Welcome to Desert Geology, one of our "Special Topics" under Geology 350. This course is designed to introduce the geological processes which form and operate in the deserts of the world. The centerpiece of our section this semester is a Spring Break field trip to the Mojave Desert. The first half of the course will be preparation for the trip, and the second half will be analysis, discussion and review of what we saw and found. This is a half-credit course so we will formally meet for roughly half the time of a regular course (except for the six-day field trip!) and generally do half the work. All the assignments involve writing, presenting and discussing -- no tests or quizzes. Please see the course notes at the end of this syllabus. You will also see that this course is taught with the help of my colleagues Greg Wiles, Brennan Jordan, and Jeanne Fromm. They will present material in class and help lead the spring field trip.

This syllabus is also a newsletter and web resource for the course. It will be updated at least once a week with relevant links and geological news items. Please check it often. Several of our reading assignments will be web-only.

Teaching a course on the geology of deserts has been a dream of mine for years. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do!

Mark A. Wilson

Department of Geology

The College of Wooster

Wooster, OH 44691 USA

The College of Wooster Mojave Desert Field Trip, March 2005. Rainbow Basin.
(Photograph by Buzz Sawyer with Brennan Jordan's camera)

Left to right: Drew Feucht, Mark Wilson, Elyse Zavar, Jesse Wiles, Andy Horst, Kaylin Siegner,
Kate MacMahon, Ryan Barnett, Kamilla Fellah, Anton Heitger, Monica Umstead, Anne Krawiec,
Greg Wiles, Erica Clites, Jeanne Fromm, Brennan Jordan.

Schedule of Lectures

(With Weekly Links to Other Web Resources)

 

Lectures are in Scovel Hall Room 216 on Mondays, 1:00 - 2:20 p.m.

Web Resources for Week #1:

Deserts are extraordinary. I must tell you from the beginning that deserts are my natural environment. The world for me consists of dry, brown, dusty hills where I can see for miles under a brilliant sky. A place so dry the air plucks at your lips and the sand crackles under your feet. And there is always the wind and the sun. Every landscape is quickly divided into the shady and the sunlit, the wind-swept and the protected. The rest of the world with its trees and grass, rivers and lakes, clouds and rain, is an exception for me. The Mojave Desert is my homeland. I grew up in Barstow, California. Rainbow Basin, shown in this wonderful 360-degree photo, is where I had many childhood adventures. I have a passion for deserts, so teaching this course is a rare privilege for me.

During this first week we will discuss the general setting of deserts and the basic geological processes which operate within them. Our initial definition of a desert is the simplest one: a place which receives less than 25 cm (10 inches) of precipitation a year. Deserts can be hot or cold (they are rarely moderate!), they can be filled with life or virtually lifeless (or actually lifeless if we consider Martian deserts), and they can be flat or mountainous. We will be considering the "non-polar" deserts, especially the large ones like the Sonoran, Sahara, Arabian, Atacama, Kalahari, Australian, Gobi, and many more which are lesser known (including the Negev in Israel where Wooster geologists have recently been working). We will often return to the starkly beautiful Death Valley of southern California.

Geology in the News:

"Geology has joined biology in lowering mankind's self-esteem. Geology suggests how mankind's existence is contingent on the geological consent of the planet. Although the planet is hospitable for the moment, it is indifferent -- eventually it will be lethally indifferent -- to its human passengers." George Will wrote this about Krakatoa in 2003, working from a famous quotation attributed to Will Durant. The tsunami catastrophe in Southeast Asia shows us again the truth of this observation. The best web source I've found for news and analysis of the tsunami events is the "Asia Quake Disaster" page of the BBC. An extensive collection of tsunami visualizations and other images can be found on this site by John McDaris of Carleton College.

The tsunami waves which devastated parts of Southeast Asia made it to the Atlantic coast of the United States. They arrived in New Jersey about 32 hours after the earthquake. The highest was only nine inches tall. The waves, in fact, swept over the entire world.

Living bacteria have now been found in very salty brines at the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea. This once again expands the envelope of life. Life has adapted to an extraordinary range of environments, from within our guts to surprising places like this. Evolution is a powerful process.

"The largest explosion ever seen in space" is associated with a supermassive black hole. The waves of energy it has released have actually pushed glaxies around and disrupted the formation of stars. This explosion has been going on for at least a 100 million years, so you didn't miss anything last night.

A giant eagle (not the grocery store!) was at one time the top predator in New Zealand. It fed on another large bird, the famous moa, and may have gone extinct as recently as 500 years ago. Note the role DNA analysis plays in this story.

Throughout this semester we'll visit the websites sorting through the data and images from the spectacularly successful Cassini-Huygens mission to Titan, one of Saturn's moons. This mission is a product of the European Space Agency, with some American collaboration. Some images appear to show a shoreline between a liquid methane sea and an icy methane island! There are even hints of methane river channels. An alien world indeed.

Web Resources for Week #2:

Our topic for this day is almost impossible to summarize in a couple of web-paragraphs. I will briefly outline the geological history of the Mojave Desert, leaving plenty of room for Dr. Jordan to talk about the tectonic and structural context of the Mojave next week. The link to the summary of East Mojave Geology in the reading assignment is simply a time chart showing the major geological events in a complex region. We won't talk about them all!

I will spend most of the period talking about the human history of the Mojave Desert. It in many ways is even more complex than the geology, and it is full of drama, bravery, cruelty, cowardice, creativity, surprises and mysteries -- like most history! The primary characters will include the Mojave Indians, Francisco Garces, the first of the "Spanish Fathers" (as they were always called in my California History classes of childhood), Jedediah Smith (one of my heroes), The Old Spanish Trail, emigrant wagon trains, outlaws, the railroads, the mining industry, Route 66, and much else.

Patrice and I have also worked out a system for collecting the $500 field trip fee. Please make out a check to "The College of Wooster" for this amount, write "Mojave Field Trip" on your memo line, and then give it to Patrice before February 25.

Geology in the News:

As more scientists study the multi-megabytes of seismic and oceanographic data from the 2004 Asian earthquake and tsunami events, we've learned much more about the underlying causes. The human effects grow ever more complex as well. Another website to visit for the latest tsunami news from a scientific perspective is that of the Nature News Service.

An interesting geological debate has been simmering about whether there really are plumes in the mantle. Since the maturation of plate tectonic theory, mantle plumes have been an elegant way to explain features such as the islands of Hawaii and Yellowstone National Park. Alas, elegance is not always a good prediction of whether a theory is correct or not.

The geological dynamics of a moon with methane oceans, methane rain, and continents of ice must be fascinating. That appears to be what we have on Titan, one of Saturn's moons. The latest ideas are here on this BBC webpage, with promises of more revelations next week.

If it looks like a duck ... This article on a possible Cretaceous duck from the western Antarctica will give you insight into the passions that underly some aspects of paleontology. Is this new find the earliest truly modern bird, or is it an "unidentifiable bundle of bones"? No one gets this excited about MY little fossils!

The extinctions at the end of the Permian Period are the greatest ever. The causes of this mass killing have been mysterious ... and hotly debated. Now the consensus seems to be shaping up that the Permian Extinctions were the result of global warming from volcanic eruptions. The more dramatic Impact Theory is losing its hold on scientific opinion.

Web Resources for Week #3:

Dr. Brennan Jordan is our lecturer this week. He will be discussing the general geological framework of western North America, in particular the Cordilleran Orogen. The Basin and Range province is characterized by extraordinary extensional processes that we still do not fully understand. Many of these observations and ideas will be directly applicable to what we see in the Mojave Desert, and some will be important to know as part of our larger picture of western US geology.

Geology in the News:

New bone bits from the early hominid species Ardipithecus ramidus have been found in eastern Africa. It is not a lot of material, but it fills out some of our information about this relatively new species in our family tree.

The evolution of bats may be linked to a global warming about 50 million years ago during the Eocene. This is a cool story, especially since the history of bats has been long characterized as almost completely mysterious.

The Shroud of Turin, which supposedly shows the face of a crucified man purported to be Jesus, has for almost two decades been the classic example of the use of carbon-14 dating to solve mysteries, in this case showing that the shroud is a "medieval fake". Now there is a BBC story that the radiocarbon dating techniques may have been flawed and that the shroud is much older than calculated by scientists. Somewhere there are websites rattling with glee with this one. More later from other scientists.

Could global warming be even worse than we've been told? These are preliminary conclusions from an ingenious project attempting to predict the climate of the 21st Century. Check out the system of interlinked computers at climateprediction.net.

Web Resources for Week #4:

The wind is the part of the desert that I miss the most. There is something primal in the desert wind, the way it can go from a light, caressing breeze to hot breath to a raging dust storm in just minutes. The features the wind creates are among the most attractive images in geology. ( "Of all natural forms, sand dunes are the most elegant - so simple, severe, bare. Nature in the nude." From Desert Images, by Edward Abbey.) Our goal for Monday's lecture is to understand the wind in the desert: where it comes from and what it does as a geological process.

We'll start with an overview of eolian (wind) processes, which this physical geography webpage gives us (more or less). What causes the wind in the first place? How do Mojave Desert winds differ from other wind systems? (OK, that poem isn't so great, but at least you were entertained by the pop-ups. Maybe this Mojave poem by Sylvia Plath is better?) How windy is it in the Mojave Desert right now?

As for the effects of wind in the desert, you'll certainly want to start with some movies of sand movement in wind tunnels (very exciting, especially the close-ups), and read how some Germans have modeled sand dunes in that classic German way of theirs. As for real sand dunes, there are many websites with spectacular photos and descriptions, several emphasizing the geology of sand dunes. We will even see one of the famous deposits of "acoustic sands" on our field trip. (Hearing them is another story. I've never heard the "booming" they sometimes produce.) The movement of sand in deserts is a serious issue, especially when desertification approaches a city, like Nouakchott, Mauritania, in this example.

Finally, we'll look at the issue of dust derived from deserts by the wind. Loess is a deposit of wind-blown silt or clay. (Click on that link and then the little sound icon to hear someone authoritatively misprounounce it.) Dust storms have increased in frequency across the globe as deserts have increased and desert soils have been disturbed. This has very worrying health implications. Desert dust storms are even implicated in the decline of coral reefs.

We will, thankfully, feel only the very healthy Mojave wind on our field trip this spring.

Geology in the News:

Small one-celled creatures have been found living in the deepest water of the oceans -- almost 11 km below the surface. The pressure there is over 1000 times that at the surface. Yet another surprising place we can find that life has colonized. They do not have calcium carbonate shells because they are below the CCD. What do they eat way down there?

This BBC article on the "God Particle" will show you some of the most interesting research being done to test the current model of the Big Bang. The Higgs boson is a particle thought to make all the rest of the subatomic "zoo" actually work to form the stuff of the universe. (No, I don't understand it. I just show it to you!)

It was discovered last week by astronomers in Hawaii that Saturn has a warm vortex of gases at its southern pole. This is the first such warm spot discovered in the solar system. The Earth and some other planets have, of course, cold vortices at their poles. Another delicious scientific mystery!

The extraordinary biologist Ernst Mayr died last week at 100 years of age. It was he who came up with the modern definition of a biological species. He did much else besides, staying active until his last year of life.

Tubs of partially molten wax at Cornell University have proven to be excellent models for plate tectonic processes in the Earth's crust, especially the formation of microplates. Who would have guessed? You can even download movies of this waxy tectonics.

Here's a nice guide to the recent controversies surrounding the teaching of evolution in American schools, including a simple but effective critique of "Intelligent Design". This text has been produced by the Graduate School at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

Web Resources for Week #5:

Deserts are usually such dry places that when rain does come it can bring dramatic effects. Desert soil can shed water quickly, and there are relatively few plants to retard runoff. The result is often a flash flood. Here is a NOAA fact page on predicting flash floods, not all of which are in deserts (thanks in part to deforestation), and here is a NOAA page where you can get the latest flash flood warnings. And please, young geologists, never end up in a narrow canyon during a flash flood.

Alluvial fans and debris cones (3-D photo!) are dramatic water-formed features, and they are well displayed in deserts. They are characterized by their fan shapes (they are really deltas on land) and their poorly-sorted sediments.

On our field trip we will see that wadis (also known as arroyos, washes, or dry river beds) will be our pathways into the desert wilderness. Here's a USGS page about wadi (wash) development in the Mojave. Note how important it is to understand past climate conditions and geomorphology before interpreting present geomorphic features. This is especially true for the Mojave River, which you will soon get to know well.

Want to see more 3-D photographs of Death Valley? They are very cool. We have plenty of the required glasses in Scovel if you want to borrow a pair.

Remember that your Essay #1 is due in class on Monday.

Geology in the News:

A giant Antarctic iceberg near McMurdo Station has at last been grounded and will no longer threaten shipping in and out of the base. It is as big as Long Island, but a lot less crowded. The amount of water it contains is stupendous.

A scientific initiative has begun to produce a giant catalog of life. Every living species will be described and added to a huge database. There are at least 1.7 million living species known today, and there may be more than 10 million still awaiting description. Can this be done, though, with so few trained taxonomists?

The Arecibo telescope in Puerto Rico has begun a systematic search for "dark galaxies". These are humungous clouds of hydrogen and helium which have not collapsed into stars. (Larger than nebulae, I suppose.) Finding them may answer at least some of our questions about the "missing matter" of the universe.

Gliding ants. Maybe now I've seen it all. Who knew? Evolution is an extraordinary process. With the combination of random mutations, unpredictable histories, and selection, look what results! Ants now join a variety of other organisms which can glide through the air without traditional wings.

Web Resources for Week #6:

This week we will finish our discussion of moving water in deserts, and then look at the features which result when that water comes to rest on valley floors. Playas are dry lake beds in closed desert basins. Water reaches them infrequently, and when it does it brings clay and silt and many exotic dissolved minerals. Playa means "beach" in Spanish, which doesn't make much sense to me. In Latin America the Spanish-speakers call them salars ("salt flats"). There are many geological processes on and around playas we will discuss, and I can't resist mentioning that playas are fine places for racing rocket cars, landing aircraft, testing alien spacecraft, firing rockets, and the Burning Man festival. To demonstrate the utility of modern playas, even the U.S. Army has a page on them.

On our field trip to the warm and dry Mojave Desert, we will be staying on the shore of Soda Lake, a playa at the end of the Mojave River. There is a reason why it is called "soda" lake, of course, and that is because of the wide variety of exotic evaporative minerals in the playa deposits. One of the richest sites for the mineral borax is near Trona, California, on the large and ancient playa now called Searles Lake with its fantastic associated "pinnacles". Here is a superb 360-degree view of the Trona Pinnacles. Ironically, in southern California there was more value in these colorless evaporative minerals than in gold. Of course, we will also visit Racetrack Playa and try our hand at guessing why rocks mysteriously move across its surface. If you want detailed information about those exotic playa minerals borax, ulexite and trona, you know where to click! (These sites have excellent interactive crystallographic diagrams. I don't know what to do with them, but they're fun!)

Don't forget about the $500 check for the field trip. It is due by Friday, February 25, to Patrice.

Geology in the News:

The oldest rabbit fossils have been found in Mongolia by a group of German paleontologists. These bones are 55 million years old. Not only do they tell us something about the origin of rabbits, they are important for our studies of the mammalian radiation in the Tertiary.

More evidence that humans are indeed a major contributing cause to recent global warming: new data shows that the oceans are warming as predicted from the amount of carbon dioxide we've added to the atmosphere.

The NASA rover Spirit is still very busy on Mars. It may have found its most important Martian rock yet: a piece of bedrock which shows clear indications of modification by water. But how long ago did liquid water exist on the surface of this small planet? Not for billions of years according to another recent Martian study. And where is all that water now? Maybe locked up in the mineral gypsum.

An ancient crocodile has been described from Late Cretaceous rocks in Brazil. Uberabasuchus indeed is an interesting creature, but its discoverers have obscured its real significance with a lot of hype about the lost continent of Gondwana and so on. Let's just appreciate it for the animal it was!

The oldest known skull of Homo sapiens is now known from Ethiopia. These bone fragments were found 40 years earlier, but only recently have they been dated as 195,000 years old. Once again we see how critical radioactive dating is to unravelling the history of life

Web Resources for Week #7:

The Pleistocene Mojave Desert was not, much of the time, a desert at all. This week we will look in detail at the pluvial lakes which were common in the Mojave and throughout the intermountain west. The vast playas we see today are remnants of these lakes, as are the massive alluvial fans and pediment surfaces. An important lesson gained from studying the Pleistocene history of the Mojave area is that the present landscape is not in equilibrium with present geological processes. Much of what we see is a vestige of the later Pleistocene. This should not be surprising considering that the desert we know today has only been in existence for about 14,000 years.

We will concentrate in this week's lecture on the history of the lakes associated with the Mojave River. The incision of Afton Canyon is a controversy. Was it cut catastrophically in a flood from Lake Manix to Lake Mojave? Or was it cut more gradually? The difference is that one school supports a flood which could have occurred in little more than ten hours, while the other is looking at thousands of years. I favor the quick model because the arguments for it seem better. We can test it out ourselves in the field because we will be living right next to this beautiful canyon. (Oh I love this photo!)

There are also biological vestiges from the cooler and wetter Pleistocene times in the Mojave. The most charismatic organisms we'll look at in this regard are the desert pupfish which are now geographically and genetically isolated in small populations after their lake environments disappeared. We will also examine the distributions of creosote bushes and Joshua trees to see how they too indicate climate change since the Pleistocene.

Will we see a fantastic wildflower show on our Mojave trip? March is the best time. The question is whether the Mojave has had too much rain this winter. You can check out the current weather in Barstow as we prepare for yet another snowstorm this week in Wooster. Sigh.

Check out this photograph taken last week at Badwater on the floor of Death Valley. Can you believe it? Boating in Death Valley? I've never seen anything like it. Record rainfall this month. Thanks to Dr. Jordan for sending me the link.

Geology in the News:

Recent photos of Mars appear to show a frozen sea of water underneath a covering of Martian dust. The team of European scientists analyzing these images believes the water is from a catastrophic flood about five million years ago which eventually "froze out". The age estimate is surely just an educated guess.

An invisible galaxy with no stars! A British team of astronomers has found what must be a galaxy of dark matter which emits no visible light. It was found using radio waves. This is a major clue as to what dark matter actually is (if "is" can be used here!).

Construction in the Central Valley of California has revealed a rich assortment of fossil mammals approximately 15 million years old. They are now being studied at my alma mater, the University of California, Berkeley. This is the first time I've heard the term "avocational paleontologist".

The "greatest portrait of Saturn yet" has been released from the modest people running the Cassini space probe. Indeed, it is very nice. OK, I'll give in: it is fantastic. You can download several versions of it directly here from the LPL laboratory.

Web Resources for Week #8:

It has been much fun for us working out the plan for our Mojnave Desert field trip less than two weeks from now. In class we will discuss the following stops and other activities. Of course, this is all an estimate subject to change because of weather, flooding (I never thought I'd have to say this!), resources, and our developing interests. Our objective is simply to explore as much of the Mojave as we can. Be sure to bring to class your completed Information Sheet and the Sharp & Glazner guidebook. Here are the days and their projected events --

Saturday, March 19: Arrive in Las Vegas at 10:45 a.m. We'll be out of that strange city by noon, probably eating a fast food lunch on its outskirts. Our first geological stop will be at Red Rocks Canyon National Conservation Area just outside the city. Here we'll see beautiful Mesozoic sandstones and a tremendous thrust fault. (I did my dissertation in the Spring Mountains above.) We'll then drive to our lodgings at the Desert Studies Center on the shore of Soda Dry Lake. We'll spend the rest of the day exploring our new neighborhood.

Sunday, March 20: Our objective on this day is to explore the southern portion of Death Valley National Park. We plan to hit as many interesting sites as we can as far north as the Furnace Creek Visitor Center. This will include the turtlebacks, Shoreline Butte (if we can get there across the renewed Lake Manly), lots of beautiful alluvial fans, faults, and ventifacts.

Monday, March 21: Time to see Manix Lake and the beautiful stratigraphy and structures around (yes) Barstow. We will start early in the morning (of course! don't think you're sleeping in!) and work our way through the ancient lake beds moving west. I hope we can have lunch in the extraordinary Rainbow Basin north of downtown Barstow. On the way we plan to see examples of folds, faults and detachment structures. On the way back we will visit Afton Canyon and look for evidence of the draining of Manix Lake.

Tuesday, March 22: This will be a long driving day, but well worth it. Again we will head west, passing near Barstow and through Ridgecrest. Our goal is to visit the Trona Pinnacles.

Wednesday, March 23: Not as much driving this day as we head south and east into the Mojave National Preserve. So much to see here. On the way to the Kelso Dunes we will stop and look at some Cambrian limestones with trace fossils and oncolites. We will visit the broad and large Cima Dome, the Granite Mountains (check out the associated geologic map), and the incredible volcanism at Hole in the Wall. (I can hardly sit still to write all this. What a cool trip this will be.)

Thursday, March 24: This is our catch-up day. We'll look at the Tecopa lake beds and volcanic ashes, the tuff at Resting Springs Pass, and the Amargosa Chaos outside Death Valley at Exclamation Rock.

Friday, March 25: We'll be up early to drive back to Las Vegas, drop off our rental vehicles and board the 11:10 a.m. flight back to Cleveland. The weather will be perfect for our last view of the Mojave Desert.

Geology in the News:

The force of the tsunami in southeast Asia late last year has apparently revealed archaeological remains of a "lost" port city in India. During the passage of the wave's trough (when sea level appeared to recede), parts of structures were revealed to onlookers. Now archaeologists are following up on the find.

Deinonychosaurs (bipedal carnivorous dinosaurs) have now been found in the Cretaceous of Argentina. We now know this dinosaur spread out much more widely than thought. Prior to this discovery of a distinct fossilized foot, these critters had only been known in North America and Asia. The South American variety apparently show the effects of evolutionary isolation, although how much we can tell from a single foot is debateable.

NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has detected galaxies over 11 billion light years away. Of course, you know this means that we are looking at the light which came from extremely young galaxies, thus giving us a direct look into the distant past.

Snake venom apparently evolved from proteins already in the snakes. Who would have guessed that we could use genetic technology to track down answers to esoteric questions like these? It is extraordinary what we can now do.

Worried about the ozone layer? Yes, human technology can degrade it, but look what happened to the ozone layer during the solar storms of 2003. It is humbling to know that minor perturbations in the Sun can have such dramatic effects on our little planet.

Web Resources for Week #9:

Here are the first photographs I have to post of our wonderful field trip last week. We'll have more and better photographs later.

For today's class, please bring in the specimens you collected on the trip. We'll review our journey and the many things we saw, then talk about how we can further study some of our samples.

The staff of the Desert Studies Center, by the way, had the highest compliments for our group. They enjoyed your enthusiasm, humor, and the care you showed the staff and the facilities. I am very proud of Wooster geology students -- with good reason.

Geology in the News:

It's not geology, but it is evolution: the Bubonic Plagues in Europe may have given Europeans a genetic edge for resisting AIDS. Hard to imagine a silver lining to the Black Death, but this is a tiny one. When you think about it, the plagues were very effective genetic filters. What other effects will we find in our genome?

I'm not sure I believe it yet. Two Berkeley physicists claim there is very strong evidence that mass extinctions have occurred with a frequency of about once every 62 million years. The reason for this cyclicity is debated, of course, but an interval like this demands an astronomical mechanism. Much more on this later!

Why is there so little melted rock at the famous Meteor Crater in Arizona? The meteorite wasn't traveling fast enough to melt significant amounts of rock according to the calculations of some British astronomers.

The oldest human protein has now been described from a 75,000 year old Neandertal skeleton. If we can keep doing this kind of work we can learn even more from ancient proteins than DNA in sorting out family trees.

Life with lava. What is it like to live on the slopes of an active Hawaiian volcano? For one thing, you learn why such land is cheap.

Web Resources for Week #10:

Monica's topic is cryptobiotic soils and Elyse's topic is Quaternary climate change in deserts. More links later!

Geology in the News:

The apparent recovery of soft tissue from a Tyrannosaurus rex femur is the biggest news in paleontology this year. What is this strange elastic stuff? Clearly it is organic and dinosaurian, but whether it actually contains proteins, blood cells and the like is still debateable. Like many new finds in dinosaur work, it is best to wait a bit while scientists sort it out.

Our recent geology-biology speaker Deborah Kelley is mentioned in this article about the "Lost City" deep-sea hydrothermal vent field and the number of "primitive" microbes found associated with these hot water vents. The inevitable ideas about the origin of life at vents are here as well.

At least some plants can use old copies of genes from distant ancestors to repair damaged DNA. As the article says, it is like using old copies of an electronic document to fix a new version which was somehow corrupted. This is a new mechanism to evolutionary scientists, and it has considerable implications for the modes and pace of evolution.

"Dark Energy" has become an orthodox explanation for various patterns weobserve in the Universe. Maybe, though, dark energy doesn't really exist? Challenges have arisen from physicists who, naturally, have some difficulty with hypotheses which cannot be tested.

Could it be that some movie theaters in the South are not showing an IMAX film on volcanoes because it mentions the idea that life may have arisen near deep-sea hydrothermal vents? I can practically guarantee it. Such is the state of American science education these days.

Web Resources for Week #11:

Kaylin (extension in the Mojave) and Anton (flash floods) are our speakers this week.

Geology in the News:

It is not often that geologists are involved in scientific fraud, but a case in developing at the beleagured Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Site in Nevada that may indeed be a case of "cooking" the scientific data. We desperately need to deposit our high-level nuclear waste somewhere, and Yucca Mountain seems to be the best place. It may not happen in our lifetimes, though, especially if proponents of the site engage in fraud.

More than half the world's population lives in areas subject to massive natural disasters, recent studies show. How pleasant Ohio is in this regard! (Although tornadoes do give me pause.)

Sahelanthropus tchadensis is a primate fossil about 6-7 million years old found in Chad, northern Africa. Is it the link between chimpanzees and the hominids? We don't know yet, but new reconstructions of the flesh on the bones is giving us new clues.

The marsupial lion, which fortunately went extinct about 40,000 years ago, had the most powerful bite of any mammal, living or dead. Thylacoleo carnifex was a nasty-looking beast, that's for sure. It lived in Australia.

New calculations (and there are always new calculations with this type of speculation) appear to show that there are many more "earth-like" planets out there than we have previosuly suspected. This kind of science must be frustrating -- you never know when you're right.

Web Resources for Week #12:

Kamilla is our speaker this week. Her topic is hydraulic mining.

Geology in the News:

An ancient human skeleton found in Washington known as Kennewick Man has been a source of controversy for years as scientists want to study it and local Indian tribes want to bury it without further analysis. At issue is whether this man had any connection with the present tribes (and it is clear he didn't). Now new legislation again threatens scientific access to this unusual skeleton.

Here's an idea that a supernova producing a gamma-ray burst caused the Ordovician extinctions. do you see ANY evidence here for this idea? Sure, we can model it ...

A cool new study has been initiated by the National Geographic Society and IBM to plot the migrations of ancient people -- essentially answering the question of how various peoples got to where they are today. The data will come from a massive human DNA survey. You can participate, although it will cost you $100 and some cheek cells.

A German anthropologist apparently faked the dates of ancient human remains found in Europe. Quite suddenly, Reiner Protsch von Zieten was revealed to have falsified and manipulated the dates of fossils and sub-fossils and to have plagiarized the work of others. Some say the chronology of human occupation of northern Europe over the past 40,000 years will have to be redone. This fraud has now been forced into a disgraced retirement.

The Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP -- the publishers of Skeptical Inquirer) have unveiled a new website called Creationwatch. It is an excellent place to get the latest news on the anti-evolution movement, and ideas about how to fight it.

Web Resources for Week #13:

The last of our student presentations: Erica (recent volcanism in the Mojave), Ryan (the effects of livestock on erosion) and Kate (archaeology of the Mojave Desert).

Geology in the News:

Here's a National Geographic web article on that female dinosaur (an oviraptorosaur) recently found in the Cretaceous of China with two unlaid eggs inside. Note the similarities the paleontologists cite between dinosaurs and birds. Here's the same story from the Los Angeles Times.

Spend enough time with a particle collider and I'm convinced you will see just about everything matter and energy can do. The latest study appears to show that a very early state (very early!) of the Universe was "liquid-like". Yet another odd concept to wrap our finite minds around.

The world's largest iceberg, at least for now, has collided with the tongue of a glacier jutting into the sea in Antarctica. I can't think of any significance for this event, but the photographs are cool!

A volcano in the Comoros Islands in the Indian Ocean is erupting, causing considerable disruption for thousands of islanders. If you look on a map you can see the plate tectonic reasons for an eruption here. The Comoros are where the first coalacanths were found.

I like this recent compilation of "13 things which do not make sense" in modern science. Read through these just in case you think everything is figured out

Web Resources for Week #14:

Our last day! All we are doing is collecting the research papers and distributing the course evaluation forms. We'll also remember that wonderful field trip ...

Geology in the News:

It is no longer a question that the Earth's atmosphere is warming, and now we have direct evidence that deep-sea waters are warming as well. Remember one of the primary dangers of oceanic warming is that more methane is released from hydrates, further adding to the greenhouse effect, further warming the oceans, releasing still more methane ... Note the language in this article about the possibility of "sudden catastrophic change".

I'll try not to have just bad news, but here's more: the ozone layer over the Arctic is at its thinnest ever recorded. We thought it was "healing" from the abuse it has lately suffered, but apparently not. Now work begins to see if a rise in skin cancers is correlated with ozone lose. Wear your sunscreen!

Yes, the evolution debate has returned to Kansas as modern creationists (euphemistically known as supporters of "Intelligent Design") attempt to again reduce the teaching of evolution in public schools and introduce pseudoscience. Note that scientists are going to boycott hearings this month because they believe they are rigged in favor of the anti-evolutionists. It is rarely a good idea to disengage.

Our friend methane is found in the atmosphere of Titan, along with other hydrocarbons. The usual claim is made here that this observation will help us better understand the origin of life on Earth. I don't see how, but such words can bring in grant money.

Since this is a half-credit course we will expect to do about half the work of an ordinary advanced geology course. That is if we don't count all that time on the field trip! (Which will be so much fun.) Here are the primary elements of this course:

Field trip.--The Mojave Desert field trip is the most important thing we will do. It is where we'll actually see what we've been talking about, and you will also be collecting resources on this trip for your own research projects. Our plans are to leave Cleveland-Hopkins airport on Saturday, March 19, and return to Cleveland-Hopkins on Friday, March 25. We can transport you from Wooster to the airport and back, but if you're coming from somewhere else you'll need to make those arrangements on your own. The trip begins with a flight to Las Vegas (which will give some of you your first views of the desert southwest). Once there we will rent vans and drive into southeastern California, staying at the Desert Studies Center, a field station near my hometown of Barstow. From that base we will explore Death Valley and other parts of the eastern Mojave Desert. Each student will have a particular research topic related to some aspect of desert geology we will see on the trip. Most of the expenses for this trip will be paid out of endowed funds in the Geology Department. All that we require from you is $500 to partially cover transportation costs. This fee must be paid before the trip.

Writing and speaking.--This is a writing course and so we will fill the requirements with a series of diverse writing assignments, discussion of scientific writing, and peer review. You will have at least two short essays on topics related to desert geology which appear in the news or recent scientific literature. These will be assigned in the middle and end of the semester. You will also have a research paper roughly 10-15 pages long on a topic of desert geology related to our field trip. (Be sure to see our departmental writing guide.) This research paper will also be the basis of a class presentation you will give in the last part of the semester. We will discuss these assignments in more detail in class. Note that there are no tests, no quizzes, and no final examination.

Participation.--Desert Geology meets once a week (Mondays, 1-2:20 p.m., Scovel 216). I will expect you to be present at each lecture, to do the assigned readings, and to ask and answer questions. I will also expect you to be active participants on the field trip. This participation will be 10% of your final grade. I don't think we'll have any problems with this -- you all have an "A" in participation unless you show me otherwise.

Sharp, R.P. and Glazner, A.F. 1997. Geology Underfoot in Death Valley and Owens Valley. Mountain Press Publishing Company (Missoula, Montana), 321 p. [Readings are listed in the lecture outline as "S&G".]

Note that we also have some required readings from the Web. These are linked in the "reading" category of the relevant weeks in the syllabus.