Geoscience Education in the Mountain State: CATS Applied Geology Telecourse, Spring 2000, Show 1 Transcript

CATS Telecourse
Applied Geology
January 24, 2000

Dr. Bob: Greetings! Here we are again live from the studios at WVU with Deb Hemler, Bob Behling here. Deb, there's new things afoot, we've got kind of a variety show here of this semester. Applications of Geology. A lot more specifically for the classroom. The types of things that the folks out there are likely to have seen and worked with. Notice that I have new braces on and I am ready for the new year. What I'm ready to do, of course, is get out in the field. It's a great day for a field trip and start bleaching these out.

What we want to do first is to go over the nuts and bolts of what we're up to this semester both for the regular shows and for the adjuncts. We realize that not too many of you are looking are looking live as we speak. It's an awkward time of the day perhaps for you but we will have enough methods for you to get this information especially since we meet every other week in this format and then we intersperse adjunct activities in between. Perhaps what I should do first is just look to the overhead and do an outline to show you where we're headed today.

First the general introduction to the course. Then we will identify why we're using National Parks and monuments as a feature for the first two weeks. Later we will talk about West Virginia State Parks, so we're only going to generally introduce that today. Introduce an additional factor, the environmental case studies in West Virginia and why we want to build on that. We will work towards a break period. There will be a short break in between and then after that break we come back and we will look at some specific national parks. First talk about the history of national parks and then talk about the geology of specific ones. You see we have quite a list in the menu ahead of us. We will, for some of them, talk in very general terms and we will pick up additional information as we go through the adjunct. We want to spend some time with national parks in the classroom and some thoughts regarding that. We'll end up in the last portion there and then next week we're going to do an adjunct where Dr. Jack Renton and I will be here to put together a two hour presentation on volcanoes because there are volcanoes and there are volcanoes. We'll see that in the national parks there is a lot of difference.

Let's get back to the introduction. Deb, you've got all kinds of things there.

Dr. Deb: Tom always gives me this long list of things I have to do the first show. So we'll get this one over and done with. First of all we'd like to remind you that the sponsors for this program are the CATS, the Coordinated and Thematics grant out of the State Dept. of Education, WVU Geology Department, WVU's Education Dept. and the West Virginia Geological and Economic Survey. It's a combined effort of those organizations to put this show on for you each semester.

Tom would like me to remind you about the prerequisites for the course. He mentioned these earlier. If you are taking the course for 3 credits or you are taking the course just for professional development, there's essentially no prerequisite required except that you have to understand that we are assuming some prior knowledge and that you have experienced one of the geology telecourses before. If we move a little quickly you're going to have to do some background work. If you're taking the class for 4 credits you must have had the Environmental Geology course last semester. When you're signing up for the credit load for this semester make sure you keep those prerequisites in mind. The pretest that you have in front of you, you need to complete before we really get underway. If at the break you haven't taken that yet, please go ahead and do that. Take the pretest before watching the rest of this video also because the pretest is important for us to determine where you're base line knowledge is and where you come or go during the course of the semester. We use that as an evaluation for NSF. Make sure you put the last four digits of your social security number on that. This is not graded. It will not reflect a grade for this course in any way shape or form. The only thing we use it for is evaluation but it's very important for us that you do this evaluation. As a matter of fact, there's a threat here, from Tom. It says, You could have your grade withheld if you don't do your pre and post tests. Make sure you get those finished. You need to mail those to Tom. Facilitators, do not mail it to anybody but Tom. If your taking this by yourself at an unfacilitated site, please make sure you send that to Tom Repine directly. The registration forms also need to be sent to Tom Repine. There is a $10.00 fee if you are not currently registered as a WVU student. This is called a professional development fee and it keeps you from having to enroll at WVU but it allows you to enroll for this class. Be aware of that if you have not enrolled in a class within the last year as a student of WVU that you will required to pay that $10.00 fee. Our registration will stay open until February 8^th. If you have some friends or colleagues out there that are interested in taking this course they have until February 8^th to do that. In terms of credit, we need a check from you. If you are taking this for 3 credits you need to make out a check for $99.00, again if y you have not been enrolled as a student you need to add that $10.00 for a total of $109.00. If you're taking it for 4 credits, $33.00 per credit, so for 4 credits you have to make out the check for $132.00, again if you have to tack on that $10.00 fee then it would be $142.00. You make your checks payable to West Virginia University. If you are using a credit card, please make sure that your credit card number is correct. Make sure that you have the expiration date listed there on the form and also make sure that you have checked the type of card that you are using to make this payment with. The course information, the registration forms generally have this information written into them, but if you don't have this information, the CRN number 15292, the subject is geology, the course number is 290. Let me reminder you that a 200 level course can be used towards the master's program. There's a limited number but this one can apply. The section is 7CA. The credit is whether your doing it for 3 or 4. Grade option is 2. You will take this for a letter grade. If you are taking this simply for professional development or your just watching it for your own benefit you do not have to register for this course but we do require you to take the pre and post test. That registers you for the class as a participant so that we know whether or not we have suitable numbers out there to run the course. Please take that pre/post test even if you are not registering for this class for credit.

If you need to contact us here is Tom Repine's off air address. It's easier to reach Tom, Bob and I are never at our desk. You can reach him at 1-800-WVGEOLOgy. Please mail your registration forms and your pretest to: West Virginia Geological and Economic Survey, P.O. Box 879, Morgantown, WV 26507. If you have to e-mail Tom for any reason that would be at repine@geosrv.wvnet.edu. That's probably the most efficient way of reaching him. If you need to contact us on air, you want to check in and let us know you're there, how many people are at your site, the phone bridge is now open. That's 1-800-233-3638, once you get on the pass code is 2287. Feel free to give us a call and let us know you're out there. If there are facilitators out there at the sites it would be nice if you could call in and give Tom a head count during the course of the program. I think that's just about everything that Tom had.

Dr. Bob: When will we be planning on getting that syllabus up?

Dr. Deb: It's posted on the web site, www.wvgs.wvnet.edu you'll find this home page, click on geoscience education and scroll down to Spring 2000 course syllabus with a big New sign next to it. Many people have received the course syllabus. Tom did a mass mailing and Phyllis did a mass mailing. Some of you got blank envelopes and some got two in their envelopes. If you did receive an empty envelope we're almost positive you should have gotten a spring semester syllabus. The syllabus in on the web site and you can refer to that at any time.

Dr. Bob: Have we told them what we're going to do and questions and that sort of thing?

Dr. Deb: Not yet. The access to the transcripts and the quizzes and all of the previous transcripts from all the other courses are available on the web site. If you have to do some background checking or you would like a little bit more information on rocks and minerals.

Dr. Bob: In this particular course I'm more interested in aspects of quizzes and practical application and working together with folks. Personally I don't anticipate a test per say at all. I'd rather do some quizzes on components. You'll not see the first quiz until we do all this national park activity. If you think of this as a test it will not be multiple choice questions in that context. It will be applications of what we have talked about, about the different volcanoes or the different national parks. Some compare and contrast. I'd rather have you talk to each other about a compare and contrast type situation and then go away and write a short paragraph or create a cartoon and share that with me with regards to the evaluations component of the course itself. With respect to using these materials and the materials we lead you to in the classroom, do you see some activities that you would like to have the participants do?

Dr. Deb: Yeah. There are numerous activities that we can get involved in with the national parks in particular and the issues that we are going to be addressing during the course of the semester. We'll bring those up. In addition to the quizzes we'll also require you to read a book and we'll put that reading list on the web site as well. We're developing that and we should have that up fairly soon. What we're trying to do is get you into the literature to take a look at environmental geology type text of some form, a book, and then report back to us on how you can use that in your classroom. Kind of a critique of the manuscript and then an application or two.

Dr. Bob: We have a video required of some of the folks also.

Dr. Deb: We're requiring that you watch "A Civil Action." At some point during the course of the semester, one of the last quizzes we'll have a question on that. It's out in the rental video stores right now. It's available. We'd like you to give that a look and take a look at the environmental implications that are covered in that.

Dr. Bob: We will spend some time in the next half hour introducing one or two books I have before me. A stack of books that I deem reasonable to fulfil the requirement for reading. There's a tremendous variety and background. In some ways I find in the western United States to appreciate what some of the first Europeans in the area saw or the earlier explorers or trappers or what ever their particular life was. What they saw and how the changes have been brought about by human interactions. We will be interjecting that constantly that a reasonable question can be asked in every case. Have we been good steward over these truly spectacular areas on a national scale and even in our own state when we talk about the state parks. We will work in that context to get that information.

I'd like to go back to the overhead one more time and repeat something. From time to time you may want to get into the web site and there's just a slight variation that sometimes gets confusing. To get into the web site you just put wvgs, even though you will see in other places that there's a similar phrase, acronym. For the web site it's just West Virginia Geological Survey is what that stands for. They do not use their full state recognized title. That's where you can trip up sometimes. You want WVGS. Bookmark that or whatever you need to do to get in. We'll be happy, Deb and I, to give you our e-mail addresses also. It's just that the site at the survey has folks directly knowledgeable of what we're up to and if Tom happens to be away from the desk you get far better service for your information. In the web sites that's a good way to get information. For example, my e-mail address, rbehling@wvu.edu.. What is your's Deb?

Dr. Deb: dhemler@wvu.edu.

Dr. Bob: Either of these and I now can acknowledge that I am now caught up again, I'm still trying to clear November. Last semester I nearly had to work with 700 students in a variety of capacities and I swear that each and every one wanted to know how am I doing? Between the week of Thanksgiving and Christmas. Every single one contacted me once or twice on e-mail. I had an arms length of things to work through. I'm now caught and you were always caught up.

Dr. Deb: I'm always caught up. I live on that machine.

Dr. Bob: We will get back to you immediately and you already have Tom's. Alright, now, national parks.

National parks, we'll talk a specific bit about history after the break. National parks by and large have been established because of spectacular geology. Because of that, even though there are limitations, you are not expected to run off to a national park and pick up one of every type of rock. The old statement, take only pictures, leave only footprints. I think is great but it doesn't always work that way. We will try to share with you how you can get auxiliary materials. Tom doesn't know it yet but I'm going to, when we talk about some types of things we're going to see what we can get you in rocks that are typical but perhaps not specifically from that national park. For example, we will share with you many ways in which you can get rocks and not so much minerals, mostly rocks. If you need volcanic basalt you can go to the local store that sells rock for your grill and for the most part it's volcanic basalt, quite often quarried right out of Flagstaff, Arizona. Just a hop, skip, and jump away from the Grand Canyon and a lot of the other volcanoes just north of Flagstaff and all kinds of things. You can get decorative stone, marble for example. You can get river rock and get a variety of rock. There are many ways that we'll give you hints as how you can build your own rock collection at a very reasonable cost. Many times going to some of these stores that sell and say hey, a bag got ripped over there and there's stones lying around, do you mind if I pick them up, I'll use them in class and you'll get them most likely free. I've done that many times. Don't go over and rip the bag and then say, Hey! We did not suggest that that is an operative procedure.

We'll also say that there are many national monuments. Throughout the history of the naming of these sites there have been some that have been taken off of maps because the mere identification of them had lured fossil hunters. There's an enormous problem nationwide of unscrupulous dealers aided by the internet. I don't know if you noticed but just last week it came up that their trying to sell the largest dinosaur skull, Tyrannosaur Rex, and I think their doing bidding on the web site and they were talking about starting at 6 million dollars. When that type of dollar figure starts to pop up in this type of sales promotion and gimmick that is a signal that fossils out there on public land, your land and my land, are at great risk. All types of spectacular specimens too of rocks and minerals are at risk. There have been many times where sites have been taken off of the list and just not identified on the maps. Especially with fossils. Petrified Forest is another unique situation where they have had a great difficult time protection all the materials.

Dr. Deb: The Crystal Trail doesn't have any crystals on it any more.

Dr. Bob: In the history, the creation of Mammoth Cave National Park just over 50 years ago started out as a situation where for almost 50 years prior to that there had been just uncontrolled spelunking. It's no wonder that you see very little drip stone left any more. It was all taken in the early part of the 1800s.

Now, West Virginia State Parks. There are quite a few really spectacular places and not only scenic places but again, based on geology. Seneca Rocks, there are some in the New River Gorge area, Bluestone and other areas. Some parks look rather, as compared to the western parks, look rather quite. They don't have great exposures of rocks or spectacular deep gorges but still we'll take you on a spin around West Virginia and to some of the parks that you probably visited or heard of before. How many of you out there have been to Beartown? It is a fantastic little park. It's under the auspices and watched over by the same ranger, it's at Droop Mountain State Park. It's just down the road from Droop Mountain near Lewisburg and it's a spectacular park and it has a wealth of geologic information there. But very, very few people go to visit that. We will spend some time looking at the West Virginia state parks also. Then building on last semesters course when we've talked about environmental earth science. One of the aspects of that course was for individuals to write a paper on a local example of an environmental problem. From that we have culled about half a dozen and we will as time permits do detailed work on some of those. Everything from mass movement phenomena to contamination of ground water, to solid waste disposal. Marvelous, marvelous projects came in from all over the state. We had a significant number of projects to review last semester in that Environmental Earth Science and we're going to see some of the really great ones that reflect how you can use it in your own classroom because it's happening right there in your community. If you don't happen to have something going on immediately you can still use it, it's going on in West Virginia. I would hope that somehow we can perhaps get some interaction going on between schools, students at schools so that they can talk to someone about what's going on, even in real time if, unfortunately floods should occur this coming spring, or other types of environmental events, landslides or collapse as a result of subsidence features through mining or as a result of solution weathering. We will try to work with that and build on those types of things. Now, what I'd like to do for the rest of the time, we've got all these books. You brought some of the books, and some of your materials and I'd like to do that introduction right now.

Dr. Deb: Ok.

Dr. Bob: It's a bit of a mixture, so don't anticipate that there's going to be a steady flow. What it is, is the smaller books are on top and the bigger books are on the bottom. We'll try to keep it in some sort of a pattern.

First of all, there's a reading assignment, right? Do you want to mention again. What books did you suggest?

Dr. Deb: I was looking at John McFee's books. I thought that they would be beneficial. Since we are requiring the move, "A Civil Action" I don't necessarily think that they should read the book although if you want to after you've watched the video it might be interesting to see what's left out. I actually have not seen the video yet so I'm curious to see how close they are to the book. Anything by Edward Abbey, A Desert Solitaire, would be an excellent book to read as well.

Dr. Bob: Edward Abbey has been a prolific writer. He has since deceased but a prolific writer on the American West. Desert Solitaire is a classic. Some of his are factual based and then he writes fiction too. Would you approve of the Monkey Wrench Gang.

Dr. Deb: The Monkey Wrench Gang is a really interesting perspective on the western dams, so I would say that was fair game.

Dr. Bob: It's probably not a book that you would read in class to the students. It's more for adult enjoyment. Totally fiction and yet it has every once in a while the bite to it that suggests, hey, we could do this.

Dr. Deb: You start looking at billboards with a new interesting gleam in your eye.

Dr. Bob: Let me share some of the books that I brought along. We will be sending you, once we get this settled as to enrollment. You won't have to copy this down, just look at the covers of the books and get an idea of they types of things that I find to be of very great interest. For example, this Pulitzer Prize winning author, Wallace Stegner. He has written some marvelous prose with regards to the western United States even though he was born and raised in the east he became a spokesperson. This book is really interesting. It's Beyond the Hundredth Meridian. It's about John Wesley Powell. The second opening of the west by that it's after the mountain men. If you wanted to read a book, I guess I found in my early years, reading Bernard De Votel's (sp) Across the Wide Missouri was an excellent book to open my eyes as to what the mountain men saw in the early 1800s as Europeans came into that territory. This is an excellent book and one of our teachers from last year gave us another book that she had found at a book fair and that one is the Wild Colorado, the true adventures of Fred Delanball (sp). He was age 17 and he was on the second Powell Expedition into the Grand Canyon by the author, Richard Maurer (sp). We'll get that on the list too. The book was fascinating as I paged through it on one of our field trips. It was another good book. The other books I have are going to relate to the national parks.

Dr. Deb: The other one I wanted to mention was the Johnstown Flood. It was an excellent book that you might consider reading as well by David McColloch.

Dr. Bob: McColloch, the historian on PBS. Marvelous story that he put together regarding the Johnstown flood. Another book or two that I put on reflected one of our last topics in this course will be a discussion of handling of nuclear waste. I have put together two rather obscure books that are a bit more difficult to find but both of them are really interesting. One is Forever More. Sort of an expose piece from about 10 years ago with regards to the policies and procedures and what was going on in Washington and elsewhere around the country for the disposal of high level nuclear waste and low level nuclear waste. Another book that I recommend although it's a bit more technical, isn't for everyone in this course, speaks to the issue of Los Alamos and plutonium into the Rio Grande River and mixed into the sediments. The aftermath in many cases of things we have done in the 1930s, in building dams in the American west and then in the 1940s as we engaged in a war effort and specifically the construction of the nuclear weaponry and the atomic bomb. There are many things we have lived with as a legacy that we'll talk about in here.

Let's now talk about a few books of the many, many books available with respect to national parks. Where we will be getting a good deal of information from. One of the books that both of us have in our own personal library, Geology of National Parks. Deb, how did you find that book with respect to general information, useable information?

Dr. Deb: It's extremely readable. You don't really have to have any prior knowledge about geology to understand it. They write it very clearly for the lay person. Often you get into these books and you find that unless you have a bachelor's degree in geology you really get lost after about the third or fourth paragraph. That's not the case with this book. If there were to be a textbook for this class I would highly recommend something like this. Since we only are covering the national parks for two of the broadcasts it was hardly fair to buy this book. If you do visit national parks and you are interested in the geology of the national parks when you visit, I recommend that you purchase this book at some point through the bookstore or somewhere like Amazon.com.

Dr. Bob: We will present the title and the author's but most important the ISBN number. Once you have that number any bookstore can order it for you. We'll try to give you some indication, if we can, of a current price. Some of these books we've had in our libraries for awhile. I'd also point out that there's another book, a bit more advanced, but it's interesting. Geology in America's National Park Areas by Brooks Elwood. He's an old ranger. Interesting book because he has spent his life as a national park ranger therefore had the unique opportunity to work at some of these parks and indulge in all of the activities regarding the history of the national park system. It's an interesting little book and the first chapter alone is a wealth of information. For example, did you know the ranger hats are an outgrowth of the days when they decided that somebody had to watch over this new system that was developing so they gave it to the U.S. Army. The U.S. Army at that time had those campaign hats and it became standard issue for the rangers and it has become the trademark of the rangers even though the Army has long since gone to other head gear.

Realize too that there are a wealth of books that relate to the popularity of national parks, coffee table books. For example, big format, America's National Parks, this is a gallery book, Ellen Winslow is the author. Throughout the years, the national parks have attracted some of the best photographers in the nation and you'll see great things. Perhaps you're familiar too with Arizona Highways as having incredible color photographs to work from.

Many times we go with our families to national parks. That becomes a vacation for so many of us and we can create a great deal of geologic information along with the family enjoying the bears and the scenery and a geyser here and there and that sort of thing. National Geographic puts together their travel packages and so often they've incorporated trips to the national parks. You have an additional one.

Dr. Deb: There's one other one on the geology and they have at least four of these, this one happens to focus on the Colorado Plateau region and the Grand Canyon. They have them concentrated in areas so you can focus on specific areas. They're black and white with some color inserts in the middle but it's a nice compendium of the geology. It's clearly written for the lay person as well as references to the biology of the area although the focus is geology.

Dr. Bob: We'll also give you again information of all of these plus the ISBN numbers. This last summer we worked with Marion County as they use some of their Eisenhower dollars for a field trip. We went to Alberta Canada and we hunted dinosaurs one day and we walked on the Afabaskon (sp) glacier part of the Columbia ice fields and we found a tremendous resource book up there, a handbook of the Rockies that is absolutely spectacular. That's one thing you'll find, perhaps for you and I, all of us, when we first get to a national park one thing that I always urge you to do is go into the park book store and rummage through. You'll find that there are a wealth of books but usually only one or two are going to really be something that while you're there for a few days, maybe a week, that you're really going to be able to use practically. Find out what books are available, make a choice of a book or two. There will also be at a number of parks the specific geologic map for the park. That may be something that you want to work with. It's something I look at. It's not necessarily something that is best use for you for example.

Dr. Deb: It's been amazing all these years they virtually ignored the geology of most of these parks and have concentrated on the biology of them. They've really put a lot of money and effort in the naturalists to know the species and the biomes that are there. Very rarely did I hear much about the geology and it's so nice to see more and more of the geology being put out for the public to understand since most of these parks are focused on the geology. That's why their there.

Dr. Bob: You'd go to Yellowstone 30 years ago and they talk about the buffalo and the Caribou and wintering over in the geyser basin and Old Faithful. Now you'll find little publications with cross sections. You'll see what the structures look like and how they are interpreted and it they are really good precise information. It's not just drawings and cartoons. It's good geology based on the research on the number of geologist's going through the area.

Another possibility of course is always look to the web sites. Deb if you would share with us what is available. This is on the state survey...

Dr. Deb: We're going to put a link from the State survey's web page to this park geology tour of the national parks so you don't have to copy this web site down. Go to the web site at the survey and click on this link. The parks are categorized by the geologic phenomenon that's present at the park. Today we're going to be focusing on parks that specifically have volcanoes. You will see a list of parks and national monuments that you can then go to. Some have a teacher feature available, this one does not. This is our text book for the next two broadcasts. They list all of the sites that we will be talking about.

Dr. Bob: I noticed one of the sites talked about photos. These days with the dumping onto inexpensive printers you can get some very nice photographs pulled off the web sites.

Dr. Deb: Please visit this web site. I know some of you think it's just another web site. You don't have a textbook for this course so if you want a valuable resource and you haven't obtained a copy of the Geology of the National Parks by all means visit this site.

Dr. Bob: The last item before the break, I'd like to point out that taking time to talk about some news items that relate specifically to this course will be a component so I urge you to look through the newspapers. I usually check two or three newspapers everyday. I use the Pittsburgh Press, USA Today, then on weekends I pick up the Washington Post and I try to maintain an awareness of all types of environmental things. In this course the only ones of the news events that I will share with you will be those new events that relates specifically to what we're talking about. As a result, here are two articles, January 12^th, you may have been aware of the fact, that four areas were named by President Clinton under the Antiquities Act of 1906. National parks can only be designated by Congress, but in 1906 it was determined by, in it's wisdom, the pressures on the southwestern United States, Native American sites, the Ancients, the Hohokem, the Anassazi sites of petroglyphs and so forth were just being decimated. It was determined by Congress that we needed to establish some sort of a procedure that allowed the President to preserve an area. That was created as the 1906 Antiquities Act. President Clinton enacted this, this past 10 days ago by four areas. Two in California and two in Arizona. One in Arizona most interesting to us is the northern part of the Grand Canyon. A tremendous acreage that is now included in preservation. It can still be used, it's not a national park, it can still be used for some things, recreation purposes especially. Mining is shut out, and mining roads. Clinton also used this about a year and a half, two years ago for what was called the Grand Staircase in Utah. It was a spectacular, huge area. The mining interests were real unhappy. This area north and west of the Grand Canyon, the ranchers that had been up there. In some cases for more than several generations, their ancestors were some of the first to come in an settle that area, their way of life may be dramatically affected now because the rangeland is perhaps not going to be open to them to the extent that it was before. Notwithstanding the fact that most of that rangeland was really cheap and it was our rangeland, taxpayer's rangeland, and that those folks for generations had grazed cattle on grasses that belong to the entire country. This was out of one article in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette titled, The Grand Canyon Grows Grander and on the same day with a few different pictures the USA Today, January 12^th had a better view of the maps. They love their graphics. This entire cross hatched was added adjacent to the Grand Canyon National Park and added 1,500 sq. miles under the Antiquities Act.

Another article to share with you is a much large article, I've had to reduce just to show you part of the 4 credit activity will be to go on a field trip and look at Lake Erie. This was a science special article in the Sunday newspaper, January 16^th of the Pittsburgh Post Gazette and this graphic was fascinating too. The author had been the science editor and now his title is special feature writer, looked at 1969 and the factories and the sewerage running off into Lake Erie suffocating the fish because of the high biological demand. Industrial pollution dumped right into the lake, mercury tainted fish. I was a little surprised that he didn't also mention that prior to that the use of phosphate rich detergents had just about doomed Lake Erie. They were really bad. But mercury, phosphates and now in 1999 the water's clear but air pollution is a problem with rainfall bringing down acid rain. Zebra mussels brought in after the opening of the St Lawrence seaway project, then we brought in a tremendous variety of exotic species. The Zebra mussels is costing American's now and Canadians, millions and millions and millions of dollars a year as part of these exotic species. PCB's in the sediment as well as heavy metals, the industrial waste. There are sediments that are on the bottom of these lakes and Lake Erie is often looked at because it is the shallowest of the Great Lakes by far. Think of this, of exotic species, more then 140 exotic species, non-indigenious, they weren't there when Native American's plied those waters, have been entered into the Great Lakes. Two thirds of them have entered since 1959 when the St. Lawrence seaway project opened. Another news article just two or three days ago related to the fact that Vermont as well as the Fish and Wildlife Service was holding public hearings because they wanted to bring back chemicals to try to get at the sea lampreys again. The lamprey eels breeding up in the streams in Vermont and coming back into Lake Champlain. That was a enormous problem with the 60s because it effectively wiped out the commercial catch of lake trout in the Great Lakes. It led to the reintroduction of different forms, the Chinook salmon, as a replacement. Lamprey eels attach themselves behind the gills of these beautiful fish, the lake trout and then they just literally suck the life out of them. The lamprey eels are not indigenious to the lakes but as a result of the St. Lawrence Canal. They're not actually eels but we call them eels.

Dr. Deb: The Wellon Canal was another reason the lamprey's got in it's not just the Erie Canal. There's an interesting article in February's issue of the Science Teacher. If you don't get the Science Teacher find somebody who does. There's a nice article on defending ecology that familiarizing students with exotic species and it mentions the Kudzu vine introduced by the Army Corps of Engineers and the Soil Conservation Service to provide a quick ground cover. The gypsy moth which happened to escape from a Boston laboratory in 1860 which is now is succeeding defoliating much of the oak trees in the east and of course the sea lamprey. It talks about getting students involved and realizing it doesn't always have to be a mistake of labs. That things like bait buckets and blowing the ballast of a ship in the Great Lakes is what introduced the larvae of the Zebra mussels into the Great Lakes. Things like international trade got the chestnut blight over here was transported via Europe in some shipment of goods and so many of the blights that we suffer on our trees were Asian in origin or European in origin that came over here in shipments. Pet releases, piranha's in Florida.

Dr. Bob: I just saw an article that in Botswana and Malowie (sp) the international community has tried to protect alligators and crocodiles and now in Botswana and Malowie apparently at least two people per day who are eaten by crocodiles. That's just the ones that they know about and they suspect that there are many more people. It's food, someone too close to the river banks. In the past they had culled the herds, if you will, so there are those types of problems.

I think we've come to break time. Let's take a quick break here. We'll reorganize, we've got some things to show you and we're going to move through some of those national parks that we had identified earlier. We may not get through the entire list today and that's ok. We will take our time until we feel comfortable and move ahead. Stay tuned, we'll be right back.

BREAK

Dr. Bob: Do you know the date when Congress authorized the first national park? The year is before Custer and Little Big Horn. That may come as a surprise. 1872 and which was the first national park? Yellowstone. It had been viewed by a surveyor. Many stories had come out from trappers in the early 1800s and finally a surveyor, General Henry Washburn, took a group out and said these are really tall tails. The early trappers were well known for enhancing stories.

Dr. Deb: Actually it was a fellow from the Lewis & Clark expedition that came back with the stories.

Dr. Bob: That's right. They just thought it couldn't be possible. It sounded too bizarre to think of all these wild animals, geysers, deep river gorges, beautiful lakes. They went there and it was just that. There is a video, a reenactment of that, in the Nova series. We'll get that reference to you. It's a fascinating story. Then, of course, as we move through the history of the national parks, the number of national, Congress has to designate it. Here's another interesting question. Was there ever a national park that lost it's status? The answer is yes. It lost it's status because it was named after a member of Congress. It was sort of one these home cooking deals and in it's wisdom, Congress and the scientists and the rangers said this doesn't really qualify so they withdrew the national park status and renamed it a recreation area, the Chickasaw (sp) in Nebraska. The Chickasaw Recreation Area. It lost it's status. There are also a great number of national monuments. Some of the monuments are beautiful little sites because it features one geologic feature. A single volcano or a volcano type or fossils, the John Day Fossil Beds or a variety of things that's not up to the status of the national parks. There's a variety of other titles and of course included in this are battlefields, historic sites for other reasons, so that the National Park Service is a broad perspective. In West Virginia there's very, very interesting interaction between the local people trying to coexist with the National Park Service. Those of you who might live in and around Harpers Ferry know that this isn't always a congenial arms linked sequence of events. The local plans and economic development sometimes run headlong into the National Park Service activities. In that case, historical park. The National Park Service has tried to expand and we applaud that, we are generally are after the expansion and that sort of thing.

The basic information of the National Park Service and the original director came under the Secretary of the Interior and the first director of the National Park Service came from an industrialists background. It's one of those twists of fate because he obtained great wealth and therefore curried political favor by mining balkzite in the Death Valley. As he did that and made his fortune, he realized that there needed to be some areas preserved and needed to be watched out after. That was well after 1870 and there already were some national parks. That's a quick overview of the National Park Service and why we get into this type of topic.

Now, I have before me some rocks. This is what we're going to do. We do not have the text for the course. If I ask you some questions, as I will next week, I'll pose the first questions next week. What you will be forced to do to answer is go to the web site and read it off the web site for the different national parks and you can access it through the WVGS web site. Additionally, I will put together a list of specific rocks and we're certainly going to do volcanics. We will have some number, 6 or 8 different volcanics and all of those enrolled in the course will get a sample of each. We will buy them in bulk, repackage them and distribute them to you. I have before me two types. This one, does that look like a nerf football? The densities a little bit different. It's pretty well aerodynamically formed isn't it? It was airborne and this is a volcanic bomb. Now, the specific location, this happens to be from Antarctica. I was doing work in Antarctica and we were looking at these little vents that came up perhaps once and then they were gone. You can see that little dark spot is a gas hole that this has little holes where the gases were trapped. It's not like viscicular (sp) basalt which has many holes. The types of rock that I'm going to get for you, basalt, scoria, pumice, obsidian, rhyolite. They'll be easily a half dozen different types of volcanic rock so that you can work with your students in groups and then they can rotate the different types of rocks and compare and contrast. I'm always interested in comparing and contrasting. They can do that great at 4^th grade level.

Dr. Deb: The younger kids can at least distinguish them by color and when you get to the 4^th grade then you really can get some very good characteristics. You get to high school and you can talk about the chemical composition.

Dr. Bob: I'm going to come to that in just a moment. Coming back out of this, it's dark and it's black and it is very dense. The chemical elements, this is a bomb. The rock type is a basaltic composition therefore it has iron and magnesium as major components. We call this basic or because of the iron and magnesium or mafic rocks. It has in general, it's low silica content. It still has 40-50% silica but it's very dark and very dense. It's dark and dense because of the iron and magnesium. The rock type is basalt and then the IC is that is has become the nature of basalt. I hold in my hand a piece that's shiny. See the concoidal fracture. It has some gray stuff on it. Weathering or perhaps some other type of igneous rock. My guess is it is probably rhyolite. At the edges this is very sharp. I could cut my finger if I drew it across here rapidly. But I could also take this material, if I had just hunted a deer and I wanted to scrape all the meat off the skin, I could use this as a tool to scrape. If it wasn't as sharp as I wanted it I would take it near the fire and I would do napping or creating as the Native Americans did with flint creating very sharp edges. This is obsidian. A number of national parks, it's not all that abundant, but what would you say if the nearest national parks to West Virginia where this is found are the Grand Canyon area and Yellowstone National Park. If I were to tell you that as they excavated the archeological site at Seneca Rocks they came onto pieces of obsidian. This along well established trails and trading routes of Native Americans in our area. What would you say to that? That, that obsidian must have come a long, long way. It had this sharp, besides being black and shiny, it had the sharp features. If you had a great deal of it you would use it for arrowheads but if it traded all this way you probably wouldn't use it for arrowheads. You'd probably use it for amulets or something that you keep in your possession rather sending it out after game where you might lose it.

Dr. Deb: They had flint for that and that would have been like gold to them. That would be a highly treasured item.

Dr. Bob: That's right. That's an interesting way to think about it because it's exactly the value. The abundance and value method. Obsidian, when you look at it where it's fractured you can see that it's transparent in real thin pieces and it turns out that obsidian is not at all like basalt. It's acidic meaning that it has a high concentration of silica. The high silica content we'll put it as an oxide determination. We also find that this type of igneous rock is dramatically different then the mafic type of iron rich and magnesium. This is almost, not totally, but very, very little iron present. Fel stands for certain mineral, the feldspars. The Si from the silica content. They are felsic and these materials probably have 60 or 65% silica. A truly significant concentration where the basalt might be 45 or 50% silica. Why is this glassy? It relates to the rate of cooling. If molten material is chilled so rapidly it creates a glass. The crystal size is so small we don't even talk about crystallinity sometimes. It's a rock and it has been quenched and cooled so very rapidly. That's dramatically different then the basalt.

Dr. Deb: Basalt will form pillows when it hits water, would obsidian do that as well?

Dr. Bob: The obsidian would just crack and fracture. The associated rock with this is rhyolite. The chemical composition, we're comparing obsidian to rhyolite. Rhyolite is a chemical composition rich in silica that comes out as lava flows. Then the Yellowstone River has cut down through it and as that rhyolite weathers it gets a yellow patina on the coating on the outside from iron, hence, yellowstone. This will really knock your socks off! This is where the geology comes in. The chemical composition, if you were to allow this same chemical composition to cool very, very slowly, we would get a rock you know of as dramatically different...granite. You can see the crystals in granite. Beautiful granite is used as headstone or facing stone. Some granites have truly enormous crystals in them, the size of your thumbnail. We've taken some trips with teachers to granite quarries in North Carolina and all the way up in Vermont along the stretch of the Appalachians. The granite is an intrusive igneous rock and it is only exposed now, it cooled slowly underground. The rhyolite and obsidian are extrusive. They came out on the ground and were lava and therefore more rapid cooling. Because of rapid cooling the grain size is small.

Now, as we get to individual national parks, let me also share with you that I have a whole raft of maps before me. The first park we want to talk about, Yellowstone. The Yellowstone map is huge. What I'm going to do is zoom in on a small area and specifically zoom in on one particular area, Old Faithful and the Upper Geyser Basin. The scale of this map is such that the length of the pen is about 10 miles. We're focusing in on a very, very small area. What's Yellowstone all about Deb?

Dr. Deb: There's a big hot spot laying under Yellowstone and it's kind of a quandary. They discovered that there's a huge caldera there that was 30 miles wide by about 40 miles long. It's enormous, so when it blew it blew huge amounts of material. There's not just one there. There are actually three phases of vulcanism that were found there. One was about 2.2 million years ago and that was the Island Park Caldera. It erupted to about 1.6 million years ago. Then the second phase was about 1.3 million years ago. That's been largely eroded or buried so there's not much evidence of that right now. Then the third phase was about 630,000 years ago. That's with the Yellowstone Plateau that we're looking at right now. It's been about a good 600,000 years and if you look at these various volcanic activities there's anywhere from 600 to 900 thousand years between them. So it could be about due. If you take a look at the data that they have been remote sensing there's gravity data to suggest that this thing might be moving up a little bit. There's nothing to indicate that it will erupt today or tomorrow but it's definitely not extinct.

Dr. Bob: The key phrase that Deb mentioned, hot spot. There is from the mantle a magma chamber and the plate of Yellowstone National Park, the park is moving a bit to the south and west. It's moving very slowly so the next event, eruptive phase could be expected in the northeast. That's where the entire caldera is. This is something that is moving, it's moving over a hot spot. This type of volcano is potentially very dramatic and dangerous as an explosive feature. It must be watched over very carefully. This debris could go quite far into the atmosphere.

Dr. Deb: The thing that is so funny is that we always know Hawaii is a hot spot and we always think of those volcanic eruptions as being fairly slow and you can almost outrun them. You don't worry about the volcanic eruptions in Hawaii they're so common and often. When you think of Yellowstone as being a hot spot you might be lulled into a false sense of complacency about it but the geology is much different. The lava has so much more silica that it acts like a net and so it backs up a lot more then the Hawaiian volcanoes do. Which relates back to the rocks that you were showing us.

Dr. Bob: You don't get any obsidian in Hawaii. The silica starts joining together with oxygen and it makes chains or double chains or layer silicates and it's a lot like creating cheesecloth in the magma as Deb just said. Then the gas bubbles, there's more gas in this type of magma then the magma that's in the Pacific Ocean feeding the hot spot that is the Hawaiian Islands. That gas can build increasing pressure so these type of things, lava domes, are extremely dangerous. There's another one in California that we'll talk about later that has to be watched over very, very carefully.

Dr. Deb: It's rising at a rate of a half inch a year.

Dr. Bob: It is truly significant. There's a beautiful lake but the ecosystem is all messed up because fishermen apparently have introduced different species that they thought would be great game fish to collect. As I recall, you don't need a license in the national park lakes or in the rivers to fish and they introduced the fish without the National Park Service awareness. That type situation in any of these waters is really a crazy, crazy situation to get into. Another environmental concern is Old Faithful Geyser. We always think of Old Faithful as obtaining it's name by the fact the we could set our clocks to the eruptions. When I first went to Yellowstone National Park, that must have been 1959, and at that time it was about every 59-62 minutes or so. But now, I don't know the exact time between events but I think it's in the 70 or 80 minutes. It's getting longer and longer. Why? Because all these people come to visit, especially in the summertime, they want nice cool drinks and they want to utilize water resources, so they're using some of the ground water that's necessary cause once the geyser erupts and the water falls back to the earth it percolates down in and then in many ways it's like a pressure cooker. You've got this mass of water that's being heated underneath and because there's a mass above it, as a pressure cooker does, it locks it in until the forces from below overpower the weight above. Then it spews the water up. That's what a geyser is but we've some of the water. We've reduced the ground water therefore it takes longer and longer for that cap to form so that pressure can build to blow the cap back out. There's another interesting component of that. If you do get to Yellowstone National Park take the highway up in Montana, just to the north, from Gardiner across to the west gate and it's often called the Million Dollar Highway. It's beautiful, beautiful scenery, however, just outside the park there's gold in the rocks. How do they leach gold out of the gold that they mine? Arsenic. They have large impoundments for the water and sediment to "safely" hold the arsenic. There was a Canadian firm and there's no real laws against it, but there's a great apprehension about doing that gold mining so close to Yellowstone National Park, so what the Clinton Administration had a one time suggested is when these types of things occur they were going to trade land. Try to preserve some land adjacent as a buffer zone to the national park. We're not going to get into that many more details but realize this is a hot spot. The inner part is a caldera and a caldera can form in one of two ways. Usually you characterize it as being the space, the hole after an enormous eruption that often is a problem. A cause and effect situation, but realize too that after the eruption, the lava filters on back down. It drains back out and as a result the dome collapses and many caldera's and this one also, are dominantly a factor of the magma draining from the chamber below and therefore the settling of the center portion. I'd also urge that if you can get to that area with your family that there is another national park, a little bit long drive, in Idaho, Craters of the Moon. Craters of the Moon in conjunction with looking at Yellowstone National Park are an excellent combination because Craters of the Moon are all basalt and it's not that far away. Yellowstone National Park is all silica rich and you wonder how on Earth can they coexist so close together. It's a great geologic question that we have yet to respond to.

Dr. Deb: Before we move on from Yellowstone, the reason that it's silica rich and Hawaii isn't is because of the continental influence?

Dr. Bob: Definitely in the continental. Continental rocks are always silica rich. The basalt is there because it's silica poor so your looking at a magma chamber that's coming from the portion that the mantle were there is not as much silica rather then the lithosphere where there would be a lot more silica. That answer still has questions to it. That is not a sufficient response but it's a pretty good response.

So, hot spots are one type of volcanoes. On our outline we promised you another volcano and this one along with the one immediately to follow is Mt. Rainier and Crater Lake.

Dr. Deb: Which should be called Caldera Lake.

Dr. Bob: Exactly. However, this is a situation where the Pacific Ocean, northwestern United States, Washington, Oregon, and California and we are looking at a component, they're not in a straight line but there are volcanoes up the spine up the western United States. The name of that Mountain Range? The Cascade Range. South America has a line of mountains along the western margin too. Those are the Andes. They have an origin just like this. This is not a hot spot in the way that Hawaii and Yellowstone National Park are on. This is a situation where from about this peak in California, Lassen Peak, and until Mt. St. Helens erupted, this was the last active volcano in the United States and of the early part of last century. The Cascades are a situation where the oceanic plate in the Pacific, it's not a very big plate, is colliding with the continental plate of western North America. The continental plate has more silica, it's less dense. The oceanic plate is basalt, more dense, lot's of iron, lot's of magnesium. It is going down beneath. We call this process sub below duction. Because of subduction this basalt layer with sediments and water, a lot like a conveyor belt, it's taking the old sea bottom along with it, parts of it. Some of it gets down there and gets warmer and warmer. With the increased heat it melts and then when it melts it's less dense and it begins to rise. That's why we find in this part of the United States that the ocean is bordered by a mountain range of volcanic origin. The Cascades in North America, the Andes in South America.

Dr. Deb: And they are the same rock.

Dr. Bob: Their the same rock. It's interesting because we knew this rock name long before we had this picture of plate tectonics. We named the rock because of the chemical composition, andecite. Named for the Andes. The andecite was a specific rock type. It wasn't basalt, it wasn't rhyolite. It's an intermediate one. Why is it intermediate? Because it started out as magma from basalt. It came up through the continental rocks and it melted some of the continental rocks and became a mixture. Mount Rainier is really spectacular. The importance of Mt. Rainier, as we look at telephoto of this particular topographic map, the elevation is so high that the topographic map symbol clearly shows that glaciers exist on the crest of Mt. Rainier. That's a beautiful picture. The elevation of Mt. Rainier is over 14,000 feet. It really stands out.

Dr. Deb: They thought for awhile that it was actually the tallest peak in North America. It was debated for quite some time until they found the Rockies to be much taller. If you look at it from the top view down it looks like a tree trunk because of the glaciation and the carving it looks like roots coming out of it.

Dr. Bob: One of the real problems is that if there would be another eruption of Mt. Rainier, and it is possible. The whole Cascade range geologically is very young. If there would be another eruption what's going to happen when hot gases come out underneath or in proximity to a glacier? It melts, the water mixes with the loose material in the slopes and it becomes a mass movement phenomenon specifically off of volcanoes known as a lahar. It's a very, very viscous mud flow and debris flow.

Dr. Deb: There are 55 recorded lahars recorded coming down off of Rainier.

Dr. Bob: Lahars are going to be restricted in the valleys. The valleys are where the highways are, where the people live, where they are traveling. This type of situation with Mt. Rainier is potentially very dangerous.

We're going to be running out of time. We have other sites. We'll pick up Crater Lake. First I'd like to say, upon getting close to the end of this program, that next week Tuesday, Dr. Jack Renton and I will be here to amplify aspects of volcanoes. These adjunct presentations are not the required part of the course. If you are a 4 credit person we really want you to be watching these. We will expand upon the differences and the comparisons of volcanoes and talk about the great variety of volcanoes. Since volcanoes are such a popular topic with kids I think that you'll all want to take the time to watch that adjunct session. Deb, what sort of final statement review do you have?

Dr. Deb: Well, there's one thing I'd like to make you aware of and this is the U.S.G.S. publication called "Volcanoes." It's free. We've got a booklet here on volcanoes that you get with the packet as well as a big picture or poster of Mt. St. Helens and then six lesson plans doing anything from topographic mapping to predicting where lahars will occur on Mt. Rainier. Most of it has to do with Mt. St. Helens but it is applicable to any of the volcanics in terms with what they do with volcanoes. All aspects, history, or graphic effects are discussed. It's a nice little packet. Here's how to acquire this package. It's a U.S.G.S. site, it's called the Earth Science Information Center (ESIC) to obtain one of these you need to call their 1-800-USA-MAPS. Those of you who have been to RockCamp have a copy of this from Paul Liston who is the ESIC representative at WVGES so you won't need to order one, you have one somewhere in your files. The rest of you can call the toll free number and try to get a hold of one.

Dr. Bob: Are they going to be on limited distribution, somewhere along the line they are going to run out of money?

Dr. Deb: Yeah. They go out of print eventually. You have to make a call for them and see if you can obtain them.

Dr. Bob: If you have trouble getting this what we will do is the teaching guide and the other lesson plans that are in here in black and white, we will reproduce them for you and get them out to you. Eventually the color photos will be out of print. The National Park Service and the U.S. Geological Survey are under the gun with respect to funding. They don't have that kind of money any more.

Well, that brings us to the end of this particular presentation. As you see we present a variety of things. We'll keep track of which national parks we didn't get to. That's ok. We often put together much more then we can possibly present to you. We will come to a closure and we'll pick up on Crater Lake the next time we meet in the formal class and that will be in two weeks from today. In the meantime, for those for 4 credits we'll see you next week, I urge everyone to pick up the show next week. We'll talk about the comparison and the differences in volcanoes because they really are some spectacular things in geology to talk about. Until then, keep thinking about rocks. Take care. Everyday's a great day for a field trip! See you next week or in two weeks.

WVGES Education Specialist, Tom Repine (repine@geosrv.wvnet.edu)

Page last revised: January 2000

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