Grant’s Hammer

@shimer

He/Him #Geology geologist somewhere in Utah. Will occasionally post dogs, rocks, and various other nature things, but mostly here to see what else is going on and learn cool new things/keep up with the horrors of authoritarian destruction.

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Grant’s Hammer@shimer· 19d

Last but not least. Crater Lake.

Deep blue lake water surrounds a cone shaped hill in the center of a large volcano. Green conifers frame the shot.

Grant’s Hammer@shimer· 19d

Now, Lava Beds! They just let you go in these lava tubes if you do to the white nose bat fungus precautions or have never been in a cave before.

Photo of a steep metal staircase that descends into the narrow opening of a cave.

Photo of a cooled lava tube. You can see the flow pattern of the river of lava on the floor of the cave.

Another photo showing cracking of the lava flow on the floor of the lava tube as it cooled.

A photograph of light shining into a cave, illuminating the staircase that leads up through the entrance.

Grant’s Hammer@shimer· 19d

Maybe the park service needs slightly better review of their signage before the final product. Some oopsies here, probably the result of a contractor of a contractor without a science background, but still.

A finger points to text on a slide that emphasizes the presence of quartz in basalt or basaltic andesite. It’s not likely and the geologist pictured didn’t see any.

A human finger points to a mistake on a park service sign. This one is funny. The scale bar for this scanning electron microscope image of a single archaea says 375 mm. The publisher clearly didn’t take the time to put in the right symbol for micrometer, or didn’t know what it was.

Grant’s Hammer@shimer· 19d

Some of the result of the 1915 eruption.

A short male geologist in a blue hooded shirt and brown shorts stands in front of a 300 ton boulder moved 5 miles by a lahar

A jumble of angular rocks moved several miles by a lahar from the peak that appears in the background.

Grant’s Hammer@shimer· 19d

Cinder cone on the NE side of Lassen.

A dark gray cone shaped hill with sparse conifer trees in the foreground. A trail snaked up the side of the hill, which is a cinder cone made of cinders and lava flows.

A view from inside a cinder cone caldera. A moonscape of gray rock.

A bug-eye view of the cinder cone caldera. A circular depression lies in the center of the frame, with a deep blue sky and wispy clouds above.

Grant’s Hammer@shimer· 19d

The hydrothermal features at Lassen are very neat!

A boiling mud pot. Yellow-gray mud is bubbling and steaming amidst yellow tan rocks with sulfur staining.

A view of a hot springs area with mud pots and geysers. Green conifers line a barren patch of yellow-tan rock and mud.

A closer view of the barren terrain of sulfurous mud and stream.

Another close view of sulfurous mud and steam in a mountain valley

Grant’s Hammer@shimer· 19d

Some #geology and general nature pics from a trip through northern CA and southern OR. First up, coastal rocks.

Greenish gray rocks and brown dirt. A serpentinite outcrop along the highway.

Strips of light and dark gray sandstone. Graywacke turbidites that have been offset on small faults. Human finger for scale.

Stripes of light and dark gray sandstone. Graywacke turbidites cut by small normal offset faults. Human hand for scale.

Dark grey sandstone underneath a conglomerate full of boulders of similar sandstones. An angular unconformity along the coast.

Grant’s Hammer@shimer· Jul 10

I might not be in Utah. There’s flowing water!

Grant’s Hammer@shimer· Jun 24

Photos from yesterday afternoon’s smoke in Cedar City around 6:30 pm. It lifted by late evening and it’s relatively clear this morning. It smelled surprisingly pleasant compared to other wildfire smoke I’ve experienced. Maybe the mix of burning juniper, piñon, and sage is a nice potpourri?

Photo of the sun through wildfire smoke. The sun appears as a bright yellow ball rimmed with orange. Two beams of orange lens flare strike out at a 45 degree angle from both sides of the sun, cutting across the frame from upper left to lower right.

A photo of mountains obscured by wildfire smoke. The mountains are about 1-2 miles away from the photo location. The photo looks like old grainy film due to the haze.

Another photo of a neighborhood with mountains obscured by wildfire smoke. The hill on the left is less than a mile away. A distant hills two miles away is barely visible, and the 10,000 ft plateau in the background is not visible at all.

Grant’s Hammer@shimer· Jun 11

Grant’s Hammer@shimer· Jun 6

Hello there. No snakes seen in the North Snake Range this time around, but plenty of lizards. Birds seemed livelier this year, maybe due to slightly cooler temps that were rapidly fading to normal heat.

Grant’s Hammer@shimer· Jun 6

Not all rocks.

A trumpet shaped bright fuschia flower sits atop a small cactus.

A crumpled Diet Pepsi can that looks like it’s from the 80s or 90s.

Jagged rocky peaks line the glacial cirque at Wheeler Peak in Great Basin National Park. The foreground includes blocks of gray angular talus, with dark green conifers and snow covered slopes in the background.

Grant’s Hammer@shimer· Jun 6

Some Great Basin things (mostly rocks).

$En echelon tension fractures (filled with quartz veins) in a quartzite with cross bedding showing sinistral shear from upper right to lower left. Size 8 men’s boot for scale.$

Green colored copper mineralization in a shiny micaceous metamorphic rock. Human finger for scale.

Sheared garnet-rich layer in a schist, a type of rock that looks like warm taffy pulled apart.

Somewhat cruddy sigma structure in a garnet showing de teal shear, top to east. A dark reddish-brown mineral is stretched into tails from lower left to upper right.

Grant’s Hammer@shimer· May 29

End of the day. The faulting and covered sections made measuring accurate sections a bit tough (we also didn’t trench since it’s protected land) but we got some good mudstone samples for some analysis.

Red, gray, and purple-tinted layers of rock

Grant’s Hammer@shimer· May 29

Normal fault, right where it’s mapped. The screenshot cuts off the Trcp designation, though it’s probably not actually the Pet Forest member seen in the east. That’s part of what the student is working on. fault truncates a channel sandstone.

A normal fault dips to the left, offsetting gray and red sedimentary strata.

Screenshot of a geologic map with a green Triassic unit cut by a normal fault

Grant’s Hammer@shimer· May 29

Desert stream ASMR?

Grant’s Hammer@shimer· May 29

Quaternary basalt flow above an angular unconformity. There’s a thin layer of sediment above the tilted and eroded Triassic-Jurassic strata here.

A palisade of columnar basalts, dark grey in color, sit above a red slope of tilted sedimentary rocks

Grant’s Hammer@shimer· May 29

Obligatory lizard friend.

A 10 cm long lizard perches on a rock, looking back at the photographer in what looks like disdain

Grant’s Hammer@shimer· May 29

Tarantula hawk wasps going to town on tamarisk flowers. Lots of invasive plants along the creek here, including Russian olive. At least the local insects are getting something out of it.

Large black and dark orange wasps perched on the dangling fluffy flowers of a tamarisk shrub

Grant’s Hammer@shimer· May 29

More copper mineralization, this time in sandstones fragments.

Greenish staining in two rocks indicates the presence of copper minerals

Grant’s Hammer@shimer· May 29

Some images from today’s fieldwork in the Chinle Formation (permitted work in Red Cliffs reserve, Washington County, Utah. First up: in situ petrified wood logs! Metal staff is 1.6 m long

Reddish brown dirt with an approximately 2 meter log fossil

Grant’s Hammer@shimer· May 28

Geologist…

A dorky man with a beard wearing black pants and a grey hoodie holding a metal staff with a geologic compass attached.

Grant’s Hammer@shimer· May 28

A shell from a long dead tortoise. This study area is in the Red Cliffs preserve & is permitted through the BLM. There’s a huge development going in very nearby and it is very sad to see so much habitat being destroyed for luxury homes while wildlife suffers.

The empty shell of what was probably a Mojave desert tortoise.

Another photo of an empty, upside down tortoise shell. Unlike the cartoons, this lil fella is very dead and not naked in a barrel somewhere.

Grant’s Hammer@shimer· May 28

This area was mined for silver back in the day. There is copper color in lots of the sandstones and conglomerates, as well as this piece of petrified wood.

A white piece of petrified wood with blue green copper mineral color.

Grant’s Hammer@shimer· May 28

Just some nice Chinle landscapes with colorful mudstones. The student project is on mudstone geochem and seeing if we can use on campus instruments to replicate Calmag and other climate indicators.

Layers of colorful rock in a landscape photo

Grant’s Hammer@shimer· May 28

More offset evidence: slickenside and some fracture fills in place.

$A face of a rock with linear features showing that it’s a fracture surface with some offset.$

$Grey mudstone with fracture fills in place$

Grant’s Hammer@shimer· May 28

A nice normal fault.

Layers of rock (reddish below, gray above) offset along a plane that dips down to the left.

Grant’s Hammer@shimer· May 28

Petrified wood, kind of the Chinle’s thing, so not strange.

Two pieces of white petrified wood, with a human hand pointing at both.

Grant’s Hammer@shimer· May 28

Some strange mineral concretions. The lower one is broken in half.

A lumpy reddish brown rock that looks kind of like a scab, and a smaller sample broken in half with white minerals inside.

Grant’s Hammer@shimer· May 28

The Chinle Formation is always good for fairly strange deposits. I’ve never seen fracture fills in this abundance before. It’s on the limb of an anticline that is also sliced up by much more recent normal faults. Some of them are mildly carbonate based, other gypsum, but most some silicate mixture.