Ascención Island - The Middle of the Atlantic Ocean!

A rule in aviation is that aircraft with only two engines (like our 757) can never be more than 3 hours from a landing strip. So instead of flying straight across from Cape Town to Rio, we needed to fly far north to a tiny speck of land known as Ascención Island, just 65 miles west of the submerged Mid-Atlantic Ridge. This was quite a treat for our group (maybe I'm stretching the truth here). But I was definitely happy to stop at this outpost in the middle of the sea - it was vivid with volcanic features and we received permission to do a flying tour of the island before we stopped to refuel at a runway - reserved as one of the emergency landing strips for the space shuttle. Here is a photo tour of a place very few people ever see.

Here's the approach to Ascención Island after a six hour flight from Cape Town. Our trip is making the transition from Africa to South America!

And a view of most of the island as our captain positions the jet for great views. Air traffic control was more than happy to let us fly where we wanted.

Although it is under a cloud, you can make out the runway in this pic just to the left of the obvious cinder cone. A photo of this cone from ground level is included below.

The island is over 2 miles tall but three-fourths of it is under the sea. The oldest flows are one million years old and there have not been any historic flows at all (since AD 1501). But geologists note that eruptions have probably occurred since AD 1000. You can easily see some excellent lava features on one of the younger flows in this shot.

Surprisingly, there are a number of trachyte and rhyolite flows on the northeast side of the island. Ascención is not directly on top of the mid-ocean ridge - it's about 65 miles west of that. It has erupted on a the Acención Fracture Zone and is part of a hot spot.

Here's the view of the tarmac as I exited the jet.

Our Explorer jet on Acención Island.

The NASA tracking station on top of a relatively recent cinder cone.

One for the records!

Cape Town, South Africa

After leaving the desert our trip descended on Cape Town, South Africa, one of my favorite destinations. Maybe its the similarity in climate and feel to my roots in southern California. Or maybe its just that 'Seouth Afreca' has a character that is too interesting and compelling to ignore. After all, this is the land of Nelson Mandela, who brought down apartheid and then had the audacity to say 'No retribution, look to the future'. Compare this to Zimbabwe the land of painful retribution.

I love history! And it really comes alive for me when I see a classic old painting done by someone who was "there". Here is a Dutch painting of a supply ship entering Table Bay in the late 1600's.


And a very similar view of Table Bay and Cape Town in 2009 when I flew here on a helicopter!





The cable car to the top of Table Mountain actually spins as you go up, giving a great view of the city and the wall of sandstone behind it. The sandstone is Cambro-Ordovician in age (about 500 to 450 Ma) and is interpreted to be laid down in near-shore river systems from today's north.







Lion's head - a familiar landmark west of the city center, is also composed of these bedded sandstones.





This is a shot from the helicopter of Cape Point, near the Cape of Good Hope - made famous in zillions of American 4th grade classes. What a treat to actually come here and see it. Ironically, it is not the southernmost point in Africa - that would be Cape Agulhas about 120 miles farther east of here.





Precambrian/Phanerozoic contact in South Africa. The light colored Cape Granite (below the road) intruded about 540 Ma and the darker seds were laid on top about 70 to 100 million years later. I have seen this contact in many places around the world - Saudi Arabia, Jordan and of course The Great Unconformity at Grand Canyon.

More of Namibia - The Living Desert

The Namib is a very dry desert but not at all dead. Many thousands of species live here from strange looking plants to colorful, adaptive animals. Here is a sampling of some of the things we saw.
Trips out into the Namib are faciltated by great guides and here is one of the best - Tommy of the Namib. Deserts seem to draw out the little kid in everyone and although Tommy is in his 50's chronologically, he is a kid at heart. What a trip we had with him at home in "his office".




This is a plant known as Welwichia. It has only two leaves that grow away from a central stem but it looks like many more since the wind shears them apart. Some welwichias can be 1500 years old.

The welwichia is a diaceous plant meaning that it has male and female plants. Here is a picture of the female plant.






Tommy loved to find snakes, scorpions, chameleons - anything that moved and he was an expert in finding them! Here is a venemous sidewinder snake that he found in a clump of bushes.





Check out the feet on this little transparent gecko! It can dig into the sand and breath while buried to escape the summer heat. Tommy followed a faint trackway that disappeared into the sand and dug this little guy up from down below. Awesome!




If people have heard anything at all about the animals in the Namib, it is probably about this beetle that climbs the crest of a dune, puts its butt in the air where fog droplets coalesce and run down its body into its mouth. Water without rain. Tommy collected about 6 of these along the way as they scurried about.



And then we saw a chemeleon! Fadcinating creatures that have independent eye sockets that can look with one over its back while the other looks forward. Who would have thought that something this large would live in the Namib?




And then we learned why Tommy was collecting all of those beetles.






He called them "chameleon hamburgers"






Ouch! Look at that tongue. It all happened so quick too. I am sure that this chameleon just waits by the side of the dunes for Tommy to bring his guests by every afternoon, knowing that lunch will be delivered by his favorite guide.

It's a about the dunes out here though - they are fantastic and they are a great modern analog for many ancient sandstones we see exposed in the American Southwest. In fact these coastal dunes are great analogs for the Schnebly Hill Formation in Sedona or the the Toroweap Formation in the Grand Canyon.


Here's the crest of a dune. The windward side in on the left with the wind ripples and the leeward side is the steep slope down to the right. These are cross-beds in formation!

The Namib Desert - Great Geology!

Our private jet trip has resumed with a four hour flight across the equator and on to the country of Namibia (the former South West Africa). With a population of less than 2 million but the size of Texas and Louisiana combined, it is the second least densely populated country on earth (after Mongolia). But to the geologist it is a paradise! Look at the pics.
This is the "moon landscape" as they call it in Nmibia, located near the coastal town of Swakopmund. It is a tortured land and banded gneiss, and only a few millimeters of rain per year. We toured this area in vans.

Here is a pretty good look at an outcrop of gneiss. This metamorphic rock formed about 600 million years ago when sediments were crushed and buried in a great mountain building event.

The gneiss rocks were probably at quite a depth (15 miles?) to be cooked this much. But below them, things were even hotter and some of those rocks were melted to become magma, which traveled upwards into the gneiss as magma. When these dikes were emplaced they were likely very tabular in shape but continued squeezing and crushing caused them to take this contorted shape. Imagine the amount of material eroded to bring all of this back to the surface today!

Here is further evidence of the extreme compression of the rocks. When the Kalahari craton collided with the Congo craton some 600 Ma, it created the Damara mobile belt, essentially the area between the two that was 'bruised" in the collision. Wow - it's a living planet!

This is the graphic I used on the jet to explain the concept of two continental fragments colliding to create a mobile belt. Notice the two cratons (light colored areas) and the collision zone between them. Swakopmund and the moon landscape are in the dark belt near the town of Walvis Bay.

Burkina Faso - Land of Honest People

Yep - that's what the name Burkino Faso means in one of the hundreds of languages spoken in this country, only the size of the state of Colorado. Some people might remember its former colonial name of Upper Volta. This clean and colorful place is also peaceful. We left on the U.S. inauguration day and there were visible signs that Africa is ready for an Obama administration. We saw elephants, colorful villages, vibrant markets and one great outcrop of sandstone. I'll let the pictures do the talking.


The Kazenga Reserve - envisioned and articulated by a Canadian living in Upper Volta in the 1970's is obviously a very forward thinking kind of preservation. We watched elephants bath and swim underwater in this large pond.






Check out these homes in the village of Tielebe near the southern border with Ghana. They are made of adobe bricks and painted by hand.







Here's an "alleyway" I wandered down while everyone in the village was at the dance.The pots are used to get water or to store millet.







These are the warrior dancers of Tiebele. Everyone looked quite healthy and well nourished. We found out that food resources are allocated to the men first, then the young boys, then women. Children are the last ones on the list - they do this so that only the strongest ones survive. Different for sure but not a bad strategy.



The villagers looking on at the dancers.









The mosque in the town of Bobo Dioulasso. The sticks in the walls are used to climb and repatch the adobe. How exotic. We got to go onto the roof of the mosque.









Entering the "Domeland" near the town of Banfora in the southwest of the country. We used the private jet to fly 130 miles away this day.


What a great outcrop of early Paleozoic sandstone. I saw both symetrical and asymetrical ripple marks in the deposit and it was coarse-grained. It looked a lot like the Cambrian deposits in western North America.


We rarely stop at geologic sites on these trips but everyone was fascinated by this place.


At home on the rocks!

More from Madeira

On Friday we took a jeep tour on the island to the west of Funchal. The island is quite steep and the driver used 4-wheel drive on some paved roads (not for the faint of heart but we have a few on the trip). We got this great view of the "Nun Valley" and the small settlement located in the valley floor. The sky was dark with clouds and the picture is not bright but the depth of the valley was impressive and clearly showed that this island has experienced many catastrophic landslides. Ancient soils (paleosols) are interbedded with the many lava flows, that in this view dip from left to right. It looked to me like the settlement in Nun Valley was built on the toes of some of these landslides. Yikes!











Here are a couple of views of Cabo Girao west of Funchal. This is claimed to be the second highest sea cliff in the world after one in Taiwan. (They obviously must mean sea cliffs that tourists drive to). It's hard to get some perspective on this but I guessed it to be at 2,500 ft. straight down. In the first pic you can barely see fields of crops along the shoreline. It was very impressive and again testifies to the power of waves and gravity to shape coastlines in the Atlantic Ocean.















And a volcanic cliff near our place at the Reid's Palace Hotel. Note how the visible flows of basalt rock dip towards the sea (away from the vents higher up on the island.













Reid's Palace Hotel, Madeira







Funchal towards the ocean






Funchal towards the interior


We'll be traveling now to the mainland of Africa and in the country of Burkina Faso. Internet service is an unknown for me so be patient as we will explore for 3 days. I'll post again when I can.

Madeira Island - A Very Volcanic Place

The first stop on this jet journey is the island of Madeira in the Atlantic Ocean. I've been here a few times before (by ship) but this is the first time by air. This is the view we had from our Explorer 757 jet as we descended along the east coast of the island. This is a 5 milion year old volcano that rises 4 miles above the deep floor of the Atlantic Ocean (3 miles of this are below sea level). The upper one mile is spectacular and is obviously dissected along the coast by waves that cut into the rocks.



A view of the small eastern settlement called Machico on Madeira.





And a view from the balcony of my hotel room at the Reid's Place towards the city of Funchal.

London Arrival - Cape to Cape by Private Jet

Ah London in January!






Where the temperature swings tremendously from 35 in the day to 34 at night. A one degree temperature swing! I don't think that could happen in Arizon even in the Ice Age. But why ponder the Ice Age when it is alive and well in England. Nevertheless, the Dorchester Hotel is a warm place to get out of the London fog and that is where our group assembled on January 14.

A few pictures are included.
The cheapest rooms (like mine) are only £395 (about $580 per night at the current exchange rate - this same room would have been $800 six months ago). The Royal Penthouse here is £17,000 per night (about $25,000 today or $34,000 six months ago). The amounts boggle the mind. There is no water shortage ever in England so I took a long, hot bath after the trans-Atlantic flight.













I'll write more from our first stop on Madeira Island in the Atlantic Ocean!

2008 - A Banner Year in Grand Canyon Origin Research

Although financial analysts may cringe when you mention the year 2008, Grand Canyon geologists can smile wide - it was a banner year for geologic research regarding how and when the canyon may have formed. No less than ten new research papers were generated by a host of workers, who saw evidence ranging from a canyon that suddenly "appeared" on the landscape 5 to 6 million years ago, to that which advocates for a canyon that was cut in the same location (but into Mesozoic-age rocks now completely gone) over 50 million years earlier. You've got to love a landform as world famous as this, that can stump the experts and whose age cannot be resolved any clearer than by a factor of 10! The list of these papers was compiled by my colleague Carol Hill of Albuquerque who had a big hand in stimulating so much discussion of the topic.

A highlight during 2008 was a segment aired by Ira Flatow on "Science Friday" in March. He interviewed Victor Polyak about his controversial paper that suggested a portion of the Grand Canyon may have been in existence 17 Ma. And the first caller in to the segment was none other than the "dean" of Grand Canyon-origin geologists Ivo Lucchitta. You would have thought that Victor had suggested the canyon was only 17 weeks old from the response by some! In my opinion, the publicity about his paper was a good thing: having geology and the Grand Canyon in the national spotlight! But as so often happens, scientists shot themselves in the foot when the rash of negative publicity squashed any further exposure (NPR's "All Things Considered" was 'considering' (pardon the pun) running a longer piece about the canyon, but certain negative publicity generated by the "young canyon police" assured that it disappeared from the airwaves.

Here's the list of papers:

(1) December, 2007: Karl Karlstrom et al published in GSA Bulletin: 40Ar/39Ar and field studies of Quaternary basalts in Grand Canyon and model for carving Grand Canyon: Quantifying the interaction of river incision and normal faulting across the western edge of the Colorado Plateau. They argue for late Neogene uplift to drive the final 900 meter incision of the canyon.

(2) February, 2008: Steve Cather et al published in GSA Bulletin: The Chuska erg: Paleogeomorphic and paleoclimatic implications of an Oligocene sand sea on the Colorado Plateau. They suggest that deep incision of the landscape began after late-Oligocene/early-Miocene epeirogenic uplift of the Plateau.

(3) March, 2008: Polyak, Hill, and Asmerom published a very controversial paper in Science: Age and Evolution of the Grand
Canyon Revealed by U-Pb Dating of Water Table–Type Speleothems. In this they argue that certain cave formations (speleothems) can document the progressive lowering of the water table which may document incision of the Grand Canyon. Some of the dates come out at around 17 million years ago. A battle of sorts ensues as "younger" canyon enthusiasts defend the sacrosact 6 million year date.

(4) March, 2008: Hill, Eberz, and Beucher publish in Geomorphology: A Karst Connection model for Grand Canyon, Arizona, USA. This paper explains how the integration of the modern Colorado River could have been accomplished by subsurface karst piping and eventual collapse in eastern Grand Canyon.

(5) March, 2008: Joel Pederson published in GSA Today: The mystery of the pre–Grand Canyon Colorado River—Results from the Muddy Creek Formation. Joel postulated how the paleo-upper Colorado River dissipated and infiltrated in the central-western Grand Canyon area, providing a potential source for Miocene spring and evaporite deposits in the Grand Wash trough, implying a groundwater-driven mechanism for capture of the upper drainage.

(6) April, 2008 Flowers et al published in GSA Bulletin: Unroofing, incision, and uplift history of the southwestern Colorado Plateau from apatite (U-Th)/He thermochronometry. An important new idea that suggests little post-Laramide uplift of the Plateau and that a "pre-Grand Canyon" was cut in Mesozoic-age rocks directly on top of todays canyon.

(7) May, 2008: Dick Young published a GSA Special Paper: Pre-Colorado River drainage in western Grand Canyon: Potential Influence on Miocene Stratigraphy in Grand Wash Trough. Showing his versatility in taking many sides of an argument, Young sees evidence for a "precursor western Grand Canyon that may have been filled with Hualapai Limestone.

(8) July, 2008: Hill and Ranney publish in Geomorphology: A proposed Laramide proto-Grand Canyon. Using data from the distribution of different gravel types both north and south of the modern canyon, they show that some kind of a barrier to gravel transport (a proto-canyon) may have been in existence during the Laramide.

(9) September, 2008: Two reviews of Polyak et al's March Science paper by Pederson et al, and by Pearthree et al: Comment on “Age and Evolution of the Grand Canyon Revealed by U-Pb Dating of Water Table–Type Speleothems. Polyak et al gave a rebuttal to these two reviews: Response to Comments on the “Age and Evolution of the Grand Canyon Revealed by U-Pb Dating of Water Table–Type Speleothems, defending their model and showing how most geologists don't really understand cave forming hydrology.

(10) November, 2008: Karlstrom et al paper in GSA Geology: Model for tectonically driven incision of the younger than 6 Ma Grand Canyon. Here they try to discount the Polyak et al idea.

(11) November, 2008: Ron Blakey and Wayne Ranney publish: Ancient Landscapes of the Colorado Plateau. Although not specifically related to the origin of the canyon, this book illuminates how the landscape of the entire Plateau came to be. It is a watershed work in that it can be used by professional geologists and it is useful to non-scientists as well.

This certainly was "The Grand Canyon Year". More papers are upcoming in 2009 so stay tuned to the topic and this blog! Right now I am off to Africa and South America on a lecturing trip. Watch for the updates and photos.