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Red Rock Canyon, Nevada

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The pictures above, from Red Rock Canyon just west of Las Vegas, were taken on a Ge 1 class field trip in May 1997. We saw some of the most beautiful scenery in the world, and it was one of the most enjoyable weekends of my life, despite temperatures well over 100 degrees.

The colors in these pictures are true -- the redness (see especially #2) comes from oxidized iron in the rocks, and the deeper the red, the more oxidation has occurred. In #5, in the left half of the picture is a wall of rock, and just to the right of the picture is a shear drop. (Don't ask how close to the edge I had to get to take that picture!) To help give some sort of perspective, though, we were quite a bit higher than the hills in the distant upper right-hand corner of the photo. Photo #6 is part of a series of shots making up a 330-degree panoramic view, more of which is shown below, as a series of four photos. There is minimal, if any, overlap between photos.




near Landers, California

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These pictures of the Landers rupture were also taken on a field trip with my Ge 1 class, only two weeks after the Red Rock Canyon trip. Most of the movement in this earthquake was right-lateral slip (definition), but in photos 1 and 2, the fault trace curved in such a way that normal faulting resulted (definition). Photos 3 and 4 were taken very close to one another, on a hill that has been pushed up gradually over the last 100,000 years or so by the very fault that ruptured in the Landers earthquake and appears in the photos. The vertical displacement is readily apparent (that's me in #3, I'm 5-foot-6, or so), although the lateral displacement was more that twice the vertical in both those photos. Photo #4 is of an offset wash. The wash comes from higher up on the hill and flows to where the person on the right is standing, above the scarp. He is standing right in the center of the wash. It is offset at the scarp and picks up again where the person on the left is standing (she is in the middle of the wash, too), and then the wash continues down to where I am standing. (I was standing in the center of the wash when I took the picture.) Before the earthquake, there was no rupture and no displacement, and the wash continued in a roughly straight and continuous course, without offset.

See some aerial photos of the fault rupture!




Joshua Tree National Park, California

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These last three pictures were actually NOT taken on a Geology field trip, rather they were taken on vacation in March. They turned out well, so I thought I'd include them.




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This page created by Aron Meltzner.
Initiated 13 September 1997.
Last modified 12 August 1998.