‘Nick From Home’ #94 - Exotic S: Swakane Gneiss & Chelan Migmatite

well hello everybody welcome to ellensburg washington usa the local time is 1 42 in the p.m on a friday afternoon and we will begin our program on the swat cane biotite nice and chelan migmatite at the top of the hour at two o'clock local time so a little more than 15 minutes from now hope you can join us then hope you can join us now skip ahead if you're watching this in replay but in live here we're going to visit with folks and do a few thank yous and just say hi to everybody and make sure that we are doing okay today and you are invited back of course on sunday morning less than 48 hours from now to talk about the hosa mean terrain and the metal area daddy knows nothing about those topics but i will by sunday morning well there's one perk of being inside on a friday afternoon do you want to say hi to these guys did you want to say hi yeah i know i know so this is bijou the cat and uh we've been waiting for the fog to burn off outside and for it to warm up it really hasn't warmed up but we have a little bit of sun just temporarily so i think you're going to want to go outside aren't you i think you want to give it a try and go outside did you want to do that yeah yeah what do you think i'll just leave the door open and crack and we'll let you go outside if you want i need to i need to make sure that we're communicating with these guys yeah out you go you can squeeze you can squeeze there you go all right so i do have questions for you uh are we functional hello where are you viewing from i'll just uh we'll kill three birds with one stone what chico california in mankato minnesota and jim's in primeval oregon and rick is in wisconsin rapids and i'm seeing some five by fives and that's wonderful it did dawn on me that i haven't been on the front porch yet with the wireless microphone so i don't have to worry about tons of echo i don't think hello chris in pasadena california vicki is in dansville new york abilene texas grandpa carl's in granger debbie in sunnyside washington sounds and looks good thank you nm hockey fan uh thank you paul in burlington lethally thank you for the report yeah so you know i'm not the brightest knife in the drawer so never really dawned on me to to be in the front porch here i just liked being outside so much but i kind of did this mental hurdle as i was waiting it was 37 degrees out there an hour ago i had everything set up outside like uh 45 minutes ago i'm like if it's still foggy if it's still super cold like 37 degrees at one o'clock i'm moving everything inside so i've been busy since one and i don't know maybe i'll be in the front porch the rest of the the rest of the alphabet a couple more just making sure that we're we're there frederick saying hello to elaine that's nice uh dan hello kind of a weird don's in fairbanks alaska tasmania is here that's wonderful to see whatever time of the day or night it is there wonderful northwoods joanne says it's chilly in northern wisconsin uh yep there goes bijou hanging out good the netherlands tom is from squim frederick my fellow new mexican sids in texas beach bums in cleveland ohio well lots of north americans here a stray distant person as well got some thank yous from distant lands which is fun beau's in copenhagen denmark not so fast there hello gracie age 10 you're coming from paris illinois uh that's wonderful uh big daddy says hello to you uh nobody minus six says don in fairbanks thank you for the report back country gary's in darington great to see you okay yeah got a few thank yous i'm glad we're working for now glad we're working for now and i wasn't sure about the lighting but i don't know it seems like it's okay um i did buy some lighting uh oscar in south san diego helped me buy some lights in case it was real dark and i just didn't have much to work with but i think we're going to be okay today right i got some hand samp i got some rocks to show you we'll flip you around quite a bit i think there is a little bit of echo yeah well i don't know i could open those windows hang on patrick um hang on patrick hot mike who knows i doubt that'll make a difference but it's kind of fun our house denmark okay looks like we're looks like we're rolling couple thank yous give me a second and check my laptop from vandenberg village dale and anna nice things nice things um the lander insight launched on a ula atlas v rocket from space launch complex 3 vandenberg air force base a few years ago something about nasa here southern california dale had the honor of being part of the security team assigned to the insight launch he continues to hope a young geologist first inspired by this series will choose the geology of our solar system for his or her career thank you dale and honor okay i tried hard not to make this all about me and yet here i go with another thank you involving my family history do you remember all this what was it like a month ago that i i kind of showed everybody the trunk that my great great grandfather nicholas used as he came over from elm switzerland and we didn't know the date and we didn't know the port and thanks to you guys we solved that problem and then last time i thanked i guess it was a anna the same same ayanna or anna uh for this book and in it it talked about uh my great great great grandfather sort of surviving the elm rockslide which i was on september 11 1881 so i never dreamed i'd get to this point where i had that much detail about my um family history in switzerland in the 19th century well thomas from utah saw that thank you and here's thomas by email saying uh your comments about the elm rock slide made me curious as i did not remember the details particularly that it was man-made a man-made cause landslide through an internet site i located a link to a pdf of the original 1881 investigative report to commemorate this tragic event not only is it in german this is thomas from utah talking about not only is it in german but in gothic print so for most it's now difficult to read fortunately in my younger years i learned on my own to read the gothic script as many scientific books were printed with this script well there are quite a few zentner stories in the report including an eyewitness account that might have been the basis for the zentner episode that you read moreover did you know that another young zettner was hailed as a hero i understand that your ancestor nick left elm before this tragedy but you might like it as an addition to the family story so thomas i mean he's going through this old uh report in script or whatever gothic script and he's he's highlighting all these zeners i mean it's not just cousins it's actually like last name zentner and this this family of young zetners perished in the slide and uh cousin outran and a great great grandpa so um i don't know i printed out a couple up let me just show you quickly just in case you're curious so there are photos i mean it is 1881 so we have people with cameras taking photos of the tragic aftermath this is the slate that was being mined up above the little town of elm again there's more than 100 people that were killed including a number of people last name zetner the local uh mayor essentially was a zener um there's a lot of a lot of names that i remember from my youth in new glarus wisconsin of course many of the folks that settled in wisconsin where i'm from are families that came over from elm so here's a look at that gothic script so this little live stream series continues to amaze and it's it's kind of this parallel this parallel benefit beyond just communicating geology there's there's this there's no way that i would have the ability or the patience or the follow-through to learn this on my own so i am i'm grateful not only to you thomas but to pretty much everybody who's who's been helping along these lines you're all smart you all have your levels of talent or uh areas of talent and uh it's it's just a kick it's a kick in the pants to be able to put this all together so thank you because of the uh wi-fi clown show that i had last time on sunday morning i'm not sure i can't remember on the second attempt if i properly thanked sam clindworth son of jeff klendworth and nick trommel and i just saw nick at binman's and out an hour and a half ago and i want to thank them again i'm holding it carefully now i want to i want to thank them again for this amazing fruit kayaking fruitcake and we will oh why not you want to try it right now it's going to say we're gonna we're gonna oh my god that is a dense a dense fruit kick it's been soaking in rum i can smell the rum oh yeah oh yeah so i got some plans for this fruitcake in a couple of weeks i think but uh i wanted to show you the the goodies inside daddy getting crunked on this without even eating it it's crunch a bird so thank you vincent so thank you vinmen's bakery for the wonderful fruitcake one last thank you two thank yous for folks coming from up north there this is from robin who emailed this morning and said nick i don't know if this is of interest to you but i'm sending it just in case i dug this green rock up in my backyard in quinnell british columbia last summer it came in a large flat sheet and breaks easily i am enjoying the current live stream series in replay the bc stuff is excellent even if you're mainly talking washington so you're right robin i won't be back up in bc much beyond uh today but uh thank you for a little chunk of uh quinnelia and this box with fourteen dollars a postage from petersburg alaska dear nick back in the day i used to fly a bit i once landed on a sm on a small bush strip in the mountains east of dece lake british columbia and picked up this rock another green rock for your collection from northern cache creek love your work my wife and i have been your fans for several years doug and kathy p.s if you ever drive the alaskan highway and need a place to stop we are one hour south of whitehorse so doug and kathy a piece of cash creek possibly from the southwest pacific and i can see that you've had this on your bookshelf doug and kathy and the fact that you thought to send it to me is is much appreciated so thank you very much okay everybody give me a couple minutes to get my thoughts right and we will begin our session thank you for joining us hot mike hot water at the hot mic hot mic at the hot water well a pleasant good afternoon to you all thank you for joining us this is uh the front porch of our home here in ellensburg washington usa and i'm so glad that you could be with us today here's to you um the academic quarter is done turned in my final grades last night and so i've got a little extra time to finish out the alphabet with you and today's topic the chelan migmatite and the suacaine biotite nice are rocks that i actually have dealt with a little bit for a change we're going to be at least partly today in civilization instead of high in the mountains with lindsay or back country gary or a few others the chelan rocks are right near the town of chelan and the resort community uh the greater chelan area with lake chelan and the second homes and all that sort of stuff so if you know the chelan area in northern washington you know these rocks you've seen them you maybe haven't spent any time looking at them carefully but these swirly beautiful complicated looking rocks near chelan yeah that is what we're talking about today and it has some question marks and the soil cane nice is also accessible to many of us wenatchee do you know wenatchee beautiful little city and just north of wenatchee and if you drive in fact from wenatchee to chelan on the west side of the columbia river you're going right through the chelan for more than 10 miles so these rocks are accessible and nearby and that's why i know about them because i've been doing stuff with the ice age floods and other things and so i've kind of intersected with my previous interests and those rocks but we will see that we can go up into the high country as well of the crystalline core and we can find some of those rocks as well so the plan today since i don't have the blackboard it's in the backyard is to i don't know if review is the right word but i want to at first go backwards and revisit some of the rocks of the crystalline core because today is the last of the crystalline core and i did a few things on the you know my homemade little uh diagrams that helped me and possibly will help you and they not only will help us look backwards but they will help us put these two new units for today into perspective and um and then we leave the crystalline core and on sunday morning we head across the ross lake fault zone and we get into hosa mean and methau and tayoton and bridge river and i don't know okay so here's one way to kind of not only look back to the crystalline core but look ahead the first act here is to go and look again at each of these units that we have discussed and then of course here's chelan and suaukane the two new guys for us today but real estate wise these two guys are not a major player compared to the skagit nice let's say or even the nupiqua et cetera so these are question mark guys they're kind of oddball guys they have questions of their own they don't nicely fit into much of the rest of this stuff and yet i'm very interested in both of them for a number of reasons i'm hoping to get you interested in them as well again once we cross the ross lake fault we're into sunday's content and we're really out of this crystalline core remember this is the straight creek fault okay so let's see yep just decided so you remember this this was the way that i was trying to keep track of these things and correlate these terrains not only in the crystalline core but going all the way back to western washington and the san juan islands etc i don't want to go that far back but i am going to just kind of wrap around here and just quickly remind you that we have this geologic portion of the geologic time scale with dates and that's been our standard approach and here's our four terrains in the san juan islands and then we got further east and we were approaching the cascades an area called the western cascades foothills this is all this is really old stuff now for us again we've got stuff like the alexander terrain and cash creek question mark and everything else okay now we're going to slow down and you'll see that i redid this how can i so first of all just notice that in the crystalline core as a unit we really don't have this paleozoic and earlier stuff now we'll get little tiny little zircons today that are from those olden days but as far as a substantial exotic terrain we really don't have it in the crystalline core but as i said that i was going to do this and i and i like doing it yesterday it really helped me and possibly you too i redrew even going back to ingles and i separated what i think is real the proto-lift or the original rocks of not only these guys we have discussed already but here's the two new guys today the chelan and the swat kane i'm redoing this to show that i think this is worthwhile to show the original rocks whether they were sedimentary roxy i'm drawing a little sketch for you now for me mainly but maybe it will be helpful to you too so we decided that the original stuff in the ingalls terrain was deep ocean floor and even the stuff below the ocean floor the mantle i'm just drawing a little thumbnail sketch what is this like a pelican i don't know it's supposed to be a boat but i guess they look like pelicans uh the chuwacum the protolith of the chihuahuacum is this deep ocean sediment this true politic material this this this kind of black mud uh the nascent ridge uh often lumped in with the chuwacum well apparently there's enough proto-with rock there to say well we don't just have a deep ocean floor we've got a volcanic island we've got oceanic island maybe a line of ocean islands not sure what that is in other words is that stokeenia is that quinnelia we don't care the nepiqua this crazy a com a kind of accumulation of material we decided was an oceanic wedge or oceanic accretionary wedge subduction complex basically but apparently completely underwater the cascade river which included um i guess just the cascade river shift sorry was a volcanic ark story now this is new this gadget was our last show and i was struggling with the proto-lift of the skagit but by email i've been emailing stacia gordon and a few other researchers who've been really doing amazing work in the last decade with this gadget from what i can tell from their emails and also reading as carefully as possible the original proto-lift of the skagit nice is nepequa and cascade river so i'm combining these two shows on the ocean floor and that combining that age stuff and saying before we get the complicated metamorphism and the banded knives and and the other kinds of nices perhaps and it's tough to go back this far and undo all that crazy metamorphic activity but perhaps we had a combo of the piqua and cascade river not only with this gadget and why not i think even there's triassic nepiqua and cascade river shifts as the very earliest days of the chelan migmatite now that's not a hallmark kind of headline event but i'm kind of showing you that i think this is worth thinking about i'm not entirely sure it's real and you're like you know i started doing this last show didn't i i'm not sure it's real i think i think i read this like i got some guts what am i doing i'm talking to 600 people and i'm not sure yeah i'm not sure i'm not sure i'm learning this stuff for the first time but more importantly i'm finding areas that are kind of fuzzy among the research community as well if it wasn't fuzzy it would be easy to read that stuff in the earliest days of these guys so you know i i if you're bothered by me saying i'm not sure it's real or i think i read this that's the that's the kind of context for statements like that we're still making progress i hope but there are places that need continual work and then look at what i can't hold it look what is up what kind of freak show is the swat cane look at how young it is so that's what's coming now i'm still in act one and another way to go back and just basically take a tour of the crystalline core is to go back to this very impressive map and accompanying pamphlet and text put together by ralph hagarood i think at this time i'm not sure but i think roland was retired or close to retirement and roland had put the original mapping together it was his life's work and he's been a team with ralph for a long time you might recall we we met ralph by video in his backyard in wenatchee a while back but as i read what i'm about to read to you little thumbnail details about these terrains i hear ralph's voice and i think it's ralph's writing and you're like oh i don't think i know what is this this is 2009 yes it's 2009. and i'm going to be reading to you from this pamphlet which is loaned to me by jim paters uh patterson uh no what was his name former student of mine can't do it student patterson it'll come to me james james patterson um this is what i'm going to be using to share with you because i like the little thumbnails that ralph gives us uh in part because he he kind of hints at a few of the questions that remain he also gives us more rock detail and i feel like i need many of you have a very kind of deep interest in this area and my little casual turns up a few little rock types is maybe not enough and you might as well might as well hear from the source immediately and you're like i still don't think i have seen this publication well sure you have this is the map i've been showing you off and on that is the entire north cascades uh the centerpiece of which is the crystalline core i got this one laminated the one i showed you last time isn't laminated but it's such a hornet's nest there's such a lot going on that what i'm trying to do with you is to pull out some major messages and run with them but occasionally i'm a little too general and so i feel i'm going to feel better by sharing some of this with you so i'm not stalling before we get to the chelan and and the um soaking but i i do want to set that up by talking about kind of what we know as a whole so i don't know can i do this easily read a little bit and then show you uh we'll try and i might spend an hour doing this i don't want to do that so the ingles terrain here's ralph ultra mafic rocks including peridotite and foliated and massive serpentanite these rocks are dark heavy and rich in iron and magnesium most of ultramafic rocks initially from many miles below the earth's surface during seafloor spreading i'll stop there but he's got more so it's a combination of rock detail but also kind of some general interpretive stuff and then an occasional kind of question mark uh nason ridge migmatite nation ridge nice in other words in in some places migmatic and we'll talk about what that means in just a second in the southern part of the outcrop area mostly mixed light-colored nice interlayered with mica schist in amphibolite similar to the chiwakum shift which we'll about to talk about many of the rocks are so mixed and variable with crust cutting with sills dikes and irregular bodies of light-colored granitic rocks that they are called migmatite grades northward into more uniform mostly medium grain biotite nice with small red garnets speaking of the chihuakum schist remember the chihuahuacam schist has a proto-lift that's a simple black shale basically black mud on the ocean floor that became a shale and that eventually got metamorphosed uh into this this is the chihuahuacum schist that you can see has some garnets inside of it should i flip you around now i say should i flip you around now so we've looked at the chihuahuan before used to be this proto-lift in other words black shale which will wacom today remember some of those backcountry gary photographs this stuff is in the high country not that you walk them but i can't hold it remember occasionally the garnets get out of control i'm not sure that there are garnets this big in the chiwakum although maybe somebody can say that okay hope this is helpful what does ralph say about the chihuahua mostly well-layered graphitic mica schist locally contains minerals that only form in aluminum-rich rocks which suggests that the schists the schist was once ocean floor mud rich in alluvium writ aluminum-rich clay minerals graphite the mineral form of carbon is the metamorphosed remains of organic matter in the original mud and imparts the dark color to many of these rocks so he's right ralph is writing to a general audience which i appreciate we keep going what are we doing we're trying to take the scenic route and work our way through these rocks essentially from south to north ish i mean this is down by mount stewart of course the ingles and the chuwacum so i'm talking about the metamorphic equivalence which i'm still working on but i think most of the metamorphism is happening late much of it not all of it but much of it is happening post 100 million years ago okay so we just did these guys uh nepiqua i don't have any nepiqua for you but what does he say about napiqua remember that was the dog's breakfast nopeequa schist predominantly fine-grained hornblende mica schist fine-grained hornblad hornblend rich schist an amphibolite and quartz-rich schist as well as minor nice marble and ultramafic rock most of these rocks were derived from the deep ocean sediments and ocean floor basalt the quartz rich schist is metamorphosed chert a rock composed of the so tiny salicious shells of marine plankton the age of the original oceanic rocks is uncertain but comparison to unmetamorphosed fossil-bearing rocks in canada suggests to many geologists the napequischist includes permian and or triassic rocks is that what i said triassic i could have included a little bit of permian apparently my bad let's jump over to cascade river shift mostly fine grained easily split green brown and black micacio schist as well as amphibolite fine-grained nice and metamorph metamorphosed conglomerate many of these rocks were derived from volcanic material erupted from late triassic volcanic ark whose roots eventually crystallized as the marble mount plutons the metamorphosed conglomerate indicates that streams eroded the ark and delivered material to the oceans i love the way he goes right to a little mental snapshot for us and i'm trying my best for a mental snapshot as well we're almost to the two two new units for today skagit nice remember that gave me trouble adding the sediment late in the game into the mid crustal levels to lower the temperature for the mid level of the crush to create the certain look of this gadget nice still struggling with that skagit nice complex mix of schist amphibolite and rare marble and ultramafic rocks mostly derived from marine sedimentary and volcanic rocks that is intruded by sills of igneous rocks which are now metamorphosed to orthonize the original schist amphibolite and marble may have been continuous with the nepiqua schist and or the cascade river shift described below ortho knives bodies range from a few centimeters thick in the layered nicest to several kilometers thick in mapped bodies of ortho knives many of these rocks are cross cut by a variety of lighter colored igneous dikes blah blah blah so i went up and visited chris mattinson last night in his office he gave me some skagit nice to show to you guys that he has cut and been working on that's the chris mountains and two weeks ago that was here talking about green rocks in the backyard that's not a specialty a specialty is the chelan migmatite and some of these rocks within the crystalline core but skagit nice is one that a number of researchers are working on okay i think we're ready that's my decision i think we're ready to cross into new ground and why not i'm gonna go right to it this is the best i've got for you today this is the best i've got for you today so i'll be showing this to you a number of times this is the skagit i just got done talking about but you'll see when we jump to our two units today even though there's questions even though there are dis dissimilarities with this gadget there are a couple of major themes that happen with today's terrains the biggest of which do you remember the skagit was this rock that after 100 million years ago got plunged more than 20 miles into the earth to create the metamorphic banding and the metamorphic nicest going down in the geologic elevator do you recall that i still don't totally get why that's happening but here we are with both the chelan migmatite and the suacaine biotite nice that are doing the same freaking thing they're also going down and by using the metamorphic minerals in the chelan and in the soil cane we can approximate the maximum depth like how deep did the elevator go 22 miles down 20 miles down 26 miles down so by far our deepest look into the absolute lowest levels of the crystalline core is this swat cane even though it's really young let's just pause and say that again i never put those two thoughts together until right now by far the youngest whoa that is interesting even by far the youngest of our bedrock units that we are discussing now if you've lost track if you've zoned out and you're coming back now we're done really going back to these guys that we've already discussed we're taking our most recent terrain and comparing them to today's two terrains and what i just realized by putting these thought concepts together in one sentence is the swat cane nice is clearly the youngest of the rocks but it was plunged deeper than anybody else what is up with that what is up with that i can't hold it i'm setting you up a little bit setting the hook did i tell you before i got into geology i was a theater major part of this is trying to get you to come back trying to get some things going i wonder why maybe we'll talk about it next time maybe we'll talk about it in december it's all showbiz i guess so all three of these guys are doing this crazy go down plunge deeply and then all come up but i can't hold it notice that the chelan i'm ahead of my story now but i'm just i'm just kind of rolling with it notice that the chelan is a little bit out of sync with everybody else it's getting a head start it's starting to come up the geologic elevator starting 80 million years ago according to chris mattinson whereas the skagit and the squawking are not really starting to come up until 50 and then it's a rapid rise to the surface as we discussed with this gadget nice last time so we're not in total sync with our ages with our going down with our going up but that first major concept of just taking the nest t plunge i'm dating myself but just just down man down and then up up up what is up with that no pun intended and do you recall really spitballing now but i'm having a good time hopefully you are too do you recall that daryl cowan who is the co-author of the book we've been using most of this series tells us that the straight creek fault is obviously significant no no landmark statement there from daryl but daryl was basically saying as you're driving from west to east uh through the north cascades let's say on state route 20 and you're cruising through the easton and you're getting into the chilliwack and you're back into some easton and then you cross the straight creek fault you're in another world and by that he meant two things the first another world thing is obviously you're into much different rocks the crystalline core but i'm reminding you of another major message that daryl had for us which i really hadn't thought about until i read that maybe it was marley that wrote the sentence i don't know part of the reason we're in a different world is because these things have come up from 20 miles below in other words there's not just northward movement on the west side of this great creek fault that is for sure a thing you remember our piercing points but in addition to the west side of the straight creek fault going north we should also visualize the east side of the strait creek fault coming at you coming up the geologic elevator and so i think i've decided maybe it's just me but i think i've decided that we don't have a perfect match of units on opposite sides of the straight creek fault because this crystalline core has come up from below it's probably underneath on the other side as well that's a new thought right now i'm not even sure that's accurate but i think the fact we're doing so much vertical lifting on the east side of the straight creek fault is screwing up our units perfectly matching when we restore this retreat fault remember what i mean by that remember we did this right we did today's geology and then we decided to go back in time to remember this restoring the straight creek fault we're going to be doing more of this i don't know next week maybe two weeks from now but if we go back to 50 million years ago our piercing point is the uh windy pass thrust and the vetter thrust it's another fault that's the mount stewart baffleth that remember intruded up into the chihuahuan shift in the ingles my point is i haven't been adding anything else to these strips because there really isn't anything else that is identical on both sides of the fault that we can use and i think a big reason for that is our vertical geologic elevator bringing this saddle brown to the surface okay let's reel it in big boy let's reel it in a little bit let's let's let's be less open-ended and a little bit more uh regimented now i'm talking to myself i hereby declare from this point forward that are two new colors today courtesy of pencils by patrick the chelan migmatite is a turquoise green and our soil cane biotite nice a dark gray and just by oh by the way if you're like i don't think i like your color choice here like are you color blind or something like these don't colors don't go together and i agree with you i think they're ugly together like artistically i think they're ugly i think they're ugly but there's a little bit of method to the madness here about taking certain shades of yellow let's say or grello uh and you'll see when we try to correlate a little bit uh coming down the road oh oh we got a friend come on come on come on oh yeah it's getting cold huh okay so here's our chelan migmatite you see it's not a super huge guy here's our swat cane nice and here's another piece of it over here so the ineot fault has a fair amount of strike slip offset on it and it's been a while since september but if you recall our table setting episodes back in september i was trying to plant the seed with you that if you have a strike a strike slip fault like the straight creek or like the antiot or like the roche lake we'll talk more about these on sunday does anybody remember what i was really pushing to immediately think of when i say strike slip fault it's two months ago i don't expect you to come up with an answer plus there's a delay i was trying to say strike slip fault oblique subduction strike slip fault oblique subduction and it took us a while i think to actually communicate what oblique subduction meant because we didn't have context for that idea and i think i'm going to be vague again about it today to be honest but oblique subduction generally means we don't have two tectonic plates hitting head head-on we don't have plates colliding in an east-west sense instead oblique subduction is a plate coming in kind of side-swiping the other plate in the sense of north america western north america and an oceanic plate yes i am setting you up once again for december if we bring in a tectonic plate obliquely that's going to trigger formation of some strike slip faults so i'm just trying to remind you that that's something that will be useful to us anytime we run into a slight strike slip fault anytime we run into a strike slip fault we want to realize we might have some oblique subduction some sort of tectonic event oblique event getting some strike slip fault action happening okay i hit that harder than i think i even wanted to okay oh my god are you right here are you right in the open window you're learning geology with us so here's a part of the chelan migmatite and chris said yeah i got i got some samples like in lonya from my you know research here's his uh ways to uh label his samples that he collected in chelan and then he takes a rock saw and makes a rock chip and then he gets a thin section um but when i started actually picking a few samples to share with you it's like you know we need an outcrop scale we can't really see it just like this so let me show you some photos especially if you've been to lake chelan and you think you may know what i'm talking about with this chelan magmatite let's there's a picture's worth a thousand words change my mind let me finish let me finish my ralph reading here he's got three sentences for the chelan migmatite ralph haggard in 2009 under the heading terrain uncertain are you talking about a major question mark in an official usgs publication i mean there's paragraphs and paragraphs of text for these other units there's three sentences under the heading terrain uncertain migmatite complex of hopson and mattinson that's chris's dad jim mattinson and cliff hobson metatonalite metabaseite and metaplutonic migmatite i'll try to explain a dome-shaped upwelling of deeply formed igneous material that appears to have pushed aside the shift and nice of the chelan mountains terrain that's a weird sentence i'll just leave that sit there i don't know what to do with that sentence but his brevity speaks volumes and while i'm here he's got a few more things to say about this walk-in biotite nice well layered by a titan ice formed by metamorphism of sandstone zircons separated from the nice and analyzed for uranium and lead isotopes give ages of 1.6 billion years among the oldest ages founded in the north cascades although geologists debated for many years about the significance of the old zircon we're in this joaquin right now the most recent work by jenny matzil in 2004 shows that the old zircons are accompanied by other younger zircons merely 73 million years old the old zircons are now thought to be grains eroded from much older rocks and deposited along with younger zircon grains more recently than 73 million years ago not long after these grains were deposited the sandstone was deeply buried by the rocks of the chelan mountain's terrain i'll explain that were thrust over it the sandstone was metamorphosed and eventually off-road unroofed or exposed when the overlying rocks slid off during the extensional event again i've got things to say but let me show you hand samples of these two things that ralph just got done talking about this one feels a little disjointed but i hope you hope you're kind of rolling with it best you can again i promised it was mostly outcrop photos i wanted to share with you for the chelan but the swat cane oh i got good stuff in fact after i got done interviewing ralph hagrid in his backyard on that hot early september day i drove quickly up to squat kane just north of wenatchee and i knew i was going to talk about it so i grabbed a few hand samples so this and i'll show you some photos as well but this is the swatcain biotite knife let me flip you around okay it is a remarkably homogeneous rock unit meaning it doesn't really seem to matter where you are in this squad cane nice it looks like this and if you're kind of in cross-section view you can see foliations the black minerals are biotites and you can see that things are parallel to each other but if i happen to orient the rock like this now you're looking down on some of those biotite flakes so biotite mica now i can see ivana talking to daryl right now and there's a chance that they're ahead of my my story meaning there may be talking about baja bc this is a key unit that we will be discussing in december about this phantom baja bc that some of you keep hearing about but you're not sure you're not even sure what it is so again i'm setting you up dog i'm setting you up while i got you here in the back in the in the back camera so we're looking down on the biotites here are we not uh [Music] yeah and then if we can get a spot where we can see the foliations and this is a pretty big terrain and yet it's almost all this now what i don't like that sample as much so i had a stroke of inspiration this morning about 11 so i quick bicycled up to school and i said i got this swacane but can i show the proto-lift and i can so this is what's called an arcosic sandstone and this technically is the swak formation which is nearby this walk cane i know we got similar names now and this is a sample we've had in our rock id lab so we've got grubby little undergrad fingers all over it so i took a hammer and busted it open a little bit fresher for you guys but please note that we have a sandstone that has a variety of sand grain sizes and a variety of sand grained compositions like this thing it's like some big quartz thing looks like here's a little i don't know hornblende little dude some some feldspar sand some quartz sands some little mike is thrown in what i'm telling you is that this is the original rock and this is the swat cane as it looks today so this swathane metamorphic nice with lots of biotites within it was originally a sedimentary sand grain story and we're really about to talk about sandstone a lot a lot not just today and so i'm hitting this hard because i know we're going to keep coming back to this concept a fair amount of times okay i didn't mean to didn't mean to call out you guys it's good that you're discussing stuff but uh i i yeah so what do i have prepared for you i wasn't planning on skipping ahead with all that rock stuff but i just felt like it all right well i promised that with the chelan i wanted to show you some things that i printed out and chris was very kind to uh send me some photos and some of these photos are mine so here's a photo of mine that i'm fond of so when we have brand new crop of graduate students that are coming to our department from all over the world the first thing we have them do is take a field class geology 502 and it's team taught often times by chris mattinson sometimes wendy borsen or lisa ely or some of other professors and a few years ago this is the one going up to chelan and i said i want to join chris because i want to finally learn some of this exotic terrain stuff so here's melanie and others and i just want you to know the complicated look this is not the ribbon cliffs this is a beautiful exposure right below the town of chelan if you know the dramatic um rise from the bb bridge up to the town of chelan like you're heading towards the walmart you come by this exposure you want a couple other photos of it i mean how can you drive by this and not notice it i guess it's possible i mean come on now so this probably was later that summer when chris smart who i make video programs with so we made a little pbs episode that i'll show you featuring chris mattinson so chris smart filming chris mattenson it's chris on chris crime but of course we're looking at this migmatite which we don't even really understand what that is yet but i'm about to try to help you see what this migmatite is and what we know of it and now i'm just spitballing and showing you stuff from chris's field trip and you can see how you can spend a whole morning at one outcrop of the chelan migmatite and they do and they do they break down all these individual events within the chelan magnetite oh my god so i'll just do this quickly so lake chelan itself the shores of lake chelan in the lower part of the lake is all the chilean migmatite and then by the time you get a little up lake you're into the cascade river shift and if you're up at the very head of the lake you're into this gadget nice more just giving you a sense of how incredibly complicated this chelan migmatite is and just let me pause so where are we we're done at least for now talking about the skagit where we make the proto lift and then we plunge it make the metamorphic stuff and then we exhume it we dig it up now we are firmly talking about the chalan which has some early days of granitic action tonalites diorites of these ages but we're doing the same damn thing man we're dunking it and notice that the dunking or the plunging of the chelan is earlier than the dunking of these other two guys so by 115 million years ago the chelan migmatite is already more than 20 miles down and we're doing this migmatitic action which i'm about to try to help you see or understand and then again it gets a head start on coming back up what was the other form that we were looking at same idea when i drafted this two days ago and i took chris's notes which he was very kind to email me some details because he's watched these shows and he knows what we're up to he said okay yeah the protolith is this granitic material and then we create the metamorphic action but then as i kept reading ralph hagerow's stuff i realized perhaps that there's originally nepequa and cascade river even where we have chelan today and so maybe originally we do have this same kind of deep ocean sediment combined with some sort of volcanic ark you know where i am i always want to try to correlate and say we've got stakinia coming through or we got quinnelia coming through or some other volcanic art we're not doing it cannot do it but if you want to get down into the gory details with the chelan tell you what you got to do you got to take a step ladder you send one of the grad students up to the step ladder you mark off an area that you want to sample you cut that rock the chelan migmatite into these billets these little dominoes made out of different rock then you cut thin sections and you look carefully under thin sections you also collect some zircons which we will talk about ad nauseam over the next few weeks and so yes you can look at the chelan in kind of a old-fashioned outcrop sense but there are these new techniques to help us really dig down and get some impressive detail out of these complicated rocks that we could not get even 20 years ago this is a place right along lake chelan so you're all kind of huddled next to the road you know lots of tourists lots of people zipping back and forth um but you know you're you're off in the shade late in the day and then very down right by the road there's all this detailed cumulative and fractional melt so let's not beat around the bush anymore what is as i understand it which is always a caveat isn't it as i understand it the main themes to learn from the chelan migmatite the main message when i see the chelan migmatite today is i think wow we are so deep in the crust that we are beneath a magma like quite often you have a big pluton which was liquid magma originally like the stuart pluton if you recall the stewart pluton 93-ish million years old and that's this liquid magma in the crust that cools off and forms this beautiful plutonic rock well this research team that i'm going to be assisting is mostly working with plutons at least mike eddy's part of it he's just going pluton to pluton pluton to pluton and learning about the details that's recorded in the pluton but the chelan migmatite is a rare chance to look at what was happening beneath the pluton in the pluton magma factory almost like this is where the sausage is made this is actually getting a chance to look at what happens when you create a magma beneath the pluton this doesn't happen very often you don't get a chance to see this very often most of the times you go to snoqualmie batholith you go to the golden horn basilisk you go to i don't know tattoos whatever you're you're here and you go wow we're deep we're deep in the crust where there was liquid magma that crystallized in the dark that's all true that's all true but what did it look like below this big blob of liquid and so the gory details that chris and his students and his dad and cliff hobson and others have been trying to learn is what detailed processes are happening when we first inject some mafic magma to the lowest part of the crust and we have some sort of mafic mixing with higher silicon or we're actually creating higher silica magmas and then by the time we squeeze that less dark-colored magma from the depths uh we accumulate this large volume uh of plutonic igneous rock and so how do you get those details not only at outcrop scale but you collect some zircons and here's one little grain of zircon remember that guy that gifted me a whole bag full of zircons like that bag was so heavy i was one felt like the ziplock bag was going to break these zircons are so heavy quite often zircon grains the size of a sand grain have rims and you can analyze one tiny grain of zircon and get different ages from that one little zircon grain and these zoned rims give you evidence about the original rock and then the first batch of magma mixing and then a kind of a late stage story crazy and i only have the most basic part of it you want a cliffhanger for sunday cliffhanger cliffhanger for sunday this is the shellag hey you want a cliffhanger for sunday this is the chelan migmatite where's the pluton that reaped the benefits of all this sausage making is it gone or is it someplace a little further to the north on the other side of the ross lake fault zone tune in sunday for more of chris mattinson's work we're approaching the top of the hour we are going in the cozy fort we have a field video report we've got some photos from backcountry gary and from lindsay but for those that want a little bit more soil cane in their life and is it really swat cane or suacan it's soil cane i texted randy lewis native american wenatchee he knows all those original names and their pronunciation they're all native american names by the way it's joaquin so that's the story i had for the chelan proto-lift dink it down 115 to 110 was the main phase of really creating that rich volume of liquid magma above oh that's that's sunday you're not supposed to see that yet damn now let's go to soaking the proto-lift the earliest stuff we can find on a major scale is 93 million years old so i'm not going to flip you around again but younger than a hundred million years ago we are beginning to form this walking and we are making our coast success extension i am flipping you around so the proto-lift of the swat cane biotite nice is an arcosic sandstone like this why are we having focus trouble a dirty sandstone a gray wacky whatever you want to call it and i don't know what environment to give you yet i don't know what to draw i have a couple ideas but i don't want to screw up the hook setting that i'm doing with you so you know you got a little a little uh back of the envelope sketch from me for each of our exotic terrains through the crystalline core you're not getting it from me here is this a beach is this a desert is this some sort of river like where are we accumulating all this sand why are we accumulating all this sand and why is it so damn young how do we know it's that young well there's zircon again and that leads to some confusion and ralph wrote that a little bit in his uh little text his little blurb about the soak cane even though almost all the sand grains in the soil cane originally this is before the nice now right this is just when we have truly a sandstone almost all the sand grains are between 93 and 81 million years old is that right it's not right it's not ripe it's not right no those are i don't want to call you i'll throw you under the bus now chris but those are the dates that chris gave me but then i started reading more careful more recent work by kirsten sauer and i think i just did throw chris under the bus my bad so i enjoyed this paper that i kind of read in the last 48 hours from alabama michael gatewood matthew gatewood from university of alabama roll tide and he's talking about stuff in 2012 about some detailed zircon work in the swat cane and here's kirsten sauer again star student of stacia gordon and these papers continue to come out with from these guys but this is just simply a soaking mostly a swalkane paper not talking about correlations with other places and again i showed you this before but this is uh kirsten again with a field guide in the gsa meeting in seattle so i want to change what i have on the box and go to this to me this is the most current view of the swat cane biotite knives yes we have an arcosic sandstone proto-lift no i still don't i'm still reluctant to draw a picture for you about what that original proto-lithium environment looked like yes there's some scattered very old pre-cambrian zircons and so the soil cane brings back a painful memory for me actually i had back in the olden days when we actually led field trips for anybody who was interested i had a large group one sunday afternoon and we're screwing around just north of wenatchee up on top of what is that about sunny slope and birch mountain whatever and we're just hiking where we shouldn't be like in the subdivision behind whatever and i'm up there and i'm talking about the swat cane being a pre-cambrian craton to like 100 people you know they're all like nodding and like some are taking notes and stuff and i'm saying yeah this is like an exotic terrain this joaquin it's a pre-cambrian craton from another continent and i was using old research that talked about finding some pre-cambrian constituents inside of the swat cane i just ran with it and assumed that this walking was what a buffoon so you know walking back to the vans there's a geologist that came up i won't say his name but he did it very nicely he said hey great trip you know everybody's nice to see so many people interested in geology and uh yeah that part about the soil kane being a pre-cambrian craton yeah so i'm like oh god really so i've since been up to speed on that and i know that most of it is 93 to 72. so this was hit hard by marley and daryl as well if you would open your hymnal please page 148 and you will see in outcrop the suacaine biotite nice that is kind of interestingly gently folded kind of a gentle anticline here north of wenatchee let me just read marley's text that i'm that goes along with what i'm trying to say here north of wenatchee the road passes high cliffs of swat cane biotite nice for the first 13 miles on the way to chelan several small quarries that mine material shed from the cliffs as well as the flood gravels lined the road for the first few miles the nice which is rich in black biotite mica and prominently banned in places is the deepest known part of the crystalline core it originated as a sedimentary rock as young as 72 million years ago and had been buried and metamorphosed by 68 million years ago a period of only 4 million years exclamation point the nice forms a broad fold with noticeably south dipping foliation for the first few miles and noticeably north dipping foliation beginning near milepost 206 pegmatite cells that intruded the parallel to the foliation make mark make the fold a little easier to see numerous pegmatite diets also intrude along the foliation just a point blah blah blah okay so that's where i collected my samples from vista point and so the last thing i want to do with the swat cane is not tell you more about this because that's coming it's a far-reaching story and it takes a lot of discussion so i'm just planting the seed with you but here's our absolute incredible plunge to 26 miles depth just a few million years after the stuff was created this is coming from this new zircon work and the metamorphism is basically the result remember what ralph was saying as well taking other pizza boxes and shoving them over this joaquin i got to go to the freezer he goes to the freezer hey i'm i'm just a few steps from the freezer hot mike so the concept we had way back west on the other side of the strait creek fault involved pizza boxes and we emphasized that the exotic terrains in the san juan islands and even in the foothills of the of the western foothills of the cascades were slivers thin slivers of these exotic terrains that were thrust on top of each other a stack a thrust stack and daryl collins was fond of saying these are like hats without heads we just have the hats we don't have the rest of the terrain like we just kind of sheared off the upper part of these terrains and then we stacked them one on top of another along thrust falls so we're compressing the throttle crust we're thickening the crust i know we're talking about pizza now but the earth's crust is getting thicker because we keep shoving all these thrust faults we keep shoving all these thrust slices into an area and the more pizza boxes we keep bringing in the thicker our crust is going to be well it's true we're at the squat cane and this is the youngest bedrock but the deepest part of the stack why this is a beauty i'm pretty sure this is from bob miller this is a beauty let me wrong colors for us but we can we can live with it well can i get a little closer here's the swane the youngest rock at the bottom of the stack and what i want you to notice is that there's a a low angle fault here a low angle fault here between the nepiqua and the chihuahuan a low angle fault here that's the windy past thrust so we have one two three four pizza boxes basically near wenatchee how easily can we bring the pizza boxes from western washington and bring them through the crystalline core i know we're doing our up and down thing but there's also this kind of faint um pizza box story coming through the area as well and notice that our angles being thrust on top of the chihuahuacum has already been discussed but now i'm adding that below the chiwakum is the nepiqua and below the nepiqua is the frickin socane of course what else do you notice it's pluton city here it's invasion from below madness in the nepiqua and the chihuahuan there's not one pluton that cuts through that swat cane now why is that i've been thinking about it i think one reason is that the schwa cane is so young that we don't have the protolith of the soil cane when we do our first batch of magmas remember the 96 to 91 is a major flux of plutons coming through all these guys we don't have this rock yet to invade it from below but there's other reasons that the plutons are not shooting through the swat cane so i don't know how you're doing here there's a lot to kind of keep track especially the way that i'm kind of dancing around here this afternoon i almost feel like i need to bring it together somehow but i don't know if i i don't know if i want to i don't know if i want to last thing i'll say about the swat cane is it's not all in one place so here's the town of wenatchee and when i think swat cane i think just to the north of wenatchee but we have our video field report from eric who lives in wenatchee and eric is reporting this joaquin from this cute little island of soaking that's within this chihuahuan graben now this is one of those grabens that is not allowing us to see the fruitcake again back to september these young grabens eocene and age that the floor drops out and we have a bunch of sawdust sitting in place don't allow us to see the fruitcake but yet within that grab and there is some soil cane wrong color for us but yellow i kind of like it and here's another major portion and another portion of this walkane that backcountry gary's going to show us i don't think of this walk cane as up in the high mountains but he's got some photos damn it dextral offset on the swat cane and the fault that separates the soil cane from this the pizza boxes above it is called the dinkelmann de calmall the dinkleman de como now dick hormones that's french bring to mind the opposite of pizza boxes being compressed and pizza boxes being stacked up is it possible that we're doing some extension younger than 50 million years and some of those what used to be thrust vaults are now actually normal faults and we're having the crust extend and we are unroofing some of that material like why do we see the swat cane at all if it's down there at the deepest part of the stack of peat boxes haven't we kind of undone the pizza box treatment younger a lot going on right here's our main swatching the island of soaking that eric's going to tell us about and more of this walking that's been dexterity offset into the high country above holden village so we're not really abandoning our san juan island thrust stack we're not totally abandoning it and i'm wondering how much we can bring the pizza boxes through the crystalline core all right i think that's probably enough give me just a second to see if i wanted to do anything else out here before we went in the cozy fort please top of the hour yeah past the top of the hour yep we're kind of saying goodbye to the north cascades i meant to use this book much it's a beautiful photo type book with a little bit of geology thrown in but just wanted to share it with you yeah i think it's time i think it's time cozy fort by steve i got a sneaking suspicion i wanted to do one more thing but i i just it's not coming to me and i suppose it doesn't matter it's time it's time bija's inside he's back sleeping in the in his spot i presume i haven't heard from him in a while uh we have a a nice group of you who are here almost every time and i'm appreciative of that always hovering about 700 or so and this is hard stuff so i i kind of half expect people to kind of disappear as we continue to get deeper and deeper into this stuff but it doesn't appear to be the case and even if it was the case we'd still be going because i'm learning a lot for sure i don't even want to think about sunday so i'm learning a lot and then i said i don't even want to think about sunday it's you know you have occasional moments where you're totally overwhelmed you're like i can't do this i can't learn this all in in a couple of days and then you have a bunch of help from amazing geologists by email and you make a couple of breakthroughs here and there and then before you know it uh it feels like progress i hope that you're seeing that too okie doke i'm muting us again i'm getting rid of us we will do some live q a as always uh let's start with there's a a group online that loves to continue to learn and talk and share photos etc uh with us with with each other i should say and i happen to see these photos from lindsay uh who was up let's see if i can do this can i do this this is a pdf i just want to scroll through yeah okay so lindsay and and others maybe your husband i'm not sure they were up doing a hike in the stuart area and and basically using uh what we've been doing here in this live stream and so i i just the part where she's taking some kernels of wisdom here and there and and applying it i think she even took this back country trip in october before she saw some of these live streams but she kind of did a gary here and used some yellow labels and i just this is really ultimately what i'm hoping for some of our sessions that a viewer who knows some of this country can revisit country and use this kind of bag of tricks that we've learned here or vice versa and i'll continue to scroll if i can come on daddy that's a winner look at that she'll wacom look at that photo nice photo my favorite of your photos there that you wacom schist so obviously we're going backwards and thinking about some of our concepts in the north cascades and the crystalline core but i just wanted to share a little bit of to me a perfect marriage of beautiful places and complicated concepts and it's nice to see people combining the two so lindsay thank you that was wonderful she sent me those after i found them online of course we have backcountry gary in the last show i shared with you that i out of all of gary's photos this is by far my favorite and i heard from gary by email and he said i would be happy to make a second uh print and send it to you and uh here's the charge and i'm happy to pay that and so this is on the way on some sort of canvas print apparently and uh very excited to have this in our house as well this is part of the skagit nice but i cannot get enough of this photograph not to belittle the others but that just sings to me absolutely sings to me gary so thank you i'm excited to have that arrive here and yes that's just north of the north cross highway washington 20 and then looking over to the next peak there's our some of our friends the skagit nice and i love that little squirt of nepiqua uh up in the saddles there can you see the nepiqua in two places i'm out of hands to point it out but i think you can see it well gary sent some some photos i don't know how long it takes you to put all these yellow labels on gary but we are appreciative of course so he knew we were talking about skagit excuse me he knew we were talking about soi kane and chelan today so he sent a few more of his favorite skagit that he didn't send me before last weekend so here's skagit in light the piqua breakfast in dark and he's got all sorts of comments and notes for me but i i can't do it i can't read all the notes as i show these my god look at that so holden village is the location that some of us know i still haven't been to holton village that's embarrassing i was supposed to give a talk up there in august but of course that got canceled cascade river shift is really the only thing in the photo that we've dwelt on is that a word that we focused on everything else is younger plutons and older plutons that again we continue to ignore the plutons for the most part a little bit of the is this the what is that the marble mount yes so magma of the oceanic island arc that's been totally metamorphosed more photos from gary man gary takes the time to post all these photos if you want a better look there's a facebook group apparently uh where there's a lot of kind of um chances to look at some of this stuff more carefully so maybe somebody can in the comments can help you find this facebook group oh lord in heaven so gary being a back country person he's retired now but he has a long history with preserving land and managing wilderness areas etc he helped me understand that this walking was an important unit because of mining and there's a long history of deciding what we're going to preserve what we're going to lock up in preservation versus allow people to [Music] extract so i did not know that the soil can soar kane has a i don't even understand why it's got a minor significance but it does holy lord in heaven so the swat cane is more than just down there along route 97a on the way to chelan obviously but it helps me and maybe you to see this walking remember this is our stuff that was 26 miles down there it's not 26 miles down there anymore where'd all that stuff go by the way if we lift more than 20 miles worth of crust where'd that stuff go it did i have a significant point here i'm not done with the cozy fort but i i did want to say this if we're doing all this lifting and we are so we've made the point that uh all three of these amigos here are getting plunged 20 plus miles into the crust and then even though the chelan is coming back up the geologic elevator starting 80 and trying to catch up with these two guys which are coming up starting 50 they're all up here by 45. where did all that detritus go is there truly 20 plus miles worth of crust that got chewed away like sawdust and sent elsewhere cartoonishly yes although a few geologists have helped me realize that these metamorphic core complexes are actually stretching the crust as well so we don't have to chew it all up into sawdust meaning sand and have rivers take it away but the question remains and i don't think this is a new thought for others but it's a new thought for me if we're doing this is too young for our series but i'm throwing it out there anyway if we're doing all this exclamation in the eocene and we have sedimentary units in washington that are this age and younger the chum stick the rosslyn a little bit older the swak the chuck-a-nut there's thousands of vertical feet of swak and chum stick for instance i mean swac and chuckanut for instance is that eroded crystalline core that's a new thought to me if that's true i've been teaching recently that the the swak formation i'm off topic now this walk formation in central washington came from northeast washington and some uplifted some metamorphic core complexes in the northeast and sending that stuff from half a state away well here's another potentially huge source of sediment if we're doing this a crazy amount of geologic uplift if i ever do a live stream series to kind of take off after this series and start 50 million years ago and go younger that's one major thing i'd want to try to learn about okay but we're not done with the cozy fort because we have a couple of quick little things to share with you and then we'll get to the live q a uh so more gary coming but not today and yeah so eric from wenatchee took the time to go out and make a short geology video from the swan swat cane and it's a little bit low in volume so i'm i'm doing all i can here to crank your volume here eric but i sure do appreciate you taking the time to make it for us so here we go hey everyone that's really that's really low eric i gotta start again [Music] hang on hang on patrick oh my god grandpa what what are you doing i'm talking to myself hey everyone my name's eric johnson i'm here doing my home project on the exhaust train for nick's videos alphabet series on the uh fruitcake and this exotic terrain is part of the soaking terrain [Music] t-e-r-r-a-n-e it's um if you look on the front cover of marley and dave's book it's a little magenta island in the middle of the chihuahuan graven this is a portion of the terrain that was thrust up through all the sandstone layers this swalk and the chihuahuacum our chump stick excuse me and this is an abandoned mine or quarry and uh the portion of the terrain is called the eagle creek fault slash anticline and i've learned about this spot from charles mason an amateur wenatchee geologist i think he started the wenatchee valley erratics so i don't have a raw camera but i use my ball peen hammer open some of this rock i don't have sunshine either we're in a canyon here you're good eric so see if i can do a neck here we go it's real pretty rock and of course it's um a lot different rock here i'm not a not an expert but it's uh i think it was the parent rock is from 170 million years ago and it was metamorphosed to end of the cretaceous and then of course this chunk um either split away when the chihuakum grab it opened up and then it was thrust back up through or it just subsided there we go that's familiar what happened there it was a part of the uh the horse like anasites that shoved this back up anyhow i'm gonna get going i'll sing you a little bit of next song two minute geology actually turned into three thank you later very good eric thank you very much great to see these little field reports i got one more and this is less than uh a minute i think but we did a uh pbs program it's called nick on the rocks we've been the little five minute things that we've been airing and we did one on lake chelan we focused mostly on the ice sheet story and the erratics that are there but we had chris mattinson drive all the way up from ellensburg it's a two-hour drive to chelan and he was on camera for i think probably seven seconds you can count that's embarrassing and at the time i knew hardly anything about the chelan migmatite so i'm saying wrong stuff in here and the whole thing but anyway it there's a couple nice quick shots of the chelan migmatite that i think you might enjoy from chris smart and otherwise this will be the last little uh video portion and then we'll go to your questions one more piece of evidence that the ice was here in lake chelan this is polished bedrock do you see how grooved it is there's fingernail scratches glacial striations left by the ice sheet as it worked its way over this bedrock and the bedrock itself is unusual this is not granite this is a complicated rock that gives us a very specific rare window at the processes that go on deep in the earth's crust chris mattinson a geology professor from my school central washington university has had a lasting relationship chelan's bedrock based on the position of garnet and other minerals that occur in these rocks we know that they originally formed about 30 kilometers below the surface so these rocks record the processes that go on at deep levels underneath the volcanic system and this is one of the few places in the world where we can actually observe these rocks and study them some geologists say the volcanoes were further west and then drifted in and docked here the rocks are local and an incredible 15 miles worth of uplift brought this beautiful bedrock up the geologic elevator to the surface beautiful bedrock a beautiful glacial lake beautiful lake chelan that's how to write a super vanilla script and how not to use a person who knows a lot of stuff if you're paying attention kids that's how to whatever some of those short programs are kind of a disappointment but people seem to like him okay enough of that it's time for you 3 30. okay it's time for you so uh i will find the uh find us i will pop the chat out like a boss right between the eyes i'm gonna live chat all the way bro and uh oh we got people at the front door we're gonna ignore them we're gonna ignore them isn't that nice uppercase please if you would and we'll try to answer a few of your questions uh the device 9 what can cause that kind of uplift i really don't know oftentimes we have uplift of that magnitude when we have a massive ongoing continental versus continental collision think the himalayas or something like that but in this case boy i there's more to the story and i don't know if we have much of it yet i'd be happy to share ideas with you but i don't have them right now robert why did the exotic terrains accumulate here in the northwestern washington and bc instead of continuing north why didn't think continuing north well robert i've been teasing that we will eventually when we leave washington and that's coming i think we're probably one more weekend in washington and then we're going elsewhere and we will talk about i can't hold it there's good at good evidence that the swat cane nice was not created in washington it's in washington now that sandstone that dirty sandstone out of state so i'm trying to be focused on the terrains that we have today in washington but pretty quickly we're going to realize this is a far-reaching story that's the best way i can answer your question right now without without getting into it too much peter what is the white marbling made of in the magmatite or migmatite swirls that's a good question without really knowing and i didn't describe this as probably succinctly as i wanted to migmatites like these in chelan are a combination of igneous and metamorphic processes so i visualize without really knowing the details and maybe chris mattinson can correct us at some point but i think of these white bands as some of the magma some of the new magmas that been created in this sausage making factory and above this zone we're going to get this kind of less mafic material that's evolved magma essentially so as far as i can tell it the dark bands are kind of mafic dark mineral sections that are the original deep crustal magmas possibly also some of the proto-list if we're going back to an island arc or ocean story and then i view the white stuff without really know what i'm talking about as more developed magmas evolved magmas after some of that sausage making oops automatic scroll saber is the geologic elevator more like an escalator sequentially moving terrains down and back up i love escalator saber but i'm not sure i know what you mean there sequentially moving to range down and up i don't get it sorry uh another people talking about the uplift i thought you might be interested in that and i am too i don't know of anybody convincingly talking about who's who's in charge of the elevator yeah cat slave who drove the elevator was it folding as the various exotic terrains docked or do we not know remember that remember that the the biggest picture the biggest order i keep coming back to this and those that are deep into the knowledge here probably scoff every time i do this but to me the the biggest grandest story is a huge collisional event 100 million years ago between old north america plowing into what i think is the fixed insular super terrain out in the water and all this thrusting all this stacking all this compressing all of this metamorphic activity ultimately all of this i guess elevator down and up at least down is in response to this thrustal stacking this this pizza box stacking and pushing the first or oldest not oldest pushing the lowest pizza box further and further down i think we are struggling with the mechanics and the geometries and the orientations and especially if we're going to start moving this stuff from southern california to central washington or mexico again that's coming but i keep coming back to this as the biggest part of the story and maybe i'll stop coming back to that at some point but to me it's tempting to keep going back to that grand story i guess we'll call it that from now on the grand story elaine what other metamorphic rocks have sandstone as a proto-lift quartzite you take the sand grains and just shatter them or crush them metamorphic quartzite that would be one example frederick what if there was a basin and range splitting of the crust that would open the crust for a large extrusion from so from so deep i don't think you're far off frederick in the sense that i think most visualize the geologic elevator coming up with extending the crust now why is that happening in central washington starting 50 million years ago that that really is the next live stream series am i talking talking myself into doing this right now but it's too young for our series today or this this fall linda is the swat cane or skagit nice is the same as the okanagan nicest in bc canada excellent question i thought we paid a little tip of the cap to the okanagan area in bc as being incredibly old possibly alexander terrain so my first order thinking linda is that the okanagan old rock in southern bc is more like the chilliwack or the turtleback and has a much older story coming from northern as opposed to these nicest here so you can have a nice you might recall that the yellow aster nice uh in the turtle back no sorry sorry patrick the yellow astra nice in the chilliwack river terrain was stuff coming from europe and through the arctic i think that's where the okanagan fits in without knowing for sure a couple more and we're done automatic scroll john could there be a part of a tale of a sinking plate that cooled and rose back up i love the creativity john and you know that i've been avoiding uh specific plates and specific actions of plates we'll get into it a little bit but it's quite difficult to visualize details of plates sinking and rising back up if they're totally gone today many steps in logic before we can get to that a couple more why is it called the crystalline core a z thank you i can guess um these um we're in the core of the so geographically we're in the middle of the north cascades and the north cascades are this incredibly uplifted area compared to its neighbors to the east and west into the north and to the south and there are crystalline rocks meaning that they are not basalts they're not dark colored kind of boring looking volcanic rocks i think generally crystalline rocks are are kind of granites and salt and pepper rocks and many of these hand samples of things that i've been sharing with you today these kinds of higher silica rocks that have all these interesting fabrics and textures and foliations casually they're just kind of referred to as crystalline rocks even with the ice age floods you can determine uh which ice age flood came from which direction by looking at the whether there's crystalline rocks in the flood bar or or basaltic like in moses coulee for instance why is the swat cane have a long a and spokane pronounced with a short a i don't know bob good point is spokane also a native american word um yeah i don't know one more and we're done mr tony 19. has there been any volcanic activity in the north cascades in the last 100 million years well of course in the last two million years mr tony there is glacier peak volcano surrounded by all this crystalline core mount baker surrounded by all this uh these pizza boxes and over the last 40 million years there's been plenty of volcanism that got established right in right through all this uh fruitcake that we've been talking about but if you're going back earlier than the cascades then i i don't know the answer that's a really interesting question if we're thinking about between yeah that'll go in the next live stream series as well a toast to you thanks once again to julie from prosser washington who's in the wine industry she brought up a case of wine liz is a major wine drinker i'm from wisconsin and i drink milk and water but occasionally i try to be civilized and drink with her this is a local favor a recent favorite of ours from the variety pack in the case the pundit a 2016 syrah from the columbia valley created through a unique collaboration between washington state satoma sheikh michelle and rhone's michael okay i don't even know what i'm reading it's like it's like reading a scientific paper i have no idea what i'm reading but i know what i'm tasting and even though i was raised on jello one two three and tater tot casserole and big wiener don't ask even though that's my background we can try to move forward and learn new things like how to appreciate good wine here's to you and here's to julie in prasar here's to your health in this stressful time here's to the health of your parents and your grandparents and your children and your grandchildren near and far i'm still broadcasting thank you though okay okay thank you thank you kay of course they're all showing up now they figure he can't still be going it's like two hours later here's to them your family and your no your your yeah here's to your community near and far that is a good one thank you i should do one more here's to the hardcore scientists who have compiled all this amazing data and here's to a subset of those hardcore geologists who have the patience and the interest to put their work into plain language for those of us that want to understand it it's a subset thank you for joining us from the front porch here in ellensburg washington you are welcome to come back you are invited to come back sunday morning at nine o'clock and we will finish coloring this map patrick not quite we're gonna color in here we're gonna color in here we're going to do a couple more piercing points which we haven't done in quite some time daddy screwed up right here i'll talk about that on sunday and then i know almost certainly that next friday we're going to get here we've got to finish coloring here there's another story here but by that point we will have completed this map in washington and it will be time to leave washington and go looking for friends elsewhere thank you for joining us i love you and goodbye not holding anything nothing's falling nothing's falling just an index finger coming at a white x see you sunday morning

Channel: Nick Zentner

Views: 9,670

Rating: 4.9741521 out of 5

Keywords: Nick Zentner, Nick From Home, Swakane Gneiss, Swakane Biotite Gneiss, Chelan Migmatite

Id: qQN_KtFazE8

Length: 124min 33sec (7473 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 20 2020