Batholith. I love that word. It is a portmanteau of “depth” (bathos) and “rock” (lithos), literally meaning “deep rock,” but sounds like you’re trying to say “basilisk” after having burned your tongue on hot coffee.

On Sunday, Racy of the Racy Mind, VirgoTex (whom you all know by now as she who puts the Town in Back Of Town) and I hiked the Enchanted Rock granite batholith in the Llano Uplift area of central Texas. It took us approximately 2.5 hours to hike up and down a deceptively easy 425 feet; as Virgo said, “You think you’re getting close to the top, and then there’s more top after that.” We could have accomplished it faster, I suppose, but the point of a hike is hiking and not a race to the top and back.

As I get older, I am more a consummate scientist (“Consummate Vs!”) and less a geologist, and increasingly piece together the immediate and more nuanced relationships between the earth and the things that live in and on it. When I was a geology undergraduate, my approach was “Cool rock! FIND ALL THE SAMPLES. KNOW ALL THE THINGS.” This attitude has now morphed into “Cool rock! What does it tell me about the larger geologic history of this place? Also, notice how it has eroded and broken down to its constituent minerals and how some minerals form one type of soil on which X species of plants grow, and house these specific animals and birds, while others weather or are transported elsewhere to form different deposits and soils.”

Mineral type, grain size, chemical content, distance from source, chemical breakdown, clay content, soil formation, that the cacti and peaches love a certain type of acidic soil and the peach pie served at the cute little cafe in Llano. It’s a contained system, this earth, and I don’t bring up this observation from a standpoint of hippy-kumbaya-interconnectedness or simply being older, but one of practicality: Being open to different inputs and practicing the art of making the right connections among them makes you a better-equipped human, much less a scientist. Even as a scientist, detective work yields better results if you step back and focus your eyes beyond your area of specialty. This is why I still want to be a crime scene forensic geologist when I grow up [insert mental image of me whipping off my sunglasses all Caruso-styleeee].

Back to Enchanted Rock. If it’s one of twelve batholiths and surrounding metamorphics that constitute the Llano Uplift, why is it up here at the earth’s surface? In fact, why is it higher than surrounding rocks for miles and miles? Rob Reed’s Llano Uplift site has very detailed descriptions of the (debate surrounding the) mechanics and timing of these preCambrian granites and schists exposed in the middle of a much younger Texas geology. My Cliff’s Notes version goes like this:

1) Uplift by Metamorphism, Deformation and Intrusion: Mesoproterozoic (~1.5 billion years ago) sedimentary rocks metamorphosed into schists and intruded by granites, including Enchanted Rock and surrounding granite batholiths, during the Grenville orogeny around 1.1 billion years ago. This resulted in the formation of very thick continental crust in this area. So, the “Uplift” has always been relatively high with respect to its surroundings. (Can you say “positive gravity anomalies,” kids?)

Vein (with Virgo's finger for scale)

2) Continued Uplift by Tectonics and Erosion: Deposition of sands and limestones occurred through much of the Paleozoic (540-300 million years ago). Erosion of the Uplift’s rocks probably continued in this time. The late-Paleozoic Ouachita orogeny seems to have contributed to another re-Uplift and exposure of the preCambrian rocks. The deposition-erosion cycle chugged along through the Miocene (15 million years ago) movement along the Balcones Fault Zone, which pushed the Uplift’s rocks higher than the rocks to the southeast of the fault zone.

3) Even More Uplift and Weathering/Erosion: All through this time, from around 1 billion years ago to now, the rocks have experienced varying degrees of uplift and weathering/erosion. Uplift or not, two phenomena you can count on beyond death and taxes are weathering and erosion. (Weathering is the in-place breakdown of a rock by physical and chemical means and erosion is the movement of weathered material from its source.)

The view from Enchanted Rock

So, from when they were first exposed to the present time, the granites and metamorphic rocks of the Uplift have moved upward in response to the forces of buoyancy, tectonics and burial. And the moment you move rock relatively up, *BAM!* wind and water begin to eat into it. When we were on the top of Enchanted Rock on Sunday, it was very windy and heavy rains had come through the night before – we saw chemical weathering, gravel formation and sediment transport before our very eyes. Granites display an additional weathering feature in that they exfoliate (yes, think skin exfoliation) on the removal of overburden or pressure, which is why you see sheets/sheaths of granite that look like they’re ready to slide off the surface any minute now.

Exfoliation

Wait a moment here. Take the geological action that we saw in 2.5 hours and begin to envision a billion years of it. Think of how much sediment this group of rocks has generated and how far it must have traveled and been buried by now to possibly be re-intruded by igneous rocks and be metamorphosed elsewhere some day. Tell me it doesn’t make you trip backwards in awe of space and time and this ball of rock that makes all of this possible. I cannot think of doing anything else in life besides geology. At a crime scene. With cool sunglasses to take off.

***

If you would like to visit Enchanted Rock and the surrounding Texas Hill Country, here is a handy-dandy set of geology links to peruse before you head out.

1. The aforementioned Llano Uplift site (which, hilariously, describes everything we’ve covered above as “an island of rock excitement adrift in a sea of Cretaceous limestones whose only redeeming value is the oil in them.” Not true. Hill Country = pretty + aquifer.)
2. An indispensable Fredericksburg to Enchanted Rock Road log which you Must Have in the car. The log narrates the geology along Highway 965 between the town of Fredericksburg and Enchanted Rock Park and beyond to the town of Llano. If for nothing else, follow along so you know when to look for the caliche pit and the “gorgeous, panoramic view of Enchanted Rock and the surrounding countryside laid out from skyline to skyline.”
3. My Geology of the Llano Uplift and Texas Hill Country pre-read guide, which consists mainly of maps, photos and overviews to get you quickly oriented to central and southeastern Texas geology. Each page has links to the source(s) for even further reading. Nice thing about this Google doc is that it is a very specific and breathing document that can be crowd-edited if I open up permissions.
4. The Enchanted Rock State Natural Area topographic and trail map. Take water, wear boots, look out for rattlesnakes and *sadface* don’t beat on the rocks to take samples home.
5. My Enchanted Rock Flickr photo set containing the photos you see here and more. All of my photographs are available under a CreativeCommons BY-NC-SA 3.0 license, so feel free to use them for teaching and/or open research purposes.

Little Rock (L) and Enchanted Rock

In the latest American Association of Petroleum Geologists Explorer, geology professor Sharon Mosher offers some great insight into the future of our profession at a time when fewer students are graduating with geology degrees* while the industry need for geoscientists is at an all-time high.

“There’s still a tendency to emphasize field work and travel, but many students now don’t find this attractive,” Mosher noted. “They want families and a stable home life and don’t want to travel.

“Additionally, most first generation college students equate field work to manual labor and aren’t interested,” she noted, “plus they may be reluctant to leave their community.”

The folly of using field work as a lure for students today becomes even more apparent when considering the bulk of the professional jobs they ultimately will take on, for the most part, require staying indoors in front of a computer.

On reading this article, I posed the following questions to the geoscience community on Twitter.

1. How to attract students to [geoscience studies] in an era when education isn’t valued as an end in itself and has become a conveyor belt business?

2. Then again, if [current] end goal of higher ed is just to get a job, the geoscience industry is hiring! So, where are the applicants? What’s the hurdle?

To which I got several telling responses, but two that really stood out. The first was from Erik of Eruptions Blog, a geoscience professor himself:

“I think we’re stuck in a loop where many faculty don’t even think to recommend industry jobs to students.”

and the other was a reply to both Erik and me from Infrasound Huntress:

“Very true! My adviser is still in his ‘first job.’”

Are you hearing this? Professors and full-time researchers are needed now more than ever, but the inflexibility and lack of vision, versatility and diversity of their current incarnation may be their own undoing. Fewer geoscientists are being made for academia and industry.

On cue, this Inside Higher Ed article on chemistry academics is making the science blog rounds today: Why Women Leave Academia. As the author suggests, feel free to apply the learnings to other science departments.

… By the third year, the proportion of men planning careers in chemistry research had dropped from 61% to 59%. But for the women, the number had plummeted from 72% in the first year to 37% as they finish their studies.

If we tease apart those who want to work as researchers in industry from those who want to work as researchers in academia, the third year numbers are alarming: 12% of the women and 21% of the men see academia as their preferred choice.

… Universities will not survive as research institutions unless university leadership realizes that the working conditions they offer dramatically reduce the size of the pool from which they recruit.

Two articles on different aspects of the same crisis published in the same week: While the research it generates is relevant and critical, academia has created a self-promoting infrastructure and surrounding bubble, which would be fine if it didn’t a) make it impossible for scientists to make more of their own and b) ignore economic needs and life realities in the process.

If you don’t believe me, have an honest chat with some young and female professors. They love science and, for this, they try so hard to be part of the club and play its game, but they will tell you that the pull of a balance between work and life, better pay and newer processes and technologies is very compelling.

* The University of Wisconsin Department of Geoscience seems to buck the low enrollment trend, with twice as many declared Geology majors this year than in the past. When asked what gives, one undergrad offered, “We’re probably seeing that there are great careers ahead for us.” Hmmm. I’m in the process of designing a survey for these undergraduate majors centered on what brought them to geology. I’d also like to see how many of them actually graduate with geology degrees.

In honor of this day, I give you two simple and great online tutorials on geophysical principles and refraction seismology. There will be a quiz.

Cari The Geologist And Certified U2 Freak is sure to love this post.

Volcanoclast hosts this month’s Accretionary Wedge on countertop geology.

Have you seen a great countertop out there?  Sure, everyone says it’s “granite”, but you know better.  Take a picture, post it on your own blog or send it to me and I’ll post it for you.  Do you think you know what it is or how it was formed?

I was all set to write about the rapakivi granite (that’s “Baltic brown” to you realtors out there, who refer to everything as granite or marble) in my kitchen when, hark, from the sky down came a reminder of a really cool countertop of yesteryear. Black marble with deformed fossils. Or more precisely, a lightly-toasted, black, fossiliferous, Irish limestone in the shape of a large octagon that belongs to U2.

Some science channel or the other provides constant background noise in my house (with signal being occasional exclamations such as “That in NO WAY could have caused the K-T extinction,” “When will these TV earthquake scientists balls up and start talking about strain instead of stress?”, “That 3D dinosaur has more feathers than our last Thanksgiving turkey” and “Really, did that American geologist just say MOGMA?!” There’s also the gratuitous repetition of “bass-solt” after a Britisher says the word “basalt.” Nope, never really left fifth grade.) For the last few days, a Science channel commercial on heavy rotation has been the trailer for U2′s new documentary From The Sky Down.

The U2 fans are going to be on me like a pack of rabid … U2 fans for this, but one can only take so much Bono cooing about the transition from playing notes to finding The Great Pumpkin or something while creating Achtung Baby. It’s like those who say they found god in geology or New Orleans; a lot of times life simply boils down to being really good at something and enjoying doing it. For the good times and cash money.

The roof over the bar (photo by bobsrocket on Flickr CC-BY-NC-SA)

Anyway, Accretionary Wedge. Countertops. U2 commercial. Of course! The Kilkenny marble countertop of Dublin’s Octagon Bar in the Clarence Hotel owned by Bono and The Edge. I’ve been in there twice, but it wasn’t until the second time, when the place was a lot less crowded, that I nodded off looked down, noticed the fossils, especially the sheared brachiopod (see above – bottom right), and realized that I was looking at the beginning stages of a marble with preserved fossil fragments. The bartender is usually asked when Bono’s coming in or if she’s waited on The Edge so was really surprised when she caught me scrutinizing the bar and asking her if she knew its source. That it’s Irish is all she knew which sealed it – Lower Carboniferous “marble” from County Kilkenny in the southeast of Ireland. Not to be confused with a Kilkenny stout, which I am pretty sure can be had at the Octagon Bar while listening to The Joshua Tree, which in my opinion was the best U2 album ever.

Is there anything you cannot do, Ireland?

Further reading: Kilkenny Geology

Ropy lava in cross section view. With scale, because that’s how I (rock and) roll.

“I burned the candle at both ends and it often gave a lovely light.”

To mark the passing of Christopher Hitchens, today’s rock is the Hadean Acasta gneiss on display in the Smithsonian Museum. Give hell hell, Hitch!

Basil Tikoff and Steve Marshak, my graduate and undergraduate structural geology thesis advisors respectively, at the famous Van Hise Rock in Baraboo, Wisconsin.

One dreary Wisconsin day right before Christmas, D and I drove down a grey country road towards Manitowoc. We stepped out of the car for a minute and, to our chagrin, the car kept going without us. Suddenly, stop lights appeared out of nowhere and we followed the vehicle as it continued forward through these newly-lighted intersections narrowly avoiding collisions with giant pickup trucks and snow plows. Shortly before we caught up, huffing and panting, the car had veered off into a field and crashed into a barn, its engine block having been spit out onto an unsuspecting and now very bludgeoned-to-death cow. Distant screams and wails indicated that other parts of the car had landed in a farmer’s home and caused further death and dismemberment. Oh no, what had I done now? A surge of pain and fear went through me and the ghost of this rock appeared before … I woke up.

It’s gorgeous, isn’t it? A trifecta of geology. Basalt, fossil coral and iron staining of the fossil. Snorkeling off the Kona coast, D and I saw thousands upon thousands of live Milleporidae (fire coral) and Faviidae (brain coral) growing on basalt boulders washed out to sea. Often, I’d come up to clean my mask, put it back on and then half-submerge it to visually straddle two worlds – Planet Of The Apes above and The Life Aquatic below the water line of the Hawaiian islands. Next time, I will have a waterproof camera on me.

I found this piece of that underwater world on a Kona beach and decided to keep it. John G asked if I knew what I was doing; did I really want to incur the wrath of Pele by taking a piece of her off the Big Island? When I brought the rock back to Waikiki, John’s assistant freaked out as well and said I was welcome to mail it back to her if my luck started to sour. Some of you may have heard of the belief that taking rocks off the Hawaiian islands results in bad luck. It’s big on the islands, having taken deep root even in otherwise rational people. Scientists don’t believe in any of that pish-posh hocus-pocus mumbo-jumbo, or at least we ought not to. And, moreover, I’m a geologist, one who understands and appreciates Pele and her rocks, and didn’t take it from a national park, so I get a pass.

Then why the sinking feeling inside each time I consider this sample? And that dream! If you break it apart logically, I was involved in a really scary car wreck almost exactly four years ago to the day, D and I are driving up to Wisconsin for Christmas, we are going to be forced to make a hard decision soon and, for Pete’s Pele’s sake, I have bags of Hawaiian beach sand that didn’t bother the Hawaiians and don’t don chains of Christmas past and future and haunt me like this damned rock. Pele is possessive of her rocks, but not their constituent minerals? What kind of dumbass logic is that? And yet, almost every single day since we have returned from Hawaii, something has gone south to the point that yesterday afternoon, I had to sit down and declare to the universe, “OH COME ON.”

To top it all off, the thing is in the shape of an eye. Just staring at me. Like from on top of Mordor. With Sauron, laughing at me as I recount my dream of cow murder. “You killed Milky. Milky, nooooooo! Hahahaha*snort*hahaa!” (Actually, that’s what D says to me each time I bring it up.)

Respect Pele and send it back? Or put on my big girl socks and keep it? Let me know.

(I’m probably going to mail it back to John as an experiment. If things continue to flounder after I’ve repatriated the offender, then it’s just me and life being, you know, life.)

GeoEvelyn has declared this Geology-Picture-A-Day Week and I thought I’d join in. Mostly since I need a couple of things identified.

Found this chunk of aa (rubbly basalt) in the roof of a collapsed lava tube right next door to where we stayed on the Big Island of Hawaii. What are the growths/precipitates on the aa surface? They look like tiny little mushrooms but are actually crystalline. American nickel for scale.

In National Geographic’s Finding The Next Earth, an astronomer enters the Gemini Observatory at Mauna Kea and begins to weep tears of joy on seeing a brand new space telescope. There’s no crying in science, but I get it. The stuff we see and achieve is often too damned beautiful not to be overwhelmed with emotion. It’s the same way I felt when I first laid eyes on the Halema’uma’u summit crater inside the Kilauea caldera on the big island of Hawaii a few weeks ago. It’s all black rock and toxic quantities of sulfur dioxide to you, but for us geologists who love our planet, alighting upon one of the world’s most famous active volcanoes is a life goal and akin to a religious experience. New crust forms right beneath our feet, the material having traveled miles up from the mantle, pushing, transforming, being transformed, rising into the atmosphere and, in the process, causing goosebumps of scientific elation. There is nothing more right and perfect than this moment.

Until your husband comes along and says, “Oh geez, are you crying?!”

Our day started on the southern flanks of Mauna Loa with a drive from Oceanview to Southpoint or Ka Lae, the southermost point in the 50 United States, situated at 18.91°N 155.68°W. Well below the Tropic of Cancer, but a stark reminder that it’s been a long time since I’ve been in the southern latitudes which needs correcting soon.

We then drove past many large windmills, Hawaiian grass-fed beef cattle and zebras (don’t ask) towards Hilo. After puttering around the town of Volcano (and noticing the Google Streetview car parked at a pub there) we made our way over to the national park. The rest of this post describes the stops we made on Kilauea along with pictures, some pithy remarks and tips should you choose to visit there some time.

The entrance to Volcanoes National Park sits right between Mauna Loa and Kilauea [MAP]. At Kilauea, the park is designed to contain the main summit caldera in which sits the Halema’uma’u crater (seen above) and Puʻu ʻŌʻō (or, more simply, Puu Oo), a cinder cone in the eastern rift zone of Kilauea. Puu Oo has been erupting and jettisoning lava into the sea continuously since the beginning of 1983. You can look at that either as 4/5th of the time I’ve been alive or as 7/1000000000th the age of the earth. A sense of temporal scale is handy in situations like this.

Active geology means active road construction and maintenance (your tax dollars at awesome work) so getting from point to point often requires sitting in “traffic” and staring at … steam vents that pop up where they feel like it.

Or parking the car and hiking to your next point of interest. The first time we stopped was at some vents into which people were throwing coins as offerings to Pele or through that unexplainable human desire to throw coins into places we cannot reach. D and I walked over to another steam vent and discussed the expelled gases – water vapor, sulfur dioxide, carbon dioxide. I explained that they are released during magma depressurization as it rises towards the surface and that I could also smell methane and hydrochloric acid in the mix. This elicited a dirty look from a young lady in flouncy skirts whose prayer while facing the vent in question had been disrupted by me and my scientific mambling. I should have told her to thank me for keeping her face from peeling off in an hour or so.

On to the volcanoes themselves. We drove west on Crater Rim Drive from the visitor center to see the Halema’uma’u crater from two locations: first at where I had my aforementioned epiphany and second from behind the Jaggar Museum. I highly recommend the short hike from the first lookout point to the museum as you get better and better vantage points from which to see Mauna Loa and peer into the Halema’uma’u fuming vent, and to walk by the USGS Hawaii Volcano Observatory. Also, inside the museum you see artistic depictions of Goddess Pele, who makes her residence at Kilauea. I like this one in particular because it reminds me of myself and most women during the course of any given month. Don’t piss off Pele, man, or she will cut you.

Crater Rim Drive is closed beyond this point all the way to where it meets Chain Of Craters Road, which takes you down to the sea. There are signs along the side of the road that tell you to keep your windows rolled up and to close your AC vents to keep from breathing the mix of toxic gases. Ever so often, we’d roll down the windows to take pictures and D would say, “Do you smell that? Smells like masala!” In truth, he first said, “Smells like curry!” and I had to correct him that what the west refers to as curry is actually what we call masala. Anyway, toxic volcanic gases smell like masala. Great. Apparently Pele will cut you … and eat your heart with macadamia nuts and a nice plum wine.

Now, onto giant, gorgeous lava tube beneath giant, gorgeous fern forest! We drove back east on Crater Rim Drive past the Visitors Center to an overlook from which you can see Kīlauea Iki, a beautiful pit crater just to the east of the Kīlauea summit.

Check out the fractures on the rim, probably caused by deflation after eruption (Who has two thumbs and is not a volcanologist? Me. So, please feel free to clarify, theorize, etc. in the comments below.)

From there, D and I walked down to the Thurston Lava Tube. I have never seen taller and more lush fern forests in my entire life, truly a botanist’s paradise. This would be as good a time as any to note the abundance of microclimates on the Big Island of Hawaii and how geology, topography and climate affect the evolution of any given flora and fauna. Of course, it’s hard for me to tell what is native to Hawaii and what came over when people increasingly migrated over from the American mainland and other countries, but these are isolated islands and natural life is markedly different or becomes different here. Places like this help us see more readily that the study of geology is absolutely crucial to understanding evolution. That it doesn’t occur in a vacuum but as response to changing environmental conditions.

The lava tube itself was pretty cool. Hard to imagine a river of lava flowing through this tunnel. Also mindblowing are the joints in the floor and ceiling of the tube through which tree roots propagate downwards into the tunnel. Which reminded me that I am not a fan of enclosed spaces (“Stop breathing my air!”) and that lava tubes have a tendency to collapse. And we were back out into the open forest, with the green plants and the oxygen. The sweet, sweet oxygen. Note to self: Blog at some point about the wonderful undergraduate geomorphology field trip to a karst system where you and acute claustrophobia were first acquainted.

Another thing I love about Hawaii is that plants grow anywhere and everywhere here. On rocks, on sand, on wood, on houses, on top of other plants, on you if you stand still long enough.

From here, we hopped onto the Chain Of Craters road to the sea, with some fun stops along the way.

Tree branch reaches out from a 1970s eruption:
Pahoehoe, or ropy lava, or natural sculpture:
Pahoehoe on the left, aa on the right, with approximately 6-foot-tall husband for scale:
Chain Of Craters Road cuts across lava flows from the 1960s and 70s:
A sea of lava:
USGS elevation marker with elevation conveniently missing:
Where land meets sea:
From the summit of Kilauea to the sea is a 4000-foot drop across ~15 miles of switchbacks. We drove all the way to where the Chain Of Craters Road stops, a mile or so before the road is abruptly cut off by a series of flows that buried the road and the nearby Royal Gardens Subdivision back in 1987. From here, we hiked the rest of the way to the flow and tooled around on it.

Where The Sidewalk Ends, I Ain’t Kidding edition:
View from where the Royal Gardens subdivision began:
D running away from the lava flow OF DOOM:
GeoBadgers represent! Me standing on two adjacent pahoehoe flows:
The Hölei Sea Arch:
And then, just like that, it was sunset and when the park closes. Many who were spending the night to catch lava flow into the sea began their evening picnics while we made our way out of the park.

Now, I can cross off another thing I wanted to do before kicking the bucket. Here is the complete set of pictures from this amazing trip; feel free to use it as a teaching set as it contains pictures of outcrops with scale. Here is the latest NPS Volcanoes National Park trip planner, full of maps, pictures and good advice. Please visit the regularly-updated website for area closure and other warnings.

Volcanic smog makes for beautiful sunsets.