Yesterday was a bit of a geology field trip day. I spent time in the various units of the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument in mid-Oregon and drove through a barren black lava field up near Mount Washington.
The John Day Fossil Beds are a geologically significant area due to the many layers of rock exposed through erosion that document a 30 million year period in the planets's evolution. The place is crawling with fossils and paleontologists as a result. The coloured layers are caused by different minerals in the volcanic ash that formed them and because of the dry climate have remained essentially unchanged for multi-millions of years.
After standing next to 3000 year old redwoods and feeling small, imagine standing next to a set of rock formations over 30 million years old...
Earlier in the day I drove up over the McKenzie-Santiam pass, which wound it's way up out of a rainy Willamette and Deschutes forest to a scene straight from Mordor - blackened lava chunks as far as the eye can see from cooled and cracked lava flows that devastated the area thousands of years ago. Very spooky.
No comments:
Post a Comment