Geo 365: Jan. 1, Day 1 My Corner of the World

So yesterday was a lazy hazy day, and another that was confusing to Bif. As on Christmas, he was expecting me to leave anytime; every time I'd get up or even shift in my chair, he'd run for the door to play our daily game of "Can I get out without him catching me?" I watched Batman Begins, which I hadn't seen before. Mixed feelings. Liam Neeson is definitely kick-ass. Katie Holmes, who I'd never seen outside of tabloid type reports, didn't really work as a tough-as-nails DA, IMO. And the "superweapon" that is central to the climax was absurdly wrong- my guestimate for its power consumption is in the trillions to quadrillions of watts. In other words, in excess of the power consumption of the entire human race. With no cord. And no explanation of why it didn't just vaporize the water in every living creature in range, but rather selectively delivered that energy to the water supply inside metal pipes. Gah.

At any rate, this morning, I noticed that Ian Stimpson ‏, AKA Hypocentre, is finishing up his "Rock 366" series- a rock photograph for every day of 2012. If you haven't been following it, and you enjoy gorgeous rocks, gorgeously photographed, that link is highly recommended. You can click each photo for a much-enlarged version, along with some information on the specimen. And I thought, well, I can't match his photographic skills, but I'll bet I can find 365 photos of interesting geology for the next year.

Some will be photos I've posted before, hopefully with some tidbits of new information. Some will be of poor quality, but show some interesting features. I'll focus heavily on Oregon, since almost all of the photos I currently have are from within the state. As such, expect plenty of volcanics, not so much metamorphic stuff. (Oregon does have some metamorphic belts, but on my recent geogalavanting, we've only visited a couple corners of them.) I don't even promise I'll carry it through to the end. Ian says that it becomes a plodding struggle, and I tend to throw my hands up at those.

By and large, I'm looking for inspiration and motivation to post something every day, even if I have a minimum to say about it, even if it only takes me a couple minutes. I know I have enough photos to pull this off, but I don't know if I have enough *interesting* photos.

We'll see, won't we?

Looking west from near the intersection of I-5 and Route 34. Corvallis is 9 or 10 miles away, between this spot and Marys Peak. The latter is the high point of the horizon, and rises to just over 4000 feet (the valley floor here is a bit over 200 feet). Marys Peak is the best transect of Coast Range geology I know of, and consists of a base of sea floor and hot spot basalts, overlain by a fairly restricted pile of sediments derived from those basalts when they rose above sea level. That in turn is buried under a thick- though in the area of the peak itself, mostly removed by erosion- pile of Eocene turbidites, the Tyee formation. Then in the Oligocene, a thousand-foot thick sill was intruded near the base of the turbidites. That thickness, along with its composition and high volatile content, allowed compositional fractionation during its cooling, which is readily observable in the field, and quite striking microscopically. Picture processed to increase saturation and contrast. August 17, 2011. FlashEarth location.