Wooster Geologists in Southwestern Utah (May 2018)

This month, our geological technician Nick Wiesenberg and I had the privilege of taking two Wooster Independent Study students into southwestern Utah to do research on the Carmel Formation (Middle Jurassic). The students were Ethan Killian (’19) on the left and Galen Schwartzberg (’19) on the right. (You’ll get better view of them in the links below where we have blog entries for each day.) I plotted out the localities during a solo expedition last month. We hope we are re-establishing a field area for several more years of work.

This is the local stratigraphic column (modified from that on the Zion National Park website). The area is dominated by the majestic Navajo Sandstone, with our Carmel Formation one of the very few carbonate units.

Our main study areas. 1 = Gunlock region; 2 = Eagle Mountain Ranch; 3 = Dammeron Valley; and 4 = Diamond Valley (“Water Tank”).

Here are links to our daily blog posts —

May 16: Team Jurassic Utah sets to work
May 17: Team Jurassic Utah on the Ranch
May 18: Projects designed, Team Jurassic Utah begins fieldwork
May 19: A day for Jurassic oysters
May 20: Jurassic hardgrounds and Holocene lava flows in southwestern Utah
May 21: Team Jurassic Utah finishes essential data collection
May 22: Zion National Park and life in Santa Clara, Utah
May 23: An oyster ball nursery and Veyo pies on our last field day in SW Utah
May 24: Science and culture on Team Jurassic Utah’s last day

And here are the coordinates of our localities —

Update: Nick heroically drove our samples back to our Wooster paleontology lab. What treasures there are in these three boxes!