Frank Hladky, registered geologist who worked for DOGAMI (Oregon Department of Geology and Mineral Industries) for 22 years, came to talk to GSOC about how he used his geological background to transform himself into a high school science teacher. He has been teaching high school in southern Oregon for over a dozen years now and is a member of the National Association of Geoscience Teachers.
Read MoreApril’s Friday night lecture was given by a truly distinguished Oregon geologist and highlighted recent research into an area that has long intrigued geoscientists about Oregon. Dr. Anita Grunder has led a team of researchers, including PSU’s Martin Streck, exploring the possible origin of the magma that has peppered Oregon’s High Lava Plains geologic province in the last 12 million years. This magma includes both rhyolite and basalt eruptions in a swath of territory between Steen’s Mountain region to the southeast and Newberry Volcano to the northwest.
Read MoreProfessor Emeritus and Condon Collection Curator Dr. William Orr spoke to GSOC on May 12 about Thomas Condon’s fossils. This collection was assembled for teaching and reference and ranks with the best collections for stratigraphic continuity and taxonomic breadth. Many specialists from around the world come to the University of Oregon to study its fossils.
Photo: Thomas Condon with his pals Dr. Bill Orr (left) and GSOC President Rik Smoody (right).
GSOC Past President Bo Nonn delivered the 82nd Annual GSOC banquet speech on March 12 to a fascinated crowd at Ernesto’s Italian Restaurant in Beaverton. He has a unique perspective on the geology of the Cascade Mountains: he has witnessed it in person by climbing all 16 Cascade peaks more than once, and has received several certificates of achievement from the Mazamas, as well as being a climbing instructor with that organization.
Read MoreMike Collins, a retired administrator in manufacturing, and an avid mountaineering and geology enthusiast, presented his slide show “Flood Basalts, Hot Spots, and Spreading Centers and the Creation of the Western Landscape,” to a full house last month at the GSOC Friday night lecture. His show was based upon a manuscript he has produced explaining the evolution of the Western landscape in terms that non-technical people can understand. It is lavishly illustrated with scratchboard drawings that he has drawn, which take the reader back to scenes he describes in the book.
Read MoreDr. Richard Waitt, who arrived in Washington state from the USGS office in Menlo Park, California, shortly after the eruption of Mt. St. Helens, stayed to study the volcano and built the bulk of his career at the Cascades Volcano Observatory (CVO) in Vancouver, Washington. Dr. Waitt came to promote his new book In the Path of Destruction: Eyewitness Chronicles of Mount St. Helens, Washington State University Press, 2015, to the GSOC audience and to describe the book’s origin and some of the stories it contains. He said that early in his research into the events of the volcanic eruption, he was focused more on the hard geology that people could describe. However, he became involved more in the stories that people told about their experiences and the process of determining the details of the event by analyzing the interviews of the witnesses.
Read MoreGSOC Past President Sheila Alfsen described her experiences working as an onsite paleontologist on construction sites for Paleontology Associates, a company run by Oregon paleontologist Dr. William Orr for more than 15 years. Paleontology Associates was created to address the need for preserving important fossil finds on government property when they are threatened by construction projects.
Read MoreDr. William Orr, curator of the University of Oregon Condon Fossil Collection and frequent GSOC speaker, entertained and amused the GSOC crowd on Friday, May 13. He also provided an informative lecture about the prima donnas of the fossil world, those that come from lagerstätten. Lagerstätten is a German word meaning “storage places.”
Read MoreDr. Alan Mix, Professor of Oceanography in the divisions of Ocean Ecology and Biogeochemistry and of Geology and Geophysics in the College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences at Oregon State University and Chief Scientist of the Petermann Glacier 2015 research expedition, spoke at the GSOC 81st Annual Banquet about the research he led at Petermann Glacier in Greenland. His talk stressed the value of the research in helping to further our understanding of climate change and drive the political policies needed to help us face the changes.
Read MoreDr. Ashley Streig, Assistant Professor in the Geology Department of Portland State University and NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellow, gave a talk to GSOC about her paleoseismology research on the San Andreas Fault in California. Streig’s research in the Hazel Dell site in the Santa Cruz Mountains was interpreted as showing the results of 3 significant earthquakes happening since the land was settled and logged by the first Spanish settlers.
Read MoreOn January 8, over 70 GSOCers gathered in Cramer Hall 53 to hear a science-history talk given by GSOC member and Portland Community College professor Kyle Dittmer, which revealed new findings on how the field of geology got established.
Read MoreSynopsis of GSOC Friday night lecture, October 9, 2015, given by Dr. Marli Miller, University of Oregon Department of Geology and author of Roadside Geology of Oregon, Second Edition (Mountain Press Publishing Co., 2014).
by Carol Hasenberg
Dr. Marli Miller explained and gave examples of her recent book, Roadside Geology of Oregon, Second Edition, to one of GSOC’s largest audiences ever. The book was a 4 year project from which Miller laughingly said that she learned an embarrassingly large amount of material. Amongst her reviewers for the project were Portland State University professors Martin Streck and Scott Burns. The Second Edition is a long awaited rewrite of the classic Roadside Geology of Oregon by David Alt and Donald Hyndman, written in 1978.
Photo credit: Marli Bryant Miller
Read MorePictured: polished and etched silicate-bearing iron meteorite, with millimeter scale at left
Meteorites “Greatest Hits” from Dr. Ruzicka's May 8th lecture: (1) The solar system formed relatively fast, in only 10 million years; (2) Much early planetary material was either partly melted, evaporated, and/or dispersed in the early solar nebula; (3) Pre-solar grains are incorporated in the chondrite matrix; (4) Pre-biotic organic synthesis occurred as building blocks in the early solar system; (5) Decay of short-lived radioactive isotopes gave the heat source of silica-rich bodies in the early solar system; (6) Planetary rock swaps occurred throughout the history of the solar system.
Read MoreDr. John Bershaw, PSU Department of Geology, came to the GSOC Friday night lecture in April to discuss his research using fossils to determine information about past climate change. Specifically, Bershaw’s task was to use oxygen isotopes in fossil mammal teeth to bracket the age of formation of the Andean Plateau (Altiplano) in South America.
Read MoreI was in high school in 1957 when the Russians successfully launched the first man-made satellite, Sputnik. It is hard to explain to younger generations just what a profound event that was. To us, it was totally astonishing: that we humble humans could put an object into outer space. Until then I had planned to be an artist, but I thought “Wow! If scientists can do that, they can solve anything (ghettos, hunger, strife, …)”. So began my checkered studies in science.
Read MoreAbout 100 of us gathered in Cramer Hall 53 to hear the very knowledgeable geologist Dr. Scott Burns talk about his newest adventure – first trip to Mt. Lassen National Park. This active volcano, the southernmost in the Cascade Mountains, last erupted in 1916. The mode of eruptions seems to be bi-modal – either quiet or violent. The volcano was named after Danish immigrant Peter Lassen who was a local blacksmith. The LA Times recently wrote that Mt. Lassen was California’s “most overlooked volcanic park” with only 400,000 visitors per year, as compared with Yosemite’s 4-million visitors per year.
Read MoreOver 100 of us gathered in Cramer Hall 53 – a big upgrade from the smaller classroom – to hear a former aeronautical engineering student now turned paleontologist share the geologic evidence on how the ability to fly has come to evolve. He described the various modes of flight and the thresholds between what humans might define as “true flight” and all the ways evolution has developed gliding, falling, and powered flight. The idea of flight is a major part of American culture, along with automobiles. The idea of flight goes back to ancient times. How did the wing evolve? Unlike a simple airfoil, a bird-wing is a complex venetian-blind like structure and with an opening-and-closing folding motion.
Read MoreMartin Streck spoke to a standing room only GSOC crowd about the work that he and a number of his graduate students have done in advancing our knowledge of the Columbia River Basalt (CRB) flows of the Miocene. His team has focused upon the rhyolite flows that occurred as a result of heating by the basalt magma that produced the CRB.
Miocene rhyolite flows in eastern Oregon have long been studied by geologists. The relationship between the rhyolitic magma and the massive amounts of CRB basaltic magma is not precisely known, although they are spatially close so infer that the rhyolite is a result either of partial melting of the crust by or fractional crystallization of the CRB magma. In fact, the spatial distribution over time of the rhyolite can give geologists ideas about the origin of the CRB magma itself.
Read MoreAt the end of the last ice age 18,000 to 15,000 years ago massive hydrologic floods ran down the Columbia River Gorge. Originating from a huge glacial lake near Missoula, Montanta around forty floods were large enough to flood the entire Willamette Valley to a depth of 400 ft. These floods did not just bring huge volumes of water, they brought huge amounts of rocks and sediments from the continental batholiths. A large percentage of these rocks and sediments are composed of granite. Granites from the Idaho batholith are high in uranium bearing minerals. This high uranium content brings with it an unexpected hazard, radon.
Read MoreDr. Adam Booth, Portland State University Department of Geology, spoke to GSOC on October 10 about his research with the Norwegian Geological Survey (NGU). Norway is a country with a landslide problem on its western shore. There some of the world's highest escarpments of gneiss and schist tower over steeply carved glacial fjords. Towns and villages huddle at the bottom of these steep slopes on flat land created by the rock falls and debris flows which come from the slopes above. Blocks of material catastrophically fail periodically along steep foliation planes, sending material plummeting into the fjord below and creating immense waves. Three such events occurred in the twentieth century, leaving a wake of destruction and taking nearly 200 lives.
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Scott Anderson
John Brownlee
Emily Cahoon
Tima Carlson
Reed Dixon
Lisa Hoffman
Alex MacLeod
Louis Macovsky
Seth Munkres
Deborah Santomero
Janet and Tom Sonoff
Blair Stuhlmuller
Paige Stuhlmuller
Alice Ziring
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