Death Valley Geology Field Trip (ENVG 45200)
Spring 2014
Professor Antonio Simonetti led a geological field trip to Death Valley during the week of March 8th-15th, 2014. The field party consisted of 14 undergraduate students and three graduate students (Elizabeth Koeman, Mateusz Dembowski and Travis Olds) that served as teaching assistants. Excursions to various sites of geological interest within Death Valley were carried out during the day, which involved much hiking and field exercises such as identification of faults, folds, and “strike and dip” measurements of geological units. “Home base” for the field party was at the Death Valley campground, where students prepared meals for the entire group in the evening. Death Valley is truly one of our nation’s geological gems, and a brief summary of the unique geology of Death Valley is provided below.
Death Valley Geology:
Death Valley is located within eastern California (bordering Nevada) and is nestled within two major ‘natural’ US provinces- the Sierra Nevada to the west and the large “Basin and Range Province” to the east, which extends across Nevada and into Utah. Within this region, the greatest relief (change in elevation) is recorded for the contiguous United States: the 14,776 ft difference between Mt. Whitney at 14,494 feet above sea level in the Sierra Nevada, and the infamous Badwater Basin in Death Valley at 282 feet below sea level!Death Valley is a long, narrow, north-south trending, fault-bounded trough (graben) bordered on both sides by huge mountains (see geological map below), which formed within the last few million years.
The geology within Death Valley is dominated by two large-scale tectonic processes, these are extension and volcanism. The first process, extension, has affected much of the Western United States and created the Basin and Range Province. Convection or “currents” within the Earth’s upper mantle are driving coastal California to move slowly away from the Colorado Plateau at a rate of ~1 inch/year. This extension has stretched the crust in a west-east direction, which has given rise to the north-south trending basins and ranges, such as Death Valley. Volcanism also abounds in the region; for example, the Ubehebe crater located in the northwestern region of Death Valley is the result of volcanic activity that occurred ~1,200 years ago.