Fault Line - A GeoJournal

  A couple of months ago, my hometown of Houston, Texas, experienced something which happens even more rarely than once in a blue moon: the entire city froze open. Ice covered i10 and 610 and HWY 45, children woke up to snow-filled yards, and lakes froze over, killing off thousands of fish and at least one seagull. This is an incredible change from the normal climate of the area, which is hot, and wet, and not very winter-y at all. The only thing I can think of is that this is a result of climate change. How could Houston, the Bayou City, on the gulf of Mexico, be covered in snow and ice? As the climate warms the world over, local weather events become less and less predictable; less and less normal. 

           Following up on last week's theme of "holy guacamole, Idaho has earthquakes!?" I found a news article which discusses the role that plate tectonics played in the 6.5 magnitude quake that struck central Idaho in March of 2020. It was the strongest quake to hit the state since the  early 80s, when Idaho played host to a 6.9 magnitude earthquake that left destruction in its wake. One doesn't really think about earthquakes affecting Idaho all that often, since we're so far from California and its famous San Andreas fault line, but the truth is, according to this article, that "mid-plate tectonic activity" is actually quite common in Idaho and in regions throughout the Northwest.      Apparently the most common earthquake in this part of the country is of the basin and range variety, but neither the 1983 nor the 2020 quake match this description, running as it does from North to South rather than East to West. Some geologist hypoth...

      So one thing I never considered when I was planning my move to Idaho was Earthquakes. I thought about mountains, and rockslides, and avalanches, and the potential for complete destruction by a supervolcano mere miles from my home. But earthquakes? Never even entered my mind. When I think of Earthquakes, I generally think of California, which sits atop the San Andreas fault and so has earthquakes all the time. I've personally experienced one there, as well as a couple in Alaska and, surprisingly, one in Houston, Texas, which was powerful enough to crack the foundation of my school. Thus, when I thought about moving to a place as mountainous as Idaho, it should have registered that earthquakes were a potential danger. But it never did.      Looking at Eastern Idaho, I see a large section of mountain range which, though it is petering out compared to the soaring peaks which one gets further South in Utah and Colorado, still has the power to strike one wi...

      What similarities exist between Eastern Idaho and Luxor, Egypt? At first you might say "not very much, why are you asking such a stupid question?" but actually there is one thing: thousands of acres of twisting, shifting sand dunes. Yes, our own humble stretch of Idaho has its own little dune desert (well, not so little given that it's around 10,000 acres) to rival the great sprawling sand seas of Northern Africa! And just about ten minutes North of Rexburg, too.     The majority of the sediment that makes up these dunes is Quartz sand, much of which was transported thousands of miles by wind before settling in glacial lakes which used to cover this part of the country. The sediment settled at the bottom of the lakes, which eventually dried up as the climate warmed, leaving behind miles of loose sand which blew together over centuries to form large dunes, some up to 400 feet tall. The grains of sand are well-sorted by the wind and water which have affected...

     The hole was huge. Gaping, even. From one side to the other it yawned wide in the Earth, fifty feet or more across and deep enough that even the boys of the neighborhood, usually so bold and ready to tackle whatever danger they could find, were dutifully minding their mothers’ instructions to keep their distance. Staring down into the abyss one could see the glint of metal pipes and the jagged concrete which had come from the street previously occupying the space where the hole had developed early that morning. One young girl, remembering a trip to some caves out West the Summer previous and time spent playing amongst stalagmites and stalactites (though she could never remember which was which) had tried to scout around the edge of the cavernous collapse to look for geodes, before being pulled back by her father and sent to her room. Even now as the police placed yellow tape and blockades around the hole, a few brave souls tried to free themselves from the grip of co...

       There is a wilderness trail which runs through the outskirts of Austin, Tx. Being from Houston, I don't really think all that much of Austin. As my uncle likes to say, "we don't claim them." That said, I have been on the Shoal Creek Trail, and it really is beautiful. Central Texas is one of the most amazing places on Earth, in my opinion, and walking through the green hills of Shoal Creek is enough to put one's worried heart at ease.  Texas is not, overall, a state with much variation in elevation. Truth be told, aside from the "hill country," Texas is pretty flat. Thus, we don't have to deal with landslides very often unlike a more mountainous state like Idaho or Colorado. This means that when they do happen, they tend to take residents completely by surprise and cost local governments quite a lot of money. Such is the case with the Shoal Creek Landslide that happened in May of 2018. A large rain event led to oversaturation of ground which de...

The Science of Religion       There is truth. At least, I assume that there is. I know that I exist and that I'm capable of acknowledging my existence, which tells me that there is some kind of greater truth which creates the state in which I am capable of existing and comprehending things. Therefore I assume that there is truth. And as I have been gifted with five major senses and a mind, I assume that the truths which I can understand are those in the sensible world interpreted by the mental. As far as sources of truth go, there is truth determined purely by reasoning, truth interpreted from observations, truth tested through means which I determine to be empirical, and truth given to me by a trusted source, whom I assume has his or her own ways of knowing whar is, in fact, true. There is one truth which covers all of these bases: the existence of God.       I can reason the existence of God through presumptions about the functions of the universe in...

       My Uncle in Georgia has a really odd countertop in his kitchen. It isn't granite, it isn't marble, it isn't even Gneiss. Instead, it's a rock called Soapstone. I've found a picture which bears a striking resemblance to his countertop, though he only has the drainage lines on one side, and I gotta say: it's weird looking. I can't say exactly what it reminds me of--my first though is "slab" but given that it actually is a slab of rock that's not very helpful--but it makes me think of those black tables from highschool science lab. I've never been very fond of it, but my Uncle loves it and swears it's the best countertop he's ever had. So I was curious what made it such a good building material for countertops. Delving into the topic for the sake of this entry, I discovered some pretty interesting stuff!      Soapstone is a fascinating rock. First of all, it's got a lot of talc in it. If you remember way back in Module 1, we...

  Okay, I know the title doesn't make much sense, since granite is an igneous rock and limestone is sedimentary. But! They are both rocks! So that's a similarity. Mainly I just wanted to make a pun of some sort.  So, I searched for two days, digging through snowy fields and picking rocks out of flowerbeds, and trying to pry open the frozen ground around my apartment, and I got nothing. I found plenty of igneous rocks, tons of igneous rocks in fact, but no sedimentary rock. It was very frustrating, not to mention cold. Finally I gave up on that and curled up on my couch with a hot mug of cocoa, and read through a 1978 report on the geological makeup of the soil and reocks in Eastern Idaho and discovered that there really aren't that many deposits of sedimentary rock around here, but there are several limestone quarries! So I decided to write about limestone for today's geojournal. What tells you that limestone is sedimentary? Honestly, I didn't know that limestone wa...

     For my geojournal project this week, I was asked to watch a youtube video of a volcanic eruption. I actually ended up going down a rabbithole and spent a solid hour just watching volcanoes spew smoke and ash and lava into the air. An hour well spent! But I had to choose one specific mountain to focus on, and so I picked Mt. St Helen's, which proved to be the deadliest and most powerful volcanic eruption in US history when the top of the mountain was, essentially, blown off back in 1980. It was a moving thing to watch, and I found myself awe-struck, my face inches from my computer monitor, as I watched a solid granite mountain blow itself up with force exceeding 1500 of the atom bombs thay we dropped on Hiroshima.     I watched some news coverage of the event, and the numbers I kept hearing were staggering. As the hot smoke billowed out of the mountain it melted the water on the mountainside, as well as releasing millions of gallons that were sitting inside ...

  This week, I was given the challenge of finding a mineral in my local area and examining it. I spent many hours outside, and found many rocks, though no examples of any pure minerals. I found a lot of basalt, which is (Google tells me) mostly Pyroxene minerals melted together, and a lot of frozen clay, which is apparently made up of "clay minerals." Who woulda thought? But I had an idea which I really liked, and that was to talk about my fiancee's ring.  Because her birthstone is an emerald, she has a ring with a large, emerald in the center. It's quite a lovely ring. Now emerald is not, of course, a mineral in its own right. However! It is a gem version of the mineral Beryl, which is a silicate mineral typically found in Igneous rock deposits worldwide. What really fascinated me was the realization, which hit me when I was looking at her ring, that there must be emeralds in Idaho! We are, after all, a large state with vast lava fields and dormant volcanoes, and the...

  Fault Line                                                                                       A Geology Journal      My name is Dustin Jackson. I'm from a little town in Texas called Houston, also known as The Bayou City because for reasons I can't understand they decided to build it on a swamp! Still, that's home, though right now I live in Rexburg, Idaho. I suppose I'm taking this class because I have always been fascinated by our world. I went through the "fascinated by dinosaurs" phase that most kids experience, but my fascination never went away. Thankfully Houston has a world-class museum district, and I could go often to the Houston Museum of Natural Science growing up and wander for hours in the paleonto...