Geobulletin alpha

My neighborhood in Mitzpe Ramon, southern Israel 

MITZPE RAMON, ISRAEL — Some images from the little town in the Negev where I spend my nights. I like being based here because my students and I are central to all of our diverse geological localities. It is also my friend Yoav Avni’s home. Plus, it reminds me of my hometown of Barstow, California,

Roadside dinos of Yermo, California 

A couple of weekends ago, London and I went camping and stargazing at Afton Canyon, a nice dark spot about 40 miles east of Barstow. On the way home, we took the exit off I-15 at Ghost Town Road, initially because we wanted to visit the old Calico Ghost Town. But then we saw big

Folded rocks, volcanoes, and a little of the Old West 

ZZYZX, CALIFORNIA–The spectacular set of folds above are exposed in the lower parking lot of Calico Ghost Town near Barstow, California. This is a famous site that has been visited by hundreds of geologists, but there are still many mysteries about the causes of this deformation and even the correlation of these rocks in the

Structural geology and mineralogy at Calico 

ZZYZX, CALIFORNIA–It was surprisingly cool this morning in Zzyzx as we left for our day of fieldwork, but we were not surprised by the wind at our first stop, Calico Ghost Town outside Barstow. Every time we’ve been there it has been blustery. Calico is an old silver mining site with a complex geological structure

Plunging into Lake Manix 

ZZYZX, CALIFORNIA–East of Barstow and west of Afton Canyon was a very large pluvial lake during the Pleistocene. This Lake Manix was hundreds of feet deep, and its catastrophic drainage through Afton Canyon about 185,000 years ago must have been a great spectacle. This afternoon we explored one of the southern shores of this ancient

A morning with the Barstow Formation 

ZZYZX, CALIFORNIA–It is hard to believe that the Mojave region once had vast lakes, erupting volcanoes and a diverse mammalian fauna including camels and horses. The most important record of this time is the Barstow Formation (Miocene — about 15 million years ago). This unit contains river and lake sediments along with volcanic ash, all

A most impressive volcano 

ZZYZX, CALIFORNIA–Our second and last stop of the day was Amboy Crater, which is about halfway between Barstow and Needles, California, near Route 66. Meagen Pollock, our ace petrologist, prepared us well for this visit, so we’ll wait for her to post the geological details and her expert observations. I want to prepare the ground

Greetings from the Road: Mojave Desert 

Holiday greetings to everyone! We're on the road to various locations in Arizona and Southern California, so posting might be sparse the next few days. Having done several posts on the Calico Mountains, I realized I had no distant shots of the mountains, so I snapped a couple from Highway 40 outside Barstow. Calico makes its presence known with the logo across the mountaintop. The

On the road in California 1 - Kelso 

Wow, what a day! Drove from Barstow to the Kelso Dunes and took a ramble for a couple of hours. The picture below proves I was there, but making it very far into this vast massif of dunes was,