Geoscience Education in the Mountain State:
CATS Geology Telecourse, Fall 1998,
Show 5 Transcript

CATS Telecourse Broadcast
Geology 290
December 3, 1998

Dr. Bob: Greetings everyone! Here we are--Deb Hemler, myself Dr. Bob, and the last of the presentations for geology, this December 3rd, 1998. And Deb, there have been some news items with regards to geology going on. What have you heard about events?

Deb: Well, just after I watched the video, which was one of the last one's we watched talking about remote sensing and how geologists check for oil and other resources using satellites and remote types of information, I found a news article that came across where they have found in Cairo or outside of Cairo, Ramses II, the capitol city there, and I can't remember the name of the city but they found it using magnetic information and electrical impulses. It's still buried and they're going to excavate it. So, another example of remote sensing.

Dr. Bob: And it just fit right in with the TV show. There have been a tremendous advances with respect to archaeology, with respect to remote sensing. A number of years ago, not that long ago, a pair of researchers who were working for JPL in California, the Jet Propulsion Lab, had Egyptology as one of their great hobbies. And they continued to look at remote sensing from SLAR, which is side-looking airborne radar, and other remote sensing information from satellites. And they found the location of an ancient trading city, because the pathways, the highways, all led and they could see through the sand. We're going to talk today later in the second half of the presentation about climate change and one of these great climate changes is windblown sand material. And that had covered over all these ancient highways. Similar work has been done with the Anasazi pathways in the American southwest.

What was also very neat and fits into an environmental theme was this ancient trading post, while it was written and well known in literature, was built over limestones. And by taking water out and using it for the camels and for the people at the location--when you take the water out of the areas, what happens? A sinkhole problem. And they built over the remains of the first collapse of the building and then it crunched in again, so they abandoned it. So it's one of those really interesting composites.

Then of course, Popocatepetl, right outside of Mexico City, is erupting again.

And what really reflects about all of us here in West Virginia, I suspect, especially our good friends out in the eastern panhandle, we are dry. Look at some of the local little streams.

Deb: Oh, look at your ponds.

Dr. Bob: And ponds. The pond level, if you have a reservoir level, this is a great opportunity to work with your kids to talk about where the water supplies are coming from for your school and for your community. There are places in Pennsylvania, western Pennsylvania, where they are on water rationing. And worse so over the Thanksgiving holiday. And there are some mighty unhappy people cutting down on water supplies over the holiday weekend.

So the other component of that is have them go out and see how even modest size streams are just a trickle. And ask them if it hasn't been raining, and we're five inches of precipitation down--five inches, that's a good slug of precipitation that we have been missing--where does the water come from in the rivers? Why are some of the streams still flowing? And the answer is that here in West Virginia, by and large, we have an abundance of rainfall feeding the aquifer system and the water tables. And the water tables intersect in the valleys. And the water comes from the ground water into the streams. It's called an effluent with a letter "e" condition. In more arid regions when the rivers are filled after a storm, the water soaks down into the river-bed material, it's in fluent with an "I" going into the ground.

So it's a great time to get out with the kids and talk to them about why the streams are so small and yet why they're still flowing. And it also relates--gee, it could have been a question I could have asked on the test--that on a topographic map, if the river essentially flows all year long, what's the color of the line?

Deb: Hopefully blue.

Dr. Bob: Blue and solid, if it's an intermittent stream. That means it flows most of the time, but there may be some dry months. Seldom is December a dry month. Usually it's August and September. But if it's intermittent, they still use the blue line--it's broken, it's usually a long dash and a dot. And there are many little channels on a hillside where the topography shows from the contour lines and there's nothing in it at all. And that just means that if it does rain heavily, there's going to be water flowing in that channel. But for most of the year, most every day of the year, it's a dry channel, but it clearly has been formed by erosion.

And that really relates to the test. We've had calls and cards and letters coming in. So let's talk about the test. Deb, what sort of questions had come up?

Deb: Well, a couple of questions. We had one on question number 3, I believe it was.

Dr. Bob: Let me get number 3, and that wasn't in the bonuses and it wasn't in the extra credit ones. So let's get question number 3 and zoom in. When we talked about making rocks out of loose unconsolidated sediments, it was quite clear that cementing agents were very important. That's the obvious. We also could work with our kids that way and talking a little Elmer's glue, adding a bit extra water, mixing it up, putting it into a little plastic tub from margarine, putting sand in there, and then let it sit. Or we said take a nail and a little water and let it rust, and then see if that works. In other words, cementing agents in the natural environment include the rust component, iron oxides, and iron hydroxides. Hard water charged with calcium carbonate.

Here's another one that you can do in the classroom with your kids. If you take a beaker, put in a little weak acid and some crushed limestone, and dissolve the limestone, and then put the limestone dissolved into the water into a margarine tub with some loose sand grains, and let it evaporate, you're probably going to get cement holding together the grains of sand because the calcium carbonate has to come as the water evaporates. So it's iron and oxides and hydroxides, calcium carbonate, and then silica. There's no good way to work with silica. Nature does it because it can work long time periods and different pH's and that. We can't do that. But there's another interesting component. If you take mud--what is one aspect of mud? It's fine grained. It's very fine grained. We talked about clay size particles. One of the characteristics of clay is it's malleable and sticky. So think about that as a possibility. And especially what happens when mud dries. Are the each individual grains loose and then blow away? Or, try this. Make a little mud paste in another tub, empty plastic tub of margarine, see what happens. And of course, sediments lithify to become rocks under the great load of overlying sediments. It takes clay minerals and tries to squish them flat. They don't all make it. But consider that there are places-- I could take you to the Gulf of Mexico and show you where there's 70,000 feet of sediment. That's a lot of weight. And it's going to squeeze particles, going to try to orient particles. OK. What other question?

Deb: Actually, there's one more question that I heard somebody ask on question number 3 and that was selection D, the lack of precipitation. Were you referring to materials precipitating out of solution or were you referring to a lack of rain?

Dr. Bob: I was, yep, that is a question I was referring to lack of rain. That is in dry climates. Yes, we have a question here in the audience.

(Question unintelligible)

Yes, consider that while we talked about water as being the universal solvent, I don't know if the people heard that. The question was, that we talked about clay, we talked about water. Water appears in a number of the potential situations here and is there one best answer? And yes, there would be one best answer. The mere presence of water may not be--remember we talked about necessary and sufficient conditions. It may be necessary but it's not sufficient, it's not the sole answer to it.

OK. What's the next one? We'll go through the ones that we got information and we'll ask because we have the audio piped into the room here. And we'll come up on that a little bit. What's the next one?

Deb: Question number 25. Apparently there's a vocabulary term in there that some people had some difficulty in finding. And that would be the term "lahar."

Dr. Bob: The term is lahar. Let me just underline it here on my copy. And that is interesting that different texts choose vocabulary according to the author's preference. The authors present their material to the publisher and it goes out to quite a number of reviewers. If those reviewers really hammer away at that, the publisher will probably ask that it be included, or at least made mention or in the index later on or at the end of the book, if they have a glossary of terms.

A lahar is something I did mention but it may have been that very first session when some folks weren't yet on board. Lahars are the mixture of volcanic ash and minor grain volcanic debris with water that flows like a mudflow. It's a very special type of mudflow because it is all of the volcanic debris. These are extremely dangerous because they can go to great distances away from the actual ejected material. I may have mentioned this in the context that 20,000 people perished in Armenia, Columbia in 1984. And these people perished many miles from the actual volcanic eruption because a lahar swept down the river valley and was a very tragic situation because the United States Geologic Survey had been working with the Columbian government and had indeed warned them that this town of Armenia was in harms way because the drilling clearly indicated that it was built on old ancient lahar deposits.

Now, where does the water come from? Two possibilities. If the volcano is high enough and especially in the winter season, then the water will come from the melted snow as a result of volcanic eruption. The other situation is that with the electrical discharges and the ash and the temperature regime that is created by the hot gasses coming out of the high mountain peak. Volcanic eruptions are usually associated with very heavy rainfall. So a lahar, you might put in your annotated glossary of terms, is a mudflow specifically from a volcanic eruption. In Japan there are a number of cities that have actually built box work cribs rather deep in the valley where lahars have been known to flow. And they capture that material and then when it dries out they go back with excavating equipment, dig it out, and dump it along the coast to expand the island. And then the crib is ready for the next spring rainfall that's going to the bring material on down the slope. Because there are a number of volcanoes in Japan that--and then sometimes they even talk about lahar deposits where the volcanic eruption may not have been simultaneous with the deposits moving.

So that's what a lahar is. Lahar's--just for your knowledge and information, Mt. Rainier in Tacoma, Washington, part's of the outskirts of Tacoma, Washington, are in deposits that would be mapped as ancient lahar deposits. In Tacoma, in Olympia, those are north and west of the actual cone. So the ejected material because of the prevailing wind directions would not, under a very small percentage of circumstances, would not go to the northwest. It would be primarily in the quadrants from the northeast to east to the southeast because of prevailing wind directions. But the lahar is going to follow the topography.

OK, what's next?

Deb: I think question number 40 was next. On the cartoon 3.9, I think there was some confusion as to which way the drift was going.

Dr. Bob: Ah, now part of this one--here's 3.9 the cartoon. And this is a real situation, too, as most of these are. This is a California coastline environment and the city fathers decided--a major city is located here to the east of the bay, these little wiggles. For those we've lost video in the northern panhandle again, so it is, the little wiggles are the manifestation of part of the Pacific Ocean waves. And east of the bay is where the large city lies. So there were great numbers of people that said: hey, we live right along the ocean; we want to sail boats and have a protected harbor to protect our boats from storms. So they built the combination of breakwater and groin. It's not a true groin in the sense that it doesn't come out perfectly perpendicular to shore. But they built the structure from A to B. And they put a bend in it because it conformed more with the shape of the harbor. And they wanted sand grains to move. They didn't want to have them build up. So this is the real situation. So the long-shore drift, you see, you would interpret it if you look at that drawing and say: whoa, if it came up from the south, where would that sand march into? Right into the bay, not good. I don't want to bottom out with my sloop as I head on out. Now you realize they probably wouldn't be going out into the Pacific with really small boats. You've got a pretty powerful engine or sailboats. And as a matter of fact, the scale isn't shown, but they do sail in this bay also. It's a good size bay.

So the long-shore drift is south along the coast from down towards A, if you were to draw an arrow then, a double arrow, the long-shore drift is down towards A. When it hits that first structure, it bends and then it comes down towards B. So that's about all I'm going to say about that, as far as Gump would have worded it, in the context that you can interpret the rest of the drawing and begin to worry about what happens. Well, I will say one more thing. If the long-shore drift is coming down from the north, then the waves in order to create the long-shore drift with the double arrow must be coming in at an oblique angle. Really, it's very much parallel to that upper part of the what isn't really a groin from A to a joint and a bend in the concrete structure. And this is a concrete structure right down to the floor at that location. It is not just a pier, it is a firm concrete structure. And the waves are coming in almost parallel to that. And therefore, think of what's going to happen when that wave front hits B. What's going to happen? OK. And when the wave front further comes down along the structure, what's going to happen to D? So B, C, and D are critical components of that diagram. OK.

What's next?

Deb: OK, I think we can move on to question 47, which I had a problem with.

Dr. Bob: And it turns out I have a problem with that one, too. But I did cut that cartoon, 3.4, directly from a text that we use at West Virginia University. And the important thing about reading my question is to--what is my question in the bottom underlying component? In any one year what is the probably of the 100-year flood occurring? And sometimes my questions may seem to be tricky that way when it reflects upon someone else's drawings. This is a very complicated drawing. But when you say what is the chance of the 100-year flood happening in any one year, that washes away the ambiguity of that drawing, doesn't it? Because what should be your answer? It's very low, isn't it? It's real low the possibility of a 100-year flood occurring in any year. As we start the year 1999, and say here's a creek outside our door. What's the chance of the 100-year flood occurring there? It's real low in that year. Exactly.

So this goofy diagram speaks to after you've gone through 25 years, what is the potential of an event occurring or not occurring, and so forth. And see, after 69 years of records have occurred, and after 69 years have passed, these two curves cross over. So what does that suggest to you about a certain event happening? A real good chance. It's a high probability. It's a difficult question in that context. But you see it quite often in textbooks for the introductory level of geology. This diagram occurs in any number of textbooks.

OK, what's the next one?

Deb: We can move on to number 50. I think we sort of addressed that one.

Dr. Bob: We addressed that one. Let me just pull back down the wide angle a little bit here so we get most of the question in. The V pattern, let me use a pen here, that on a number of hillsides, the contours simply look like this without anything running at all down this V-shaped pattern. But we know by the law of V's that the V-shape points in the direction uphill when you're simply looking at topography. And you say, well gee, that must be formed by running water. But there's nothing that flows in there except after very strong storms. Now the practical response to that is, the major change in landforms happens in the very rare events. The day-to-day processes really don't do much in shaping landforms. It's the 1984 flood that did something. And that sort of thinking will help kids to understand that you can't sit and watch landforms develop. But if you come back and you look at a fence that your grandfather knows and swears that he put in the ground vertically and the fence is now tipping over, you know that a process has been going on. The hillside has been creeping. And it's a cumulative effect, very slowly, very subtle. But your grandfather and his 50, 60, whatever number of years, can attribute personal information that that fence was put in right. He didn't put it in at an angle. OK.

Deb: OK. So that's pretty much the multiple choice. There was one question on the bonus short answer questions. That would be number 3. You give a whole raft of information and I guess one of the questions was: where's the question?

Dr. Bob: I'm chuckling because in one year after the course was finished, I had asked the students in their evaluation to please give responses. And more than one student in the class of freshmen, dominantly freshmen at the university, said: You've too many words in your question; that's why we get them wrong! Too many words. And I didn't have a response to that. I guess too many words could challenge some freshmen. But by the time we get to the end of the semester, words are sometimes our bread and butter. And we need to ferret out the aspect of it. And I gave you this information because it doesn't appear in the textbook. This is good home cooking. Paula Waggy down there in Franklin and her crew is chuckling as we speak, except I misspoke, didn't I. What did I call it?

Deb: You called it something else.

Dr. Bob: I called it something else when I was speaking, but there are igneous deposits in West Virginia but there very, very, very rare. And in Cass Cave, they're about 40 feet below the surface, and you have to look for them because it's not the normally traveled path. If you do enter Cass Cave as an amateur caver, you sort of have to go to the left where everybody goes to the right. And in the path less traveled you would find that.

And in Trimble Knob in Monterey, Virginia, which isn't too far from Franklin, a few miles on down the road, if you see this conical hill, you might not be tempted to ask permission to walk up it. If you did, you'd find that it's dark black rock. So it's a situation that elsewhere in West Virginia, through all the history, we don't have a whole heck of a lot of volcanic stuff. And that volcanic stuff in the Cambro-Ordovician rocks, it's just a real thin green layer because the volcanic ash that fell in the ocean 550 million years ago chemically reacted with the sea water and it became green minerals loaded with green minerals. And they were preserved, as the later sediment buried them, in the Devonian site.

But in Keyser, West Virginia, just a couple of miles outside of town, if you took a Geiger counter that was very sensitive, you could find that little volcanic ash layer. There's just a little kick of uranium content in that particular ash layer. Other than that you wouldn't be able to see the zone and the horizon because it is so very thin. It's not as if 10 feet of volcanic ash fell there in the Devonian sea a long time ago. And then the Pennsylvanian rocks that you could see--that's a good solid, quite likely, and there's still a debate on this. If a number of you have gone out and can identify flint clay in the horizon of the coal deposits, there's a debate as to whether some flint clays could not have indeed been volcanic ash deposits. And it's kind of interesting, too, because another student asked me just the other day, what is the situation with respect to volcanoes and coal deposits? Were volcanoes active in West Virginia when the coal was being formed? Or were the continents colliding when the coal was being formed? And the answer is, all of the above. The coal was essentially being formed in basins, but the basins sometimes were a result of collision many, many tens of miles to the east. The land responds to the west and basins can form. And in those basins, coal deposits can form. And if the volcanoes were out to the east, the prevailing wind directions must have been mostly away. We don't get the volcanic ash this far away. But when the continents were colliding early, we had to envision the disappearance of the ancestral Atlantic sea floor. It had to disappear somewhere. And when it did, it was a potential for the creation of volcanic eruptions that were of the explosive kind. And then when finally all the sea floor's gone, and it's just continent-continent, then the engine for the volcano shuts down.

So we don't find those volcanic ash deposits into the Permian. They're gone or at least we can't find any evidence in this area. So that's, in question number 3 then, is there a specific answer that I'm after? And it's no. I just want some good discussion on your part. Good discussion at this point in the semester gets full credit. OK, and that's pretty fair. So you'll have different answers, but I will judge it to be good critical thinking, and therefore fine. You know, it's a lot better to do those types of questions from time to time rather then these multiple choice because the students, too, are looking for one answer in a multiple choice. One of my colleagues calls them multiple guess questions. Given their chance, students would rather do multiple guess questions because they figure the right answer is in there somewhere. And the worst type of multiple guess is all of the above or A, C, and D, or something like that. Those are killers.

So, are there any questions here in the audience about others? Or in our radio audience, if you have any questions, we are hooked up and it is coming live into the studio. Yes? The question is on number 22--oh yes, very appropriate. Good question. We forgot to mention this. This does not appear, which kind of surprises me, in the textbook. And Deb, you said you didn't remember hearing it on the videos either.

Deb: Not that I could remember.

Dr. Bob: And I can't be of help because I've looked at so many videos of volcanic eruptions by Discover and National Geographic and I'm always looking at, and they're always on and this is a different one. And I never remember which one I saw it on. Now a new--this is at St. Pierre, remember the devastation of the volcanic eruptions, the great dangers at Martinique. And the recent ones in the island in the Caribbean, Montserrat is one of these islands. And it also happened in the Phillippines, that extremely high temperature gasses, I mean were talking hundreds and hundreds and hundreds centigrade, mixing with dust and ash from the eruption. You don't want to be there when it comes. And the most classic case of this happened in the Mediterranean at what site? Pompeii, exactly. The eruption at Pompeii was a new A R dome. The hot gasses--intensely hot, and why does it flow downhill? Because there's mixed-in ash. And that cloud that is more dense then the rest of the air, even though the temperature's so tremendously elevated. And if you're caught in the way of it, how do you perish? It's just a suffocating cloud. And the two survivors were in jail, at least one of them was in jail, at the St. Pierre eruption in the Caribbean. He was in jail and the bars and open window faced out towards the ocean so everybody in the other side of the jail--and he just happened to be in a location where the hot gasses swept over the jail and didn't come back in an eddy current back into his facility.

Any other questions? A question about number 11 and number 19. Actually both of those are very closely related. And what I'd say to you is recall our discussion of chemical reactions and what gases are dissolved in ground water. That's another question in the test. It's a very low percentage in the atmosphere. And I'll give you a hint, you'd probably not today, but certainly tomorrow, will drink some of it and experience it. Now what we do to these beverages is force this particular gas into the water because it isn't easily dissolved. And we dissipate that gas into the water and then of course when you shake it and were to uncap it, you would release the pressure. And when the pressure came out, what happens to the dissolved gases or the gases that have been forced into here? Poof, they'll come out! But that is the same gas that is involved in rainwater. So think of the chemical reactions. What mineral or minerals are going to be susceptible to water or water containing some dissolved gas?

OK. So that's both question 11 and 19. I just phrase it a little bit differently. In 19, I expanded a bit because you may go further and say, well, are there other types of minerals that may have formed in a different climate? See, that relates back to what we're going to talk about the second half tonight--climate change.

Any other questions? Any questions out there on the audio bridge that we can--OK, yes? Another of my classic cartoons. Isn't it great we call them cartoons? OK. Here's a chubby old line and the reading of these cartoons and you could say, gosh, maybe all of these are good possibilities. But they're not the answer to the question I ask. On the horizontal line you read these as if this is the surface. So I could put a couple of trees or tufts of grass on the surface. That's the surface horizon, the zero level. And what we do when we do a soil profile is we excavate and then we usually use a large nail or we could also use our sheath knife or big aluminum pegs, but we put the tape and we run the tape, we fix the tape up here and run the tape on down the profile. And then we measure the depths to the different horizons and we determine. The horizons have been indicated for you on the left hand column, or the vertical axis coming down from the horizon. Now you could also think of this as the depth, measuring the depth from the top on down.

And I have given you the letters of the alphabet that reflect horizons. You remember what horizons stand for. Organic. Think of it as a response to the nature of the content of the horizon. "A" is a very active zone of chemical weathering. The organic compound is very much diminished, and the chemical processes have been working in here and carrying, physically carrying, grains perhaps along little pathways or when, if that soil cracks when it's dry, then there's little channels that the finest size grains actually get flushed out from above. But the most intense weathering is an "A." Iron oxides could be leached out of there, especially in combination with the root systems of the trees. Or maybe there's a tap root, maybe there's a different--in pines for example, it's not only the root system, and the pines are very shallowly rooted, but it's also all the needles that fall. If you ever think about it, that's what these great November storms do. They cause the evergreens to lose all that dead needle material. And if you look at some trees after a strong storm, take the kids out there, look under the tree and you'll say, gee whiz, there wasn't--look at all the needles that fell. And then look back up at the tree. We had strong enough winds here in Morgantown that I was looking at one tree and it just didn't seem to have any dead needles on it left at all. Everything was a mat down there on the floor, on the duff beneath the tree. But rainwater working in that duff is going to release organic acids. And that "A" horizon is really going to be ripped apart.

The "E" is a special zone within the "A" horizon we talked about and so forth on down to "R." What did "R" stand for? I'm not going to go over all of them, but what does "R" stand for? The bedrock or rock, and remember "A" through "C"? Does that have to be related directly to the bedrock at the base? Uh, uh. It could be river sands and gravels, windblown material onto bedrock. We're going to talk about that in the second half. Or glacial deposits on top of bedrock so that the entire soil profile may not relate to anything with regards to the specifics of the bedrock.

Well, Kathy has called in on the bridge and asked did I answer then on the profiles? And then these chubby lines reflect percentage composition. So when this chubby line comes right down along this with the percentage, what is it right along the axis? Essentially zero. And I haven't given you, I haven't said that this is 10 percent or 30 percent or 50 percent. It's just a relative increase in percentage. It turns out that in the state of Ohio, the calcium carbonate content of the glacial deposits till are often 25 to 30 percent because the glacier came over limestone. Ground it all up, plunked it down--a tremendous percentage of calcium carbonate. But that's just one general location. The same glacier coming down over shale and just having a small portion of bedrock of limestone might have only 8 percent. These are relative percents. Does that help? And that means that this is near zero and this is pretty constant and it's higher then zero. That this is low then there's an increase in content and then it comes low again. This is in this horizon. This graph indicates a bulge or an increase in concentration up above but not within the organic layer. And then it drops off again. And this one is the most curious curve of all. It seems to have the highest concentration up at the surface and then it's not a, it may be a hyperbola, a parabola, we don't know. That's not important what the actual geometric shape is, but rather the fact that it drops off continuously with depth to a near zero percent by the time you get to the bedrock.

OK. Now questions that come about 36 and 37.

Deb: Yeah, I think there was some confusion about what first order, second order, and third order meant. And it wasn't in their textbook.

Dr. Bob: OK. Again this is a variation. Not all textbooks do this. Let's go to the overhead and we'll do some drawings. A stream, this is black now, the arrow indicates the direction of flow. Looks like part of a stethoscope. A first order stream is a stream that has no tributaries. When two first order streams combine, then we define it as a second order stream. So in this particular drawing, this is a first order stream. I'm doing these as if they're Roman numerals. That's a second order stream.

Deb: For those of you that can't see the overhead, the two tributaries at the headwaters are the first order streams and where they come together after that is known as the second order stream.

Dr. Bob: And the point is that a second order stream may have other first order streams. (Remainder of answer unintelligible.)

(BREAK)

Dr. Bob: Back again. My voice has returned. Sorry for any breaking up of my voice. I was on an airplane last week and the people next to me had the air conditioning unit on and both of them-- and every seat in the plane was taken so I couldn't move anywhere. The plane landed after one hour and I couldn't talk. My voice was gone. So it's breaking up. Deb, you've got--we solved the problem didn't we--the CD?

Deb: Yeah, we found out that what I didn't know was when they didn't load the CD onto the hard drive of this computer. So if you run the CD from just the drive without loading it into your hard drive, you're going to have the same problem. It will glitch a little bit. Once you access it, the video clip and the audio clip will be fine. If you load it directly onto your hard drive and then just access the CD for directions, then you're in great shape. It won't glitch or skip at all.

Dr. Bob: OK. So a lot will depend on the status of your equipment.

Deb: Yes, that's right.

Dr. Bob: It's directly proportional. The older the equipment the more glitch you'll have. Deb, maybe we should take this few minutes to talk about wrapping up this semester and then getting into the final comments.

Deb: OK, we'll do that. For the facilitators, you need to make sure that you administer a post-test following this broadcast very quickly so the participants can give us their responses on how they think this semester went with the course, so we can adjust for next semester.

Dr. Bob: Really, it's just a post-evaluation type thing. The word test...

Deb: OK, the course survey, and then the post-test is just a series of short multiple choice questions that they sought at the end of the semester.

Dr. Bob: Gotcha, yeah, OK.

Deb: So it's the identical one you took as a pre-test. We're just interested to see where you were at the beginning and where you are now. So we need the post-test, the course survey, which they'll need a number two pencil for and the participant contribution form. The CATS program needs in-kind contributions so that they can report to NSF. And then you need to also include the packing list with the little signoffs that Phyllis had you check off, and send all these back to Phyllis at the state department. You need also, then, to collect course materials. Those course materials will then be sent to Tom Repine, and those course materials should include the test answer sheet, which is on the front of their test booklets; the unit plan, which was essentially the first question of the exam; the quiz booklet, which were the quiz questions that they answered at the end of each of the videos; and then their implementation notebook. Take all these up. Put them into a box or envelope or whatever and send them off to Tom Repine.

Dr. Bob: Great! The reason we're sending them to Tom is that they have a post office box here in Morgantown directly, and they pick it up and they collect it. At the university, days and days, even in things we send in intercampus mail across the campus. So it's just really goofy.

One other thing that we didn't mention and that was a follow up, on November 14th we all met at Buchannon and we had a field trip, and I wanted to state, essentially it was led by our participants. And it was absolutely marvelous! Of course, I didn't have to do much. I just said where are we going next and I'll follow. And it was a tremendously enjoyable activity. It's the type of thing that we're going to put in time and time again now. We had gone to see the natural bridges, but more importantly it was into your home territory. You know it best. I had never been to those areas before. And some of the haunts that you travel for nature hikes and such, it was spectacular. And of course the lunch was really great, because the local Disabled American Veterans were having their turkey lunch and it was only five bucks.

Deb: Five dollars. We had turkey, we had dressing, mashed potatoes, gravy.

Dr. Bob: Homemade bread and pies and cookies. It was spectacular.

Deb: It was Bob's dream.

Dr. Bob: I'm not only going to put that one into my field trip repertoire, but that same weekend I'm going to call ahead to see if that's the weekend that the Disabled American Veterans--because at first I had looked at the map and said, oh yeah, we're down at the game farm, we'll just run up to Buchannon for one of the fast food places. Au contraire. You do not get quickly to Buchannon from where we were. But it was just spectacular. And as I say, I love to do that because you know these places and I don't.

Deb: Oh, it was just the spontaneous thing for us and it was great, and I think everyone learned a tremendous amount. I know I did.

Dr. Bob: I did too. And I always learn from you good folks out there.

Well, on to a little content. What we want to do is three things. We want to talk about unique climate type features in geology: glaciers and deserts or glacier or semi arid. Because in the United States proper, we don't have true deserts. The American southwest does get rain. It's not all that dry. And in glaciers, certainly in Alaska and in the Rockies of the United States, in North America up into the Canadian Rockies, we have quite a few glaciers--but glaciers of a mountain type, not the massive ice sheets that not too long ago occupied major portions of the United States. But one of the things, Deb, that there have been some events on-going in the past two weeks, actually November and December now. And I'm not so sure kids really understand the difference between what climate is and what weather is. And sometimes I don't know that we really differentiate. How did you do that in the classroom?

Deb: Well, when we were talking about climate we were talking about year-long attributes of an area over many, many years, say, a ten year period. What's the average rainfall? What's the average temperature at this time of year? And so we looked at a long term overall and we looked at the vegetation, because the vegetation is a good indicator as to what the climate type is. If you get a lot of rainfall, you're going to have trees. If you don't get so much rainfall, you're going to have grasslands. So we brought the biology into this, because it's very important--that's how biomes are distinguished.

Dr. Bob: That's a good connection of that we're trying to build through here.

Deb: Right. And when we talk about weather, we talked about actually things that are specific say to a certain day. For example, not often do you have 50-degree weather after Thanksgiving. And I have friends in Wisconsin that are complaining because deer season just went by, they shot three deer, and it was 50-degree weather. They had to skin them right away and they were complaining up there because they couldn't let the deer hang. The lake isn't freezing over. They can't get out to the lakes because they put the boats into drydock because they were anticipating winter. And so it's really weather changes, and we're experiencing right now a shift in weather. In terms of the climate, we'll have to look at a very long term to see how this whole thing plays out--say, next year if this is going to be something that we're going to see as a trend.

Dr. Bob: Well, talking about that with students, you can also get into it and say, look, does that make sense to measure the high temperature on December 3rd from 1900 until 1998 and average it? What else do you do?

Deb: We look at distributions.

Dr. Bob: Yeah, and furthermore, what happens on some of those nights when it's 60 degrees during December 2nd, and then the night of December 2nd into the morning of December 3rd, the temperature starts to drop, but a front comes through. So that at 12:01, it's still 50 degrees, but by one o'clock December 3rd afternoon, it's minus 20 and the chill factor is a major factor. In other words, changes can come about very rapidly. I think the students can handle the uncertainties.

What else can we do? It's easy to take the temperatures. And there are some schools where the teachers in certain grade levels tries to do synoptic weather.

Deb: They do rainfall measurements. They do relative humidities. Cloud cover.

Dr. Bob: Cloud types. As a matter of fact, there are some really nice packages of information and private companies that run these types of things--Weatherwise and those types. That's a magazine too--Weatherwise. Really great stuff. When I grew up, I was making little things. Trying to make rain gauges out of old milk cartons, the little paper milk cartons.

Deb: Radio telescopes in the basement.

Dr. Bob: What I was doing in the basement, I didn't tell this group, did I? I made a spectroscope. And in order to do a spectroscope, I sent off for lenses and a prism. And then I made my spectroscope. But I also wanted to vaporize--and there is the key word--I wanted to vaporize specimens so that I could run that light through my spectroscope and then tell what specimens, salt, and other things that I was trying to work with. So then, well, how am I going to vaporize this? Ah, I'll take two big--remember those big dry cell batteries that stood about so tall? Well, what they're built with is a carbon rod down the center that's about the size diameter of your small finger. It's a good size carbon rod and then it's packed with acid based material in a paper container. So I cut one of them open, get my two carbon rods, make a little wooden stand, fortunately, and take the two carbon rods. I took one of the carbon rods and hollowed it out to a little cone shape. Took the upper carbon rod and made that to a point. Then I loaded the hollowed-out carbon rod with my sample to be vaporized. I went over to an old lamp, cut off the cord, and stripped the wires, and had the plug still on the other end, and then I put the wire and I wrapped the wire around one carbon, went over and plugged it into the wall. Put my sample in, and I'm working in the basement, and I got this sample. And I've got it all set up. I even had film in my spectroscope so I could get the picture of it, and then I just lowered the carbon. And of course, what happened was that it got close enough, it arced over it and went zap, and it vaporized that salt beautifully. And then poof! I'm in total darkness. All my family's hollering: Bobby, what did you do now? We don't have any lights up here! And then of course, a couple of seconds later the next question was: are you OK? But at first it was what did you do now? You know, if I had been there standing next to Ben Franklin, I probably would have been zapped. So in any event--but you know, I suppose that's the type of students we like to have, right? The one's that barely survive.

Deb: School, not at home.

Dr. Bob: OK, in any event that was an aside, but it's worth a few chuckles. But we have witnessed some really unusual circumstances, and yet remember, that had been two and half weeks ago they warned us of a tremendous storm that was coming through and we had high winds, gusts, 50 to 60 miles an hour. That's the storm that knocked all the pine needles off in the first hour's presentation. And it also is very critical in cleaning the dead branches out of the deciduous trees. It really cleans them up. Besides, you get good kindling. But it does clean them up. It takes off the dead branches and the dead trees, they fall. And the value of getting the dead trees down is that--the problem of getting the dead trees down maybe is the worse one. Because if you get into a droughty condition, you have all that material available for fires. And if floods come along, any of the dead trees that have fallen down on the banks of the rivers can be swept along and caught to create temporary dams, and it makes worse the flooding. And nature is this way. Nature cleanses itself--episodes, not periodically, episodically. And then the floods come along and clean out and scours out the channel. Fires will alleviate. And as a matter of fact, in many cases in the plains' vegetation, it is fire that is necessary to keep them as plains in the Midwest.

Deb: They think the Native Americans might have contributed to that by setting fires.

Dr. Bob: The Native Americans may have figured it out that they needed the fires. An anecdotal story to that is that the University of Wisconsin set aside a significant number of acres and they wanted to restore it to the prairie situation prior to European intrusion. And they nurtured it. They put the right seeds in based on the pollen record, beautiful. Fifteen years later all they had was scrubs and trees. And they'd put out every single fire that started. They rushed outside to put it out. And they finally came to the conclusion it needs the fires to get rid of the material that otherwise would crowd out the prairie grasses.

But in any event, the November storm came through and in looking at the history of this century, not our students, but we probably remember the song by Gordon Lightfoot, The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald. And bring it into class. A few people are shaking their heads. Actually, Gordon Lightfoot is a Canadian, and he started out in opera and he just wasn't making a whole heck of a lot of money. And he decided to go into more popular things. But The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, and if you bring that into the classroom and play it for the kids--the storms of November came early...

Deb: The gales of November.

Dr. Bob: The gales of November is the actual wording. Sorry, well that's true. You know the gales of November. And then you talk about what gales are. And it turns out that in the history in this century--the second week of November--one of the great storms was on the 11th of November in 1911. So what did that storm get nicknamed as? The 11-11-11 storm. Now sometimes the storms last over two days, and if any of you have access to the periodical magazine Weatherwise, they've got a great article in it this month about all the great November storms. And it happens occasionally when the meteorological conditions are such that a very strong front from Texas in the Gulf all the way up across the Great Lakes. And the winds coming down from the northwest creates this condition. And it's happened probably five or six times in this century that major damaging terrible storms have occurred. Some of them have caused great numbers of boats to be lost on the Great Lakes, especially in the Thirties and Forties and the Twenties. And the ore boats, and that's what the Edmund Fitzgerald was, that ore boat is over 700 feet long. And it's real thin and rides real low because they had a full load of taconite pellets from the Duluth area. If you took that ship 700 and some feet long and put it up on end, it's now in 500 feet of water. It still would have stuck 200 feet above the surface of the water. It's an enormous ship. It was the pride of the American flag, as it was called, for the American side because it was the biggest one at the time.

The point is that weather is fascinating. Weather is very hard to predict. We have kept data for decades on end and we can't tell you what's going to happen next Tuesday. We can give you some indications and models, but we can't tell you for sure.

Deb: Well, a meteorologist would say they would rather predict long term then short term because by the time long term comes around, you've forgotten what they had said.

Dr. Bob: The final follow up to this is we have been having very warm conditions. And they'll say, well, is this an indication of global warming? Go try to tell that to the good folks in England and Poland. And this isn't a Polish joke. They have had a tremendously bad two to three weeks-- deep, low temperatures. And over three dozen people have frozen to death as a result of heating going out, being trapped, caught in blizzard-like conditions. Even in parts of France. I don't know if you saw it or not but all the fountains in front of the Eiffel Tower froze last week. And we are basking in unusual conditions and they are having equally unusual conditions.

Deb: It's not global then?

Dr. Bob: No. And you don't know what global warming is going to do in a certain location. And that fits into our next discussion.

Let's do glaciers, for example. Antarctica has a massive seasonal ice pack. It is the location of 90-some percent of all the world's fresh water. It's a huge accumulation and storage. But if it gets warmer in global warming, what's going to happen to the extent of the pack ice, the seasonal ice around the continent?

Let's go to the overhead here--my freehand drawing of Antarctica. It's a lot like a catcher's mitt. And there is a Mt. Behling--thought I'd just throw that in. I've been down to the Antarctic five times. And in the early days--this isn't as good a freehand drawing because it's a little thinner here, it's supposed to be thinner. But there's ice here, and ice here, and then the seasonal pack ice, the oceans of course, the world are out here and this tip of the Antarctic Peninsula goes up to South America, just for orientation, and the seasonal pack ice may be within this dotted line. That is, Antarctica is finishing up it's summer and the temperatures will be dropping a degree or two per day. And the pack ice will start to form. It's a lot like Jell-O. I came out by--in February--out from McMurdo. McMurdo Bay is right here--the American base. And this is the Ross Ice Shelf. And there is a volcanic island, Ross Island, and it's Mt. Erebus right in that location. As a matter of fact, the first time I'd been out--I said I've been down five times--the first time I was down was the year in which that tourist airplane crashed into Mt. Erebus, and everyone was killed. They were trying to get everyone a better view and they turned too tightly. They couldn't get out and they crashed into Mt. Erebus.

But, if a global warming condition were to exist, the pack ice would diminish in extent and if the pack ice diminishes, then the air masses coming over open ocean have a better chance of picking up moisture. So that the initial change might be more snowfall on the margins of the continent. And that's not immediately intuitively clear. Furthermore, I have been--most of the times I have been down in this region, Transantarctic Mountains--that's ice free. It's also called, I like to think of it as ice free. Now it just so happens, less then about two percent of the continent is ice free. They call them, colloquially, the dry valleys, but they're anything but dry. You know, rivers, there's a huge lake, there's a moat. You could go swimming in the valley. I usually took my boots and shoes off to walk across the stream because I didn't want to get my feet wet. And then I'd dry my feet on the other side and put my socks and boots on.

Deb: Before the days of Goretex.

Dr. Bob: Before the days of Goretex, that's right. I'm talking kapok folks. But it's nice in the month of December.

Deb: Balmy.

Dr. Bob: Balmy, that's right. But the South Pole is way up there and it's an elevation over 10,000 feet above sea level. We have climatized ourself on my one trip. I took a trip about like that into the east end of Antarctica and we were on traverse and we just did a zigzag path back and forth. And then we stopped at Plateau Station. This is the South Pole, that's Plateau Station. It's up on the polar plateau, very high, 10,000 feet. They brought some of the rest of the people directly from sea level at Ross Ice Shelf. Not a good idea at all, because they left them with us, they were the mechanics and they didn't want to go. We went through about 10 days. We came from the Ross Ice Shelf to the South Pole, which was an elevation difference significant enough. Then we went from the South Pole to where we picked up the vehicles and that was an additional elevation. They brought those folks directly in a 24-hour period and we are unloading the airplane--it's a C-130--and they were running around, they had all this energy in the world. And we said, you'd better not do that. We were real slow. We could not keep up with them. We didn't even try. And within 12 hours, the first guy keeled over. I mean he had a headache that wouldn't go away for 48 hours, because they were oxygen deprived. Their bodies were too attuned to conditions at sea level. They came up--we'd slowed down our whole metabolism. Everything had slowed down to accommodate that higher elevation.

In any event, Antarctica is a continental glacier, a mass of ice, that in many places is frozen to its base. But in some of these areas out here in the peninsula, it isn't frozen to the base. We drilled out in, near one of the stations, Byrd's Station, and there water came up the hole. When we drill in ice, we usually drill with diesel fuel. I know that's not a real good steward of the situation, but we do have to keep the hole open. And we don't want melted water to refreeze. So the diesel fuel doesn't freeze. But when we got down in about five or six thousand feet of ice, water came up the hole that was under pressure. So in that part of Antarctica, it was that pressure melting at the base of the glacier. If you want to talk to your kids about pressure melting, talk to them about ice skating. Because we put our total mass on a very thin metal band in order to get pressure melting. Because it's easier to skate on a very, very thin film of water then it is to skate if it's very, very cold--you're not going to get the pressure melting and it's harder to skate. It's rougher. Because there is no water there to glide on.

So, continental glaciers once covered the United States. And one of the common misnomers, and what I have here--go to the overhead again--the glacial map of Ohio. I'll show you in a moment the glacial map of Pennsylvania. But I won't show you a glacial map of West Virginia. Why not? Glaciers never entered West Virginia.

Deb: Well, you can see the corner of one.

Dr. Bob: You can see the corner. Here's the northern panhandle, right here, Pennsylvania over here, this is West Virginia. We drop this line vertically down and that's the northern panhandle and then bring it across. The glaciers ended about, maybe 12 to 14 miles north. And I tell you we have looked for evidence of glaciers, glacial deposits in West Virginia, and they simply are not there. Now on the geologic map of West Virginia as is behind us, if we could just turn around and focus again behind us, at some places you will find, right behind Deb here, that there are yellow splotches. And the key to the yellow splotches indicates that it's Quaternary age. But those Quaternary deposits are river deposits, not glacial deposits. The glacial deposits are also Quaternary, but in West Virginia it's primarily river deposits, until I show you something else in a moment.

So I've shown you the map and a big map does exist of the state of Ohio. And just to demonstrate that, especially those good folks in the northern panhandle might want to from the state survey, pick up a map. It's a good size map--only costs a couple of bucks. But you can see that even a great portion of southeastern Ohio is too high an elevation. The ice was coming in from Lake Erie. The Lake Erie Basin in the north and the highland areas shunted it so that the ice was moving more towards central Ohio and Columbus, rather than down towards West Virginia, which was simply too high in West Virginia.

If we look on the overhead at the glacial map of Pennsylvania, here again, and I'll bring this in on telephoto a bit, because here is where the Ohio River comes in and we're short about 15 miles. And then, you see here, that there's an area even of New York that wasn't glaciated. But eastern Pennsylvania was glaciated and the glaciers moved into some of these valleys and moved down the valleys but couldn't get on to the high mountain areas in between.

Now even though West Virginia was not glaciated, there was a profound effect. The glacial deposits are not in West Virginia but the outwash deposits are the sands and gravels in the Ohio River Valley. When the ice melted, the gravels and sands were washed down. Additionally, when the glaciers entered into Pennsylvania, the Monongahela River flows to the north. And this is only in general size. Pittsburgh is way up here, Elwood City, Butler, Pennsylvania, that's these areas up here. And then Morgantown is right here, Fairmont. Here's Weston way down at the bottom of the map. So that if I just put this lower part on this was a glacial lake. And the reason that it was a glacial lake was that, most likely, outwash washing out from the glacier dammed the river flowing to the north. And this was a massive lake. Here's Morgantown, Fairmont, Blacksville. Way over here to New Martinsville, off on the edge and probably a divide where the water spilled, Clarksburg, Weston. So in the bottom of these valleys, there was a lake in places two to 400 feet deep.

And here I have a sediment from here in Morgantown. It's dried out now and perhaps you can see it gleam and glisten. It's very soft. Notice that it's coming off. It's almost the consistency of face powder, right? You've used this like talcum powder. So what particle size is this? Clay size. And if you look on the edge, do you get a hint that this is layers? It's a lake sediment, indeed. And this sediment is still remaining in some parts of the valleys. But some of these lake sediments are 900,000 years old, or 800,000 years old. How do we know? Absolute methods of dating. There are little grains of magnetite, not much, but enough that were oriented when they settled down in the lake. They oriented themselves in the pattern of the magnetic field at that time. And then when we go back and collect the samples, show where true north is at the present time, and go back in and measure the orientation of the magnetite grains, we find magnetite grains are reversed. And the last time we have ever gathered all the evidence, and we have a lot of evidence, the last time that the magnetic was reversed was 780,000 years ago. It's been in the same orientation ever since. So the sediments had to be older then 780,000 years because the grains of magnetite were reversed.

Now how do we know the absolute age? We carry it further and go to the islands in Japan, especially where the work was first done, where it's mostly basalt. And then we use radiometric age dating of potassium argon and we can look at basalt because basalt, too, has magnetics in it, little grains. Now it's not only--and you see that the paper is even stained from the iron stain. You see, it's an ochre. And of course if you were an early Native American, you would really value that material. But much of this was collected--some of it is a gray, a darker gray when it's wet, and it's been wet since it's been formed. And now it dries to a darker gray color. But I want to show you something else.

Glaciers don't only deposit in features--in front of glaciers are not only depositing. This is a piece of dolomite, calcium magnesium carbonate. And look at this surface. Let me put it in profile. This was the surface that I collected in a quarry. Is that smooth or is that smooth? The original surface was more like this. This is the way the rock was before the glacier came on top of it. This happens to be a bedding plane, just a few inches deep into the rock. But the glacier came onto this and scoured and polished it. And what are these? Those are striations. Larger cobbles and pebbles were caught up in the base of the ice like sandpaper. It carved these features. And I wish we could find you and show you some of this in West Virginia. We can't. We have no evidence that the glacial erosion or the deposits of glacier--usually the nonsorted one is tilled. T-I-L-L, that's the major deposit. And we find none of that in West Virginia.

We're about ready to close up and we want to share with you just some thoughts about what we'll be doing January 13th. We're back on the air. Now that's going to be on Wednesdays.

And what we are going to do next semester is historical geology. We're going to talk about life and events and the history of the Earth. We begin at the beginning. We even talk about astronomic Earth before Earth was a geologic entity. And we go through a time span of in excess of 4.6 billion years.

Then we will talk about the importance of early life forms on Earth. Where they might have come from. How they might have originated. The speculation. We will be at same downlink sites. We will do a similar pattern of field trips but they're going to be based on fossil hunting. Fossil plants, fossil critters, that sort of thing. We can't, we do have fossil vertebrates in West Virginia. Couple of places. But for the most part, they're very sparsely recorded in the rocks of the Permian age or the very abundant bones of Quaternary animals in caves--really need to be off limits. The Smithsonian has collected around Bowden, in the fish hatchery, incredible fossil remains of Quaternary critters. We'll talk about all of that. We'll bring fossils. You will collect them, sketch them, and draw them.

And the final thing is, that when we talk about physical geology, now this semester we're stewards of the Earth. We can mess things up very easily. We live in dangerous areas but we also destroy delicate materials. We have to be better stewards. We can destroy all the vegetation because then there will be erosion. We can't pave all the ground because we changed the inflow to the ground-water supplies. So time and again, our stewardship of the Earth, we build enormous roadcuts. We drill quarries. We take rocks and materials out of the ground, but in so doing, in West Virginia we expose other rocks that produce acid mine drainage. There are gives and takes in West Virginia. We're debating now the fate of mountaintop removal. That report was given to the Governor just last night. So think about all of that in the context of physical geology.

I've had a lot of fun.

Deb: I have too!

Dr. Bob: And I hope the next time you pass an outcrop, you never think--you just can't pass outcrops again. But be careful out there when you're going 65 miles an hour passing the outcrops. We've had fun. Take care. Thank you, and it's been a great day for a field trip!

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

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