CATALINA ISLAND--26 MILES ACROSS THE SEA: Geology Field Trip, Guest Post by Paige Arnold

In August, my granddaughter Paige, a geology student at Amherst College, went on a field trip to Catalina Island. On a clear day, Catalina Island is easily visible from the Southern California coast. Yet, in the more than fifty years that I’ve lived in California I’ve never been there! I thank Paige for her excellent report!

This summer I had the opportunity to go to Catalina Island with my professor, his collaborator, and another undergraduate student to do field work relevant to my senior thesis (a year-long research project). We were there for a little under a week, and in that time I got to see some pretty cool stuff– both geology-related and otherwise!

A picture of the USC Wrigley Marine Science Center, where we stayed in dorms for the duration of the trip. We ate breakfast and dinner here, taking a sack lunch to eat in the field (unfortunately, given that sandwiches are not particularly resistant to getting crushed by rocks, they were always pretty soggy by the time we got to them). Otherwise, their food was surprisingly good and they had 24/7 coffee, exceeding my expectations for the dining situation.

For 3 of the 5 days of field work, we drove to the Catalina Airport and looked at/sampled rocks in the surrounding area. There was an airport store behind me where I took this picture, which provided great relief to us in the form of shade, cold Gatorade, and ice cream, during our lunch breaks.

The Catalina landscape is beautiful, but quite unfriendly. A lack of tall trees means no shade, and most of the plants have sharp qualities that inspire fear. Unfortunately, interesting rock outcrops don’t care about sun, spines, and spikes, and are frequently located in places surrounded by these hostile plants (don’t ask about the cactus incident).

Another obstacle between us and the outcrops was the occasional bison (small black dot above the heads in the first photo). Fourteen bison were brought to Catalina for the filming of the 1924 Western The Vanishing American, after which it was determined that removing them from the island would just be too hard, leading to their continued presence on the island today. Despite their intimidating size, they didn’t cause us any problems other than brief moments of panic at rustling sounds in the bushes.

Here is a photo of an outcrop with a couple of the rock types we were focusing on. I won’t go into too much detail, but the big picture idea is that some rocks were part of an old subducting plate, got ripped off the plate in blocks and mixed into a weaker unit of rock, then got real hot and partially melted. In this photo, we’ve inferred that the garnet and hornblende (red and black minerals) are remnants of the original rock that did not melt, while the light minerals are the remnants of melt that did not escape the rock (leucosome). What makes Catalina so special is that these rocks are at the surface (subduction zone rocks very rarely end up at the surface!), allowing us to make direct observations of rocks that were subducted rather than extrapolating from complex geochemical signatures in the corresponding ancient volcanic arc (the Peninsular Ranges).

This is what most of the blocks looked like in the field, though they could range from cat-sized to car-sized. On the rock are our sampling tools– sledgehammer, chisel, and sample bag. Geology can be a brutish science at times.

Check out these cutesy little garnets in a row above my fingers (red dots in white line)! We think these are “peritectic” garnets, meaning they formed along with melt (the white line) as the result of the breakdown of another mineral.

Another one of many beautiful views.

Before Spanish colonizers arrived, Catalina was inhabited by the Tongva, who used the local soapstone (more formally known as talc schist– part of the weaker unit of rock I mentioned earlier) to craft bowls and other cooking ware that they traded along the California coast. This was one of a few soapstone-working sites we passed by on the way to outcrops, where you can see bowls that were never finished still attached to the rock.

In this picture I’m standing on a completely different kind of rock– metamorphosed pillow basalt intruded by blueschist dikes! Despite Catalina’s geology being so varied and complex, we’d been entirely focused on one particular kind of rock up until this day, so it was nice to branch out a little bit and see something new. This picture was taken right after a swimming break in Shark Harbor, which (if you ignore the ominous name) was an amazing place to swim with clear, cool water and waves just high enough to body surf without getting tossed around.

The aforementioned cool, clear water. It made me sad to have to look up from the water and board the ferry back to the mainland, so I took this picture to remember how blue it was.

SCOTLAND GEOLOGY; The Northwest Highlands, Guest Post by Paige Arnold

View of Sango Bay, Scotland.

With many thanks to my granddaughter Paige, a student at Amherst College, for sharing her photos of her trip to Scotland in June and her breadth of knowledge of Scotland's geology. 

During my second semester of this past school year, I took a geology field trip class where we learned all about the geologic history of Scotland. This class culminated in a week-long trip to the NorthwestHighlands of Scotland, during which we traveled around to different sites of geologic interest and had the opportunity to see the rocks we had been learning about all semester. Here are some pictures from the trip!

This bridge gave us a great view of some old lake terraces in Achnascheen! Each step you see on the sloping edge of the hill in the center represents the bottom of an ancient glacial lake, with the upper steps being the earlier lake bottoms which were then cut down through by increased meltwater supply to create the next step.

A horse near our hostel in Torridon with Loch Torridon in the background. Loch Torridon is a sea loch, meaning it’s connected to the ocean, so where the water met the land varied a lot over the course of our stay–I believe this picture was taken at high tide.

View of Slioch mountain halfway up Beinn Eighe.

Another view from the Beinn Eighe hike where you can see the paleogeography of an old landscape preserved in the mountain. The slight upward curve about halfway up this mountain represents the upper boundary of the Lewisian Gneiss, which would have been the land surface until it was filled in by the Torridonian Sandstone (above the line) starting around 950 million years ago!

The holes in this rock give the rock its colloquial name “pipe rock”. They are remnants of old worm burrows in sand that has since been lithified into quartzite. These worms would have been alive and forming these burrows in the early Cambrian, around 520-510 million years ago.

Both sides of the Moine Thrust, with the Moine Schist on top of the Durness Limestone. The Moine Schist is older than the Durness limestone, but it’s been thrust up to lay on top of the limestone by tectonic movement. This kind of stratigraphic inversion is only possible via tectonic movement, and Scotland is where thrust faulting was originally discovered!

View from our hostel at sunset.

A chunk of Lewisian gneiss at Achmelvich Beach. There isn’t much to say about this picture but the clarity of the banding is pretty awesome.

Some sheep we saw from the van. I’d say we saw about half as many sheep as people.

Clachtoll Beach! It looks tropical but I promise it was just as cold as you’d expect the North Atlantic to be.

These stromatolites are some of the oldest life on Earth that is preserved in the rock record, dating to around 1.2 billion years old. Stromatolites are a kind of algal mat that accumulate in the wet season and dry out in the dry season, trapping sediment and forming these wiggly lines.

This large black stripe is a Scourie Dyke, it’s about 2 feet across and is intruding into the body of rock around it. Around 2.4 billion years ago, the body of rock around the dyke was split by tectonic activity, allowing hot magma to push up into it and solidify into this stripe.

My friend in the distance at the Arnaboll Thrust.

My friend and I touching both sides of the Arnaboll Thrust! Here the Lewisian Gneiss has been thrust upon the Cambrian Quartzite, which we can be at peace with now but is something that caused a lot of problems among geologists of the 19th century. This thrust fault caused SirCharles Lapworth (eminent geologist of the time) to have an intense mental breakdown due to visions of the entire Scottish Highlands crushing his body, as thrust faulting hadn’t been discovered up until this point and it was just all too much for him to handle. Luckily I was well prepared and was able to enjoy the rocks without descending into madness.

On our last day we “saw” some puffins (these pictures were taken by my friend with a good camera–I only saw more than a black speck once he shared his photos with us) from the cliffs of Faraid Head, which I think was a pretty solid wrap up to the week!

I hope you’ve enjoyed these rocks and maybe feel inspired to take a trip to the Northwest Highlands! I can’t promise it’ll be as sunny as it was in these photos but it’s worth it nonetheless.

BUGGING OUT IN GLACIER NATIONAL PARK, Guest Post by Paige Arnold

My granddaughter Paige spent five weeks participating in a summer research project at Glacier National Park sponsored by the Keck Geology Consortium at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota. I thank her for her perceptive thoughts about her encounters with bugs during her time at Glacier NP. "Bugging Out in Glacier National Park" is republished from the Keck Geology Blog, where you can also find posts by other members of the research team.

My first day in the field, I felt a bit like a moth in the daytime. Surrounded by unfamiliar sights, sounds, and creatures (fellow Keck students included), I felt completely out of my element and like I was being pulled in every direction possible. The overwhelming environment around me led me to focus my gaze on something smaller, something more familiar that would allow me to start with details rather than the full picture: bugs. 

Glacier National Park is full of bugs, the most notable of which to most is the mosquito (impossible not to notice if even one manages to sneak into your tent overnight or if you stand still for a second too long). If you look a bit further, though, there are plenty of insects hiding just out of sight or perhaps below a particularly large rock. 

Some disguise themselves as other species, like the hover fly which adopts the patterning of a bee as a survival strategy. Some are so prominent and strange-looking that even a bug-enjoyer like myself has to stop and ask “oh my god how did that even HAPPEN” (looking at you, sawyer beetle). Some are enjoyed by all, like the Chlosyne Palla butterfly that stopped some of us in our tracks during a particularly busy coring day, and some are widely disliked, like the mosquito (self explanatory). 

No matter how high or low we were, the amount of bugs surrounding us never seemed to drop. We saw the same anise swallowtails and hover flies both down near Swiftcurrent Lake where one minute out of the shade made my vision swim, and up near Iceberg lake, where the ground stays covered by snow in the middle of July. 

Over time, the environment that once felt blinding started to feel promising, and instead of shying away from it I began to drink it in, like a caterpillar eating every leaf in sight in preparation for its eventual metamorphosis. Though my appreciation for Glacier’s bugs started out as an independent pursuit, as I began to feel more at home my interest became more widespread throughout the group. Some bugs we named and held dear to our hearts (Francis, Margo, Margo 2, Margo n+1), and some we briefly admired (or peeked at from a safe distance) before moving on. 

Near the end of the trip, I resonated with many of the bugs I had seen during my time in the park. Over time and continuous exposure, I developed a thicker outer shell like a beetle’s, which allowed me to enjoy the park despite the weather, long days, and unfamiliar camping lifestyle. Near the middle, I began to separate from my cocoon as I gained comfort among the environment and my peers, tentatively beginning to take steps outside my comfort zone. As opposed to the beginning of the trip where I felt like a moth under the sun, in the very last days I felt like the moths we saw on bathroom breaks from stargazing; content, peaceful, and at rest.

 For more about this and other Keck Geology programs, go to the Keck Geology website.

FIVE DAYS IN ROME, Part 2: Guest Post by Paige Arnold

Bike riding on the Appian Way, Rome, Italy

My granddaughter Paige (age 13) and her parents recently went on a trip to Rome, and while she was there Paige kept a diary of their activities. Paige is a competitive swimmer, so although she was on vacation, she tried to fit in practice when she could. I thank her for sharing her thoughts and photos of the trip with The Intrepid Tourist. 

On our third day in Rome we went to the Borghese Gallery, but since we had tickets to go at 3:00, we decided to go to another museum first. It was a museum of musical instruments, which had many pianos and harps and such from a long, long time ago.

Harpsichord at the National Museum of Musical Instruments, Rome.

I really liked how the pianos and organs had paintings and art on the covers--it just made them that much prettier.  After that we went home for about ten minutes and then walked to the Borghese museum.  

Ceiling paintings in one of the twenty rooms of the Borghese Gallery.

At the Borghese Gallery, there were many beautiful statues and paintings and lots of rooms to wander through and look at things.   

Stone sculpture of person carrying a lion pelt (Borghese Gallery)

There was an app you could download to experience an audio tour that guided you through the rooms, which gave you a detailed explanation of the important pieces.  Since lots of people were using the audio tour, it was very quiet for those who didn’t, which was nice. 

Villa Borghese Park

There was also a park behind the museum with statues and trees, and we found that walking through it was very enjoyable.  For lunch, we had gotten sandwiches before, so when we got home we just ate those.  The sandwich place we went to was a “make your own” place, but it was a bit difficult since we didn’t know Italian.  They cut the meat right in front of us with one of those sharp spinning metal wheels, which was fascinating to watch.  After eating lunch, we relaxed for a while then went out to dinner at the same place that we had gone to the first day.  

The fourth day, I was in charge.  Early in the morning (at least early for me), my dad and I went out to the park near our house for me to draw and for him to take pictures of the Colosseum.  We spent about thirty minutes there, and then headed back to get ready to go out for a swim.  This time, we knew exactly which place we were going to and exactly how to get there.  We arrived, I swam for a bit, and then we went home.  I wanted a bit of a relaxing day, so we spent the rest of our day in the apartment, and ate a measly dinner that we managed to put together from the ingredients already in the kitchen.   

Bike riding past ancient ruins on the Appian Way

The last day, we woke up late and went on a bike ride on the Appia Antica road, which is the ancient road that connected Rome to Brindisi (also known as the Appian Way.)  It was a very bumpy ride, since the road was paved with cobblestone. On the way back, we stopped at a little restaurant off the side of the road, where the waiter was very kind and talked to us in English about how he used to live in California around where we live. He showed us a book he was mentioned in, and told us lots of stories about the author. In all, the trip was very interesting and it taught me how different Rome is from the U.S.
(Additional photos by Matt Arnold.)

Paige at the Vatican

FIVE DAYS IN ROME, Part 1: Guest Post by Paige Arnold

Colosseum, Rome, Italy

My granddaughter Paige (age 13) and her parents recently went on a trip to Rome, and while she was there Paige kept a diary of their activities. Paige is a competitive swimmer, so although she was on vacation, she tried to fit in practice when she could. I thank her for sharing her thoughts and photos of the trip with The Intrepid Tourist.

During my spring break, my family decided that we would take a week-long vacation in Rome.  We stayed in an Airbnb right in the center of the old city, where tourists were abundant. 

Monument to Vittorio Emmanuel II, with statue of Goddess Victoria riding on a quadriga

On the first day, my dad and I wanted to find a place to swim.  I was going to be missing a full week of swim practice at home, so we had to find somewhere so that I could keep myself in shape.  We were originally going to swim at the Olympic pool, which was relatively far away, so we had to take the subway, then walk around 14 blocks from the station.  It ended up that the pool was only for people age18 and up, so we crossed the river in search of someplace else.  We tried another place, but it was for members only, so we retraced our steps in hope of finding yet another option.  We then happened across a little place with a pool under a big tent where we could pay to swim, and swam there for about an hour. 

The Colosseum was completed in 80 A.D. It is the largest amphitheater ever built.

After that we returned home and rested for a bit before going out to see the Colosseum from the outside.  

One of the many cats that live near the Colosseum.

Our Airbnb was about a two-minute walk from the Colosseum, so we walked through a nice little park and got there quickly.  We looked around a bit, then decided to go eat dinner at Ristorante Pizzeria da Michele, a place which was very nice and where the waiter was very patient and helpful. 

Entrance to the Vatican Museum.

The second day, we went to the Vatican.  We went on a 2 ½ hour walking tour which showed us the Sistine Chapel and St. Peter’s Basilica.  The whole thing was very crowded, but it’s what you’d expect from one of the most visited attractions in Rome.

Statue of Boy and Duck with grapes inside Vatican Museum.

The paintings on the Sistine Ceiling and walls were beautiful, which is amazing since the artist who painted them, Michelangelo, wasn’t even a painter.  He was a sculptor. (No photography is allowed in the Sistine Chapel.) 

Statue of a face in the hallway leading to the Sistine Chapel

After gazing at the art in the Sistine Chapel for fifteen minutes, we walked right next door to St. Peter’s Basilica.  

There were many, many statues and the tour guide (who spoke fluent English as well as Italian) told us stories about some of the individual pieces, such as “La Pieta”.  Afterward, we went outside to the balcony and looked at the courtyard below. There were lots of nice decorations around, because Easter was coming up and the Pope was to come. 

In St. Peter's Basilica

Then we went to have lunch at a little pizzeria not too far away, which I thought was great.  Something that surprised me was how thin the crust was. It was like pizza toppings on top of a tortilla!  The thinness of the crust made the pizza even better, because since it was so thin you could eat the whole thing and not feel sick. After that, we walked for a while and took a bus back to the apartment. The buses in Rome, or at least some of them are very crowded. The upside of that is that when everyone is packed into the bus like sardines into a can, then you don’t have to hold on to anything, since there’s nowhere to fall. 
(The last two photos are by Matt Arnold. Part 2 will post next week.) 

Street scene near our apartment