Except as noted, all images courtesy of Professor Burchfiel.
We do our field work in the southwest United States in January. It is true that there is snow in the high mountains in the desert at that time but we will not work that high. We try to work in snow-free regions. There is a lot of walking. As the regions we are mapping are often not accessible by car, we will walk in and out each day so it is important to be in good shape.
This is an image of the camp set-up. There is a cook tent in the background. Inside are stoves, tables, food storage and lanterns for the evenings. We wash our own dishes and you can see them drying on the table. There is also a cooler for our veggies and drinks. As we are at a remote location in the desert, water is scarce. The red water cooler is for drinking during the day, but to be conserved when washing. There will be three showers during IAP or about once a week or 10 days. There will be mapping groups that will also have roles in the kitchen. These will alternate day-to-day, but each group will have responsibilities to help in food preparation and in washing kitchen dishes.
This is the map tent where we store the computers and the mapping equipment. It is where we will eat if the weather is bad but most of the time we will use this tent for doing the digital mapping work at night. We have generators and batteries for electricity but will use gas lanterns for light. These tents are high quality arctic tents and have served us well. We purchased them with gracious support from the Kaplan Foundation. There is a lot of wind in the desert, especially at night and, our old tents were knocked over frequently.
We will often have discussions in the morning that will cover what we are doing each day in the field. Instructors or mapping teams will let the others know how their work is progressing and what to think about during the day.
From the low angle of the shadows you can see we start early in the day. Those groups responsible for breakfast preparation start a half hour early. We also make our lunches during breakfast time. This is your chow for the day and is very important to make a good lunch. The saying goes, “a geologist is never far from his/her lunch.” When doing field work it is never a good idea to leave your food or pack behind as you might intend to just run up quickly to one outcrop, but in the end you may end up getting excited and follow a feature half way across the field area before you realize it is time for lunch and your food is way back over there.
These are the old tents. Though large they got knocked over frequently in then nightly winds. We have a set of 4x4 field vehicles that we use for moving students between their daily field mapping areas and the camp.
Here is another morning camp scene. You can see the coolers circled as benches and peanut butter still out and on the table. The water jug down to the left of the cook tent is how we keep ourselves supplied. You will need to have adequate water bottles for during the day wile you are mapping.
Here are our tent-sites spread across the desert at one camp. Tents MUST be strong and wind-proof and well staked down. Dome-style tents that are low to the ground are the best. One year, during the day, a gust of wind pulled one students tent out from under its fly, and tumbled across the desert never to be found. We searched miles down wind and never found it. The sleeping bag was inside as well!
Other instructors will often talk about different geologic topics: geomorphology, surface processes, mineralogy, tectonics, structure, geochemistry, etc… These will help guide your observations and work in the field.
We will stay together as one big group on the first day. We will introduce you to the regional geology and the rocks that we will be working in. This will be your only introduction to the field area. The rest of the time you will map in independent groups. Instructors will rotate among the groups, but it will be ultimately up to you to figure out what is going on. The best way to learn field geology is just to get out there and do it.
This is another image of a field camp. Again note the good strong dome tents. This may be an image from one of the Environmental Field camps.
Here you see a party of two mapping together, collecting data and discussing it.
In this dark image you can see a group of geologists examining an outcrop…When we go into the field we try to go to an area that has not been mapped in much detail before. Some regions in the west have been mapped over and over again and trails follow the contacts and that takes all the fun out of discovering the geology. Plus, doing work in a new area means making a contribution to our geologic understanding of the southwest. This contributes to science. This also means that the instructors are just as unfamiliar with the field area as the students are and it gives the students and opportunity to observe how a geologist really goes about doing their work. It keeps the instructors curious and on their toes as well. Geology is not always straight-forward and there will be times when we are all confused together and we will have to find the best explanation we can.
When the weather gets bad (snowed-out or blow-out), we often go on field trips. This is one to Death Valley.
This is another image from that Death Valley side-trip. These trips build on your regional understanding.
Here is an aerial view of the tents and camp. Again, you can see the good dome tents in the background.
This is why we do work in the desert! Great exposure! In New England there are trees and soils and brush that obscure 80% of the ground. In the desert there is ~100% exposure. Structure and rocks are well exposed and visible to be mapped.
For all the hard work we do during the day, there are beautiful evenings that reward us at the end of the day. This image is of the moon at sunset.
Some Final Considerations: (Lectured with out slides)----------There are no weather reports where we will be. We deal with the weather we are given.-------We use digital mapping tools to expedite the map-making process. Many maps have been made in the past, but the process of getting those maps to publishable form is to cumbersome, so many maps are never completed for others to see. We hope to overcome that with these digital tools. The map we make will be in publication-ready form at the end of the semester. Using digital tools in the field also allows us to have multiple datasets available to us at the outcrop including Landsat and other remotely sensed data.--------At the end of each day, we will be digitizing our mapping results, adding both our point data and our line data into the GIS. This way, each morning, we can print out a fresh map, summarizing all the other group’s work which helps us find holes and focus areas on the map.------------The course layout: Dr. Burchfield will lecture the first half of the course about the geology of the southwest US. In the latter part of the semester, the lectures will focus on our specific field region. We will work mostly out of the GSA Decade of North American Geology (DNAG) which summarizes the tectonics of the western US.
