Sed/Strat field trip

Here are some pictures and details about my field trip two weeks ago.

We left on Friday, March 22, around 1:30. Ryan and the kids dropped me off at Mitchell Hall. I was sad to leave them.

We drove through Virginia and then West Virginia and then Kentucky. As we got to the western border of West Virginia we started seeing signs saying that there had been a rock slide on the other side of the East River tunnel, which was along our planned route. Traffic was backed up for a mile or more behind the tunnel and the left lane was blocked. I'm sure you can imagine how excited we were to drive through a tunnel under a mountain where there had just been a rock slide. And of course the painfully slow speed was just lovely too.

Here's our view just before we entered the tunnel:

Inside the tunnel:

Obviously we didn't get crushed and we got out okay. We never saw the rockslide because they detoured traffic. To us it seemed like there was no reason for the left lane to be blocked for so much of the interstate. The detour cost us a lot of time and was the main reason why we got to our hotel in Kentucky really late that evening.

Here is a video of the rockslide:


I totally scored when it came to rooming arrangements. We were supposed to have five people to a room with one person sleeping on the floor in a sleeping bag. I had arranged to sleep in the same room as three other girls who seemed nice. But when we got to the hotel I found out that my teacher had put me in the same room as my TA because my teacher's wife said that I should get "the full mom treatment"--i.e. a bed all to myself. So my TA and I got a room all to ourselves. That was pretty nice.

On Saturday we spent most of our time looking at outcrops. Lots of bedrock is exposed in Kentucky because they cut into the hills to make the highways, so there were a lot of cool things to see. We followed the formations from younger to older through most of the Paleozoic era.

In a lot of places you could see where water was flowing between rock layers and had dripped out of the rock to form these icicles hanging from the rocks. The dark flaky stuff in the middle is mud with a lot of coal in it.

These are some ripples:

This is a chert nodule in limestone. They are formed when the limestone is lithified--the chert forms by replacing some of the rock. Across the street from this you could see an unconformity (a gap in the geologic record where layers have been eroded away and new layers were then deposited on top). There were a lot of chert nodules in the unconformity. Speaking of limestone, I'd really like to get some hydrochloric acid of my own. It's so annoying to see an interesting rock and not be able to tell if it's sandstone or limestone because I don't have any hydrochloric acid to test it. (Limestone effervesces when hydrochloric acid is dropped on it.)

This is cross-bedding.

We stopped at this place at the side of the road that was basically a huge pile of broken up limestone. It was full of fossils. Every single rock I picked up had many fossils or fossil traces in it.

This rock shows burrows or tracks:

I thought the circular fossils at the bottom were really interesting. They have these perfect little flower shapes in the middle and seem to be shaped like tubes.

The Fifth Third Bank. I just thought that was a funny name for a bank.

Saturday night we stayed at another hotel in Kentucky. It was nicer than the first one (which had smelled like a combination of stale cigarette smoke and gross incense). In the evening everyone ended up going to sit-down restaurants, and even though I had brought food for dinner I decided to use some birthday money to get Chicago pizza with some other girls in my class. We had a nice time and the pizza was great. (I mentioned this in a previous blog post, if you remember.)

On Sunday the weather was not that great. It was pouring rain so hard that it was still dark when we left the hotel. We still ended up stopping for quite a while at some stops even though it was muddy and miserable. It did get nice for a while around 11:00. We stopped for quite a while at an outcrop that was mostly coal-ey mud. It was full of big concretions and my teacher wanted to get a good one to take home. Concretions happen when the minerals from limestone are carried in groundwater from limestone to a mud deposit, and then the minerals form around round, hard centers to make big balls of limestone. Then when the mud is lithified everything gets squished, which makes the concretions look like UFOs instead of spheres.

Here's a rock we found there with ripples:

There were a few guys in the class who worked really hard to get this concretion for our teacher. That slope they were standing on was very loose and unstable, but they were really determined to get the concretion out. They were hammering the crowbar in to get the concretion loose. They literally worked at it for at least half an hour before it finally tumbled down.

Here is the concretion in my teacher's hands. He was really excited about it. There were many concretions that were much bigger than this one.

After that we just aimed for home, just stopping for meals and bathroom/gas stops. Western Virginia (not to be confused with West Virginia) was rather depressing. Think enormous black cliffs of coal, double rows of mile-long trains full of coal, refineries, and lots of poverty. And this went on for a couple of hours. It was basically like District 12 from the Hunger Games. (Coal is great for the economy, right?) As we got further into Virginia and out of coal country it was snowing.

We got back to Mitchell Hall at around 7:45 pm and I borrowed a cell phone to ask Ryan and the kids to pick me up. I came home long enough to help get the kids dinner and mostly ready for bed, and then I hurried to the church for the last bit of choir practice. We had the Easter program the next week and I needed to be there to practice (we still needed a lot of practice), so even though I was sad to leave my family right after getting home I decided to go.

Oh, and apparently I had signed up to feed the missionaries that Saturday and then forgot about it. Fortunately they called Ryan the day before, so he made them pizza. He's awesome like that.