Geology Fieldtrip

My Geo 203 field trip this weekend was one of the best I've taken. Most field trips at Oregon State end up being rain soaked affairs and I've gotten a bad case of poison oak more than once. Not that I'm complaining, as it's great to get out of the classroom. Anyways, besides the glorious weather this weekend, one of the highlights was the chance to play around on a certain sedimentary cliff on the Oregon coast and do some fossil hunting. My group and I found a number of 16 million year old invertebrates from the middle Miocene epoch. We found a number of bivalves (clams), gastropods (snails) which were preserved in a variety of methods. This included preservation of the original material, replacement through mineralization, and we came across many casts and molds. Another student found something that looked like an ancient mussel, but it was incomplete. I got to take a few home with me and I'm hoping one of my larger clam specimens will get me an extra credit point this week in lab. I just have to identify it first, which doesn't sound to easy.

At a couple of other stops (between excursions in our big yellow school bus) we viewed a a few sedimentary layers that were solidified turbidity flows. A turbidity flow is basically an underwater landslide that occurs on the continental shelf. Then the material was uplifted through plate tectonics and squished together just west of Corvallis. On no other field trip does the scale of geologic time seem so huge, and most of Oregon is actually fairly recent (we are talking tens of millions of years, not billions). It took a loooonnnggg time to create most of these features. I'll finish my science nerd monologue by stating that I think I need to get a rock hammer now... they look pretty sweet.

p.s. I'll also take this space to apologize for my liberal use of parentheses, but it's how I roll. Sometimes life is just too complicated to present in an organized fashion.