

Excellent example of a dendritic pattern stream in the light-colored farm square. It looks so sharp and clean probably due to the farmer plowing and planting right up to the stream bank, removing any kind of riparian zone. Although this maximizes growing land for the farmer this leads to more soil and fertilizers getting washed into the stream, a major problem in the midwest contributing to the Golf Dead Zone.

Saw these wind farms and knew I wasn't in Missouri aymore - Wind farms are common in Iowa, Minnesota, and Illinois, but are slow to start up in Missouri (I've heard some fairly negative political radio ads about wind farms here) http://www.bls.gov/green/wind_energy/map_1_revise.png

Lake Thunderbird in Illinois, a neat little water body I saw which turns out to be a reservoir. http://lakethunderbird.us/ You can also really see where the smaller tributary valleys are where the dark heavy vegetation has been left untouched within the plowed lighter colored cropland.

I used to live next to the Mississippi River in my undergrad days, so part of me will always have a thing for large rivers and small river towns. This turned out to be the town of Hennepin, Illinois.

A larger river town. You can definitely see the industrial district along the river. I also liked the little airport just outside of town. I wonder how long until the city envelopes it? This is the cities of Peru and La Salle, Illinois

The cities of Peru and La Salle, Illinois, as above, but with the winding river in view. I wonder why the city doesn't develop into that meander point?

Sorry for the strange angle of the shot, but I wanted to get as much of this in view as possible to see all the little sandbar islands along the river. Getting into the heavily urbanized regions of Illinois.

A shot for the physicists. I saw this and didn't believe what I was looking at at first, but yes, that is Fermilab outside of Chicago. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermilab

Radium Springs Cave, Arkansas

This last spring I had the opportunity to go caving with a great group of cavers in Arkansas. This trip was into Radium Springs Cave in northern Arkansas, sort of a final small event during Hydro Days.

This is one of those great caves that's both large and explorable, but also protected with a lockable hatch, so only certain people are allowed to get in. Even more of a plus, this was not a "show cave", meaning we had no official guide, and we could only see what we shined our flashlights at.

A short walk into the cave we first came to the locked "entrance". This metal hatch was placed over a natural bottleneck. It was quite a small entrance, and a sign to come of the claustrophobic passages we would experience.

Most of the cave was made of large "rooms" that we would spend a while in looking at really great speleothems and cave structures. Between the large rooms, though, we often had to crawl through very narrow, low, and otherwise unnervingly small passages for long distances (I had to take my backpack off just to fit along this belly-crawl passage below. It went for a good 50 feet, and we went one at a time just incase someone had to back out). Since moving to Missouri I have gone on a number of cave trips, and they all had been building me up to be able to handle this level of claustrophobia.

One of the neat cave features are these "boxwork" features, named so because they form these honeycomb shaped features on the cave ceiling which look like old fashioned post office mail sorting boxes. While most ceiling features are formed from calcite dissolution, these are calcite veins from the rock which used to be there. The veins were more resistant to erosion than the surrounding rock, so are remnant features.

Aside from those, there were plenty of the garden variety cave speleothems, as seen below. Stalagmites are the spikes on the floor of the cave. Stalagtites are the spikes hanging from the ceilings. Where a stalagmite and stalagtite grow together they form a column. The large feature on the left (which I always think look like frozen waterfalls) is flowstone, which is formed the same way as the other speleothems.

Our group would often stop in some of the larger rooms and take some fairly spectacular pictures. My little camera was nothing compared to some of the great equipment some of us had.

One of the more interesting concepts of the karst bedrock system is the way in which water flows underground in these areas. While traversing through the cave we often had to hop or otherwise tred through small streams. Underground river systems are the norm in these areas.

One of the great things about this cave being locked off from just anyone is that vandalism and over-exploration would have probably destroyed some of the more delicate formations.

I had been caving before, usually bringing my own headlamp. This was the first time I had been introduced to a carbide lamp. These are flame lamps which are powered by adding little carbide lumps with water in the reservoir of the lamp. This combination gives off a flammable gas which is lit to ignire a small flame. The lever on top controls how much gas escapes and therefore the size and brightness of the light. A little carbide seemed to go a long way, so as long as you had a source of water you had light (handy in a cave).

Below, picture of my masters thesis advisor (left) and myself (right).

I also had the opportunity to go caving with Dr. Arthur Palmer (below, right), whose textbook many speleology classes use, and is well known in the karst world. Great guy!

Despite the lack of visible light there was still plenty of life to be found underground. Below, a cave cricket.

While delving deeper into the part of the cave which is home to a colony of bats we accidentally came across a whole cluster of them. I didn't have time to get a photograph, but I promise there was a huddle of hundreds of bats on the ceiling which became startled to our arrival.

If small spaces wouldn't get you, then maybe a fear of bats might. Personally, bats don't bother me much, but I admit what followed would have caused some issues for others. A piece of advice about bats: if they start flying around, don't freak out. If you stand still and don't move suddenly, they won't hit you. Although I could feel the wind from their flapping wings just barely inches away.

Catching photographs of these bats in flight was not difficult at all. I just kept taking pictures, and there were so many bats flying around that almost all of my pictures looked like these.

I wasn't sure how large the cave was, but we spent around 3 hours underground exploring, so a good hour and a half both ways. That in itself should give you a good idea about how extensive one of these caves can be.

We finally made it back to the surface. In our absence from the surface world it had begun to rain. I couldn't even begin to guess how much extra cave this water would explore that we were too big to fit.

Petrogenesis 1:1

Some of the weirdest ideas come to people that are up way too late and under stress. With that said, it's not a surprise that this following "passage" was the product of taking a Petrology class.

One of the questions asked for a given rock sample is "what is its petrogenesis?", meaning, how did it form, and where did it come from? When given such a loaded question at 2am, the only thing you can do is go off on a complete tangent. The first couple lines were made on the spot between us 3 petrology students that late night, and the rest followed later:

_______


In the beginning, God created the heavens and the magmas. And the magmas were unfractionated and without form.

And God said, 'Let there be Bowen, so that the magma may fractionate, and order be had'. And there was Bowen.

On the second day, He spaketh unto Bowen, 'Seperate the magmas into two series, continuous and discontinuous, so that geologists may spend many hours with petrographic microscopes". And Bowen commanded it so, and there was olivine and anorthite.

On the third day, God spaketh unto Bowen, 'Thou shalst continue in the continuous series of plagioclase, replacing sodium for calcium. The Michel-Levy Method will guide the true of heart'. And there was much rejoicing.

On the fourth day, God spaketh unto Bowen, 'Thou shalst make pyroxene, which is like olivine but more complex and with cleavages' And thus the geologists did rejoice of single-chains.

On the fifth day, God spaketh unto Bowen, 'The geologists have grown arrogant in their memorization. Lo, you shalst create the amphiboles, which are complex with 60-120 cleavage'. And the geologists wailed, and there was much gnashing of teeth.

On the sixth day, Bowen prayed, and said 'I am out of calcium, what shalst I do?' and God said, 'Have faith', and there was albite.

On the seventh day, Bowen said unto God, 'May I have a rest?', and God was displeased with Bowen, and showered him with flakes of biotite and muscovite. And Bowen begged for forgiveness, and continued his series.

On the eighth day, Bowen recovered, his body having been pinched and swelled in tartain plaid. And there was microcline. And God forgave Bowen.

On the ninth day, Bowen prayed unto God, 'But I have nought but silica and oxygen left, what shalst I do?', and lo, God commanded him to take up thine rock hammer, and strike upon the earth. And forth sprang quartz, and God said, 'Its hardness shall be 7". And it was good.

Finding Patterson Spring

For part of a recent dye trace I’ve been searching the area for more springs to monitor. One spring, Patterson Spring, shows up on historical dye tracing records but didn’t seem to be at the location indicated (it was an old dye trace so location coordinates were general; location was listed as being near a bridge crossing the James River, but there are 2 bridges in this area).

I was feeling especially adventurous so I went down to figure out where the spring really was. There’s a lot of overgrowth surrounding the river and the river has carved a decent valley for itself.

I parked just at the intersection of S Farm Road 141 and W Farm Rd 190 by the northernmost bridge, as the bridge provided a good way to reach the river. Pictured below - my trusty field vehicle. In the background is a good exposure of the rock unit in the area which is prone to caves, springs, and sinkholes (in fact there is a cave within that hillside that was preserved when the highway department discovered it while blasting through to build that road).

My one regret is wearing shorts instead of pants. Apparently Mother Nature has created her own version of barbed wire in the form of vines with incredibly sharp barbs. Also, the spiders in Missouri continue to amaze me. There is this type of large yellow spider which I’ve seen a number of times while tromping through the woods around here which I’ve been told is nonpoisonous but it provides no comfort to me. It also likes to spin its spider webs at face-height. Photo below courtesy of me (note those are inches on the bottom part of the scale).

After making it down to the river we began walking upstream as this appeared to look more promising for a spring location. After about 80 feet of walking along the bank I looked down and saw water flowing into the river through a bedding plane in the bedrock. As I wasn’t actually expecting to find the spring so it was exciting to “re-discover” it.

I was too preoccupied examining and recording the location of the spring with my trusty eTrex GPS that I failed to see the “rest” of the spring.

For about 100 feet upstream along the bank of the river there was water coming out of the bedding plane into the James River. It wasn’t a large volume at any given spot, flowing at around 1-2 feet per second, but the “thickness” of the sheet of water flowing out of the spring was about 4 inches, and was around 100 feet in width. Rough estimates of discharge put the whole spring at around 30-40 cubic feet per second, which is considerably more than the other springs I’ve been studying in the area (usually 1-5 cubic feet per second).

The observation that the water flows out along a widened bedding plane is important to understand for the way water is flowing in the area (it's one of the major research questions I'm trying to address). The river seems to prevent vegetation from growing on a large section of the bedrock and has exposed the fractures in the rock, which allowed us to look down and see the water flowing. These little “windows” were a good place to put a charcoal packet to see if the dye makes it down into this spring.