toilet training a furry cat with frictionless paws

Tuesday, November 14, 2006

fly-by hollywood

A quick detour through Hollywood was enough to satisfy my tastebuds. Afterall, the Hollywood Fault (a blind thrust fault) lies directly beneath these landmarks, and when it decides its time to shift, they'll come tumbling down.

Tuesday, November 07, 2006

Homecoming Float

Co-advising the engineering club this year has allowed for certain extremely fun, although time-consuming, activities. Every year for homecoming there is a theme and a parade during half-time at the football game. The theme this year was "A Cultural Cocktail" and after one of the students suggested engineering feats around the world, I planted the idea in their head that we needed to construct a giant globe with the structures attached, that rotates. We succeeded! And won 1st place with the float also.

Can you name the 9 structures that we built on there?

Please excuse Richard's complete lack of video skills below, but at least you can see the globe rotating, and you can also see the t-shirt guns in action.

Sunday, November 05, 2006

world's longest day field trip, stop 1: dish hill

Wheeeee!
This Saturday I took a group of about 20 of my geology students on an eternally long Mojave day trip. The problem is that to get to the Mojave we have to drive 3hrs. So once you start doing things there, you don't get home until quite late.

This cactus was really cute and fuzzy looking, but I refrained from petting it. It's happily located in "desert pavement" (1st geology lesson of the day). This is basically the remains of desert sediment that hasn't been carried away by wind erosion and has the appearance of a cobblestone road.

We had a "brief" pit stop at Bun Boy in Barstow (as the hwy sign read: "Welcome to Bun Boy Country") - that ended up costing us 40min due to students not reading the first line of my "what to bring on the field trip" handout. This read "lunch" and "snacks". I think 3 people actually did that.

Anyway, here we are at (well not quite, it's the hill in the background there) "Dish Hill" a former cinder (clinker) mine - not the point of our excursion there however (in case you wanted to know, clinker was/is used to line railroad beds, sometimes road beds, and the occasional 70's style BBQ). Dish Hill, located in amongst several basaltic cinder cones, is home to a slew of olivine crystals living in lherzolite mantle xenoliths within the basaltic material. (Geology lesson #2) olivine comes from deep in the earth (mantle). Xenolith is not only one of my favourite words, but also the term for chunks of other rock picked up during the ascent of a magma from deep in the mantle that's just dying to make it to surface in the form of a volcano.

Remnants of probably a loading ramp for the clinker.

Great big olivine xenolith!

Some of the students rest and look on at the fitter souls who clambered up higher. Natuarlly I joined the climbers after taking this photo...

stop 2: national chloride

I did a fair bit of jumping on this trip...

National Chloride is a brine-producing company. They dig trenches in the desert where there is a thick rock salt layer. They add water to these rock salt trenches or let groundwater/seasonal water fill them in naturally, this obviously produces quite salty water. They sell this to Del Monte mainly, and Del Monte uses it to make pickles.

From our perspective, the salt that precipitates from evaporation on the sides of the trenches (and on the neighbouring salt flat) "solar salt" is pretty. Also the blue-green of the brine is pretty.

Matthew: "can I taste it?" me: "sure, it's just salt water" Matthew: "is it salty like the ocean?" me: "it's probably saltier" Matthew: "but I can taste it? really?" me: "if you want"
Then he and several others went down to the briney edge, tasted it, cringed and declared "ewww, that's really salty"

Riley, the faithful, genuinely enjoying every second of the long long day.

Pretty salt precipitates.

While some were tasting the brine, others wandered out onto the salt flat (Mojave's answer to Death Valley's "Devil's Golf Course") and enjoyed the crunch of the pristine white salt "ice" beneath their feet.

kelso sand dunes

Stop 3 (after lunch at Kelso Depot) was to hit up those sand dunes and MAKE THEM SING. Yeah, that's right, SING!

lava tube (at night!)

Thanks to daylight savings time it rapidly became night after leaving the dunes (digital shutter speed not fast enough to capture scene when you shove the camera out the window while driving). This transition from daylight to the absolute pitch blackness of the desert made our next stop tricky (it also caused me to lose all students (they went home) but the 2 with me).

The lava tube is located beyond a collapsed tube at the base of a cinder cone. The collapsed tube is located near a wash that edges an unmarked turnoff near an old corral on an unmarked dirt road some 15 miles north of Kelso Depot (old train station deep in the Western Mojave that reopened this Spring).

Despite missing the turn onto the unmarked road and having to backtrack to it, despite the uneasy and doubtful comments from the back "are you sure we should be trying to find this at night? isn't this kindof pointless?", and despite the annoying fact that rough sandy and cinder-y road absorbs the light from highbeams rendering them almost useless - I pressed on.

We eventually found the corral and I squealed with glee - turn left whenever you can!
We turned left and rumbled along considerably rougher road for a few feet, piled out, passed out flashlights and started roaming around blindly. The roaming was pointless - they were sticking too near the car! I ignored the troopers and pressed on following the ever worsening "road" (probably in daylight I'd find that it isn't a road at all). I stumbled across (not actually stumbling, believe it or not) a large basaltic rock that looked suspiciously flow-like. I decided to follow my gut and make a sharp right into the black. Less than a minute later I found myself looking at a big hole in the ground:

Into the blackness I whooped "woohoo!!!! I FOUND IT!!!" to the utter disbelief of the others. They followed, and my faithful (though very quiet) student Riley helped find the "entrance hole".

Check out that ladder! It's hilarious!

In we go! (ME FIRST!) And snap a shot back up at the sky - check out that full moon and black night!!!

There were some low spots where one had to crouch or crawl

The floor was blanketed with find silty desert sediment - evidently fairly dusty - my flash captured a lot of that!

Then once our eyes grew more accustomed to the dark and our flashlights scanned the walls of vesicular basalt, we found we weren't alone.

Here is a teeny little bat high on the wall. I said "hey little bat-let, where's your family? you can't be responsible for all the poo in here" The bat just wiggled its wings and ignored me.

Here is one of several nests we scoped in various nooks and crannies well above our heads in the tube. If you zoom in really close you can see the head of a little mousie (possibly Frederick) peeking out.

And here we came across the distinctive original hole (the "glory hole") that I found in the dark from above. Man was that ever cool. Lava tube during daylight will never compare now!