Craters of the Moon - Nick From The Field #44

well good morning everybody and welcome to craters of the moon in central idaho that's right i made it it's great to be out here early hour nobody really around and let's just take a walk add a few selected spots within the national monument and observe a few things i think we need to just go down here right off the bat great to have you along today of course this is basalt lava that erupted recently and what does that mean eruptions between 15 000 and two thousand years ago that's right not even one million right fifteen thousand so we're at the very tail end of the ice age going into much more recent times so we definitely have native americans in the area when this area was experiencing hawaiian-like lava and this is a special spot for many reasons including the fact that everything looks so so so fresh i don't have my hammer with me today i'm in a national monument but i think we can still enjoy these samples beautiful morning light that's a spatter cone not a cinder cone but a spatter cone and they're not super common so i think my general plan is to walk up on that spatter cone with you and look at how spatter cones are different than cinder cones the only other spatter cone i remember being that was at the galapagos islands big deal back in the early 90s cinder cone on the horizon spatter cone lava flows ha-hoi hoi a-ah caves there's a lot going on and i don't know about you but i like being at places like this when there's not a three-ring circus happening i understand sometimes it's difficult to avoid those crowded places but oh isn't this nice spider cones trails yeah okay so let's they've got a nice display here that will help us get a visual these miniature volcanoes formed when blobs of molten lava were lobbed into the air during the last gasp of an eruption sequence that ended about 2100 years ago all right oh my god i'm going to have to walk 274 feet one way oh yeah very nice this beautiful ropey pahoehoe where the rigid skin of the lava folds up as the interior bright orange still still flows still pretty hazy this morning but not as bad as i was fearing and uh i've really only been here once and that was back in 1987 when my mom and dad visited from wisconsin and i mainly remember it was about 30 mile an hour winds the entire day and my mom in particular was uh braving she was she's tough okay enough about my mom come on let's look at this batter so can you see right off the bat why this is not a pile of cinders us old-timers remember cinder tracks like running tracks you know track and field made out of cinder well these are globs so it's a cone it's an eruptive vent part of the great rift stretching across the snake of her plane but look at the size of these i don't know these big head-sized things that are being thrown up into the air and then they land near the vent a spatter cone oh yeah and some of them are coming to rest and they're still kind of oozy look that one up that's the end of the hike all right well yes we're at the vent of one of these spatter cones and so when this was active it was very active in here but coming to rest on all sides are these globs of spatter these are bigger splatters than the thing that i filmed out in central washington which was a vent with the rosa lava flow and chris smart the videographer was very impressed with these this concept of spatter but he kept calling it splatter he threw an l in there to this day he still calls yeah i remember that time we went out to look at the splatter like come on chris come on spatter he's like whatever what about craters of the moon mm-hmm yeah what about it i'll get company now i'll have to warn them about this exhausting hike it's it's one i'm i'm kind of snarky this morning it's wonderful that place like this is so accessible to so many people it is oops morning excuse me the circus has begun we'll try to find some spots that are of the line of fire all right well let's walk a little ways on the north crater trail and get a sense of what's over here mostly to avoid other folks so let's see where are there other places in western north america that have a real fresh basalt like this and you know okay so we got some lava flows like in eastern washington those are the enormous flood basalts this is different i think it's a stretch to call this well we would not call this flood basalt we don't have the volume you know these individual flows are more similar to hawaii they don't travel more than a few miles if that and you know collectively there's an amazing collection of basalt capping the snake river plain and we're on the northern margin of the snake river plain here but again we're not really covering much of the pacific northwest like we do with the columbia river basalt so in that sense this is unique now there's lava beds national monument in northern california i was at newberry volcano last month in central oregon i know there are plenty other spots and in the comments below you can add your experiences with basalt like this but is it less than 15 000 years old is some of it 2 000 years old or 2 100 years ago uh as we have here in craters of the moon this isn't a contest this isn't a competition oh boy i'm going up and there's some elevation here just generally i can feel it what is it like 4 000 feet above sea level something like that i didn't look it up but i can feel it and i'm filming going this way so that i have the morning light at my back so you're just gonna have to deal with some heavy breathing so we still have some spatter here but we lose those amazing globs that really was cool we started the video one of those guys oh my god there's a ton of people now wow glad i got out when i did yeah let's throt our way through here this is an interesting mix so if you're like you talked about a cinder cone but i don't think i know what cinders look like well you know we have a weathered reddish surface here which reminds me of cinder cones that i used to teach with down in the bing big pine volcanic field in the owens valley of california and then less oxidized material here but basically you know this is what cinders look like i think most of you know this so each cinder is full of vesicles there's a gas rich story with these magmas coming to the surface but those spatters were not far away so i'm hesitant to just say i'm walking on a cinder cone here because i'm not really sure if where we are on the spectrum between cinder cinder cone and spatter cone but occasionally get some bigger blocks within this let's just well there's a certain sound of walking on a pile of cinders i don't know how well the audio is picking up my footsteps here but i got a kick out of some of you commenting on the sound as i was walking on the big obsidian flow a few weeks ago at newberry near paulina lake thank you for the correction on how to pronounce that paulina so some of you were commenting on what it sounds like to walk on volcanic glass versus what it sounds like to walk on a slope made out of loose cinders uh from here it looks like it's more spatter over there that looks a little bit more in place less scree like and i think i can see some individual spatters but maybe we'll head over there i'll just keep this rolling so it's possible i'm walking on one side of this ravine which is dark cinder material part of a cinder cone and then if we go over to this red stuff we'll transition from these cinders very lightweight transition from the ascenders to more of a spatter story let's see if i'm right well we got to see what the view looks like here at the at the little saddle yeah that's smoky normally you can see the pioneer mountains quite easily from here and you can make them out but not like normal oh yeah central idaho you know i spent the night along the big wood river in haley or near haley idaho and then uh did a nice drive this morning i don't know 45 minutes through peekaboo and kerry little no farming towns and i'm happy to report this area as pretty much as i remember it's it's sometimes really nice to have places kind of untouched by time and and uh boy all the feelings of uh what i was who i was what i was experiencing uh almost 40 years ago pretty much the same so if you're looking for a really unique part of north america to visit hard to beat this stretch the pioneer mountains the lost river range the lemhi range the beaver heads uh i love this area and a big part of it is i have very strong fond memories but it's been a while if you're new to this channel and this is the first video you've seen you're like wait this is a guy's a geology teacher how come he's not oh my god i think we have a clark's what clark's nut patcher i don't know you might like is this guy ever going to give us some information nah you can find you can google the information my deal is coming here and giving you kind of a personal experience an intimate experience not polished if you haven't figured that out with these field videos that's that's the hope that it feels like you're out here with us and by us i mean me so you're looking west the pioneer mountains much older bedrock and some of these very young basalts lapping up against the edge this is not not a bad little viewpoint we come over here to the lip so everything's basalt in the foreground nothing is basalt up there high that's paleozoic and maybe some mesozoic rock and some chalice magmas i might add but i'm trying to stay focused on this place today but as we go from the reds and the and the the sheer blacks that we've been walking on you and i obviously this is some older craters of the moon basaltic activity but not by much and i'm just surmising that based on the topographic difference and also the color difference we've got more vegetation we've got less outcrop visible so can i guess these are less than three thousand year old eruptions and these are older than three thousand that's all i'm willing to say here i'm sure it's all been mapped carefully but then as we swing to the southwest into the smoke i mean it takes two hours to drive across the snake river plane so you're like okay well yeah we're in central idaho right so there must be all sorts of boundaries between flat lava plains and rugged mountains made out of much older rock that's true along the northern margin here but if you've never been to this area i'm not kidding you now if you drive from the north end to the south end of the snake river plane it's a full two-hour drive over a featureless plane uh much of it uh basalt in the millions of years instead of less than fifteen thousand that's that's what sets craters of the moon apart from the rest of the snake river plain and yeah there's some topography here due to the freshness of these cones both spatter cones and cinder cones i don't know what this stuff is i've seen it quite often i'm sure there's a interesting story don't have it since many of us are getting pros getting to be pros with air quality it feels like every summer now dealing with this smoke stuff is it my imagination or is it true that it's clearer in the morning hours and then as the day goes on generally the the haze and the smoke becomes heavier is that a thing if that's true i'm looking for help now i'm sure there's many variables many factors but i i just am curious about the day's heating and how that affects visibility because it is clear this morning than it was yesterday and i think i've noticed that kind of morning versus afternoon thing as i've been out this past month filming otherwise i wouldn't pay a whole lot of attention i guess the filming is part of this well there's much to see here at craters of the moon i'm not sure i'm going to visit every spot primarily because i want to go to one other spot here that's very important to me on the northern edge of the snake river plain and also because i can see more and more people filtering in that means i'm getting out of here but we'll keep it rolling we'll just walk our way back i don't know how much of this i'll keep i might edit a bunch of this stuff out but just a little taste as to what's here and i would say for sure that if you've never been to a place like this if you've never been to hawaii volcanoes national park or if you've never been to newbury volcano in oregon or any place like this then this is for sure a spot to visit and if you have been to many basaltic places like this and this is kind of old hat to you i don't know i think it's still worth your time but it's more of a compare and contrast as opposed to wow i've never seen a place like this before because this is not the only place in the world that has these features i guess that's what i'm trying to say i'll refrain from the american thing which is i don't hear it quite as much anymore but i used to hear it all the time this is the biggest this right here right at this very spot is the largest cinder cone in the world please be cautious when you hear that phrase biggest in the world longest in the world fastest in the world there's a small chance it's true but it's usually not and i i don't know why people view it that way like it's cool we can can't we just enjoy it does it have to be the biggest in the world we know it's big we know it's long we know it's fast well we'll keep it rolling uh this trail must uh walk the rim of some sort of central vent it would help if i read a sign but i've been busy with you guys how old is this tree well since it appears to be growing on this surface and safe to say the surface is yeah it's not that old it's always impressive though when you see trees or any sort of large vegetation growing on these surfaces sometimes where there's just no lick of soil anywhere it's like how do how do these trees do it what's their secret oh yeah so your guess is probably as good as mine but i'll guess anyway that we're looking at a particularly active vent where you can imagine a lot of cinders and occasional spatters pile this ejected material around the rim like there was no rim like you're like the vents down here and they're we're piling up a bunch of this stuff uh and the stuff's landing x number of feet away from the active vent because it's a little quieter out here a lot of training to give you that interpretation morning i don't think the views are so great right into the sun so let me just kind of swing you back so the scale of a vent like this and i guess more accurately the scale of the cinders in other words the stuff that's kind of piled up along the margins is quite impressive and i can see some bedrock across the way so this is more than just pi piles of cinders this is yeah oh yeah i can see that pretty well so i'll add to my pantomiming we it looks like we did have some bedrock all the way through here like this was the land surface this was the snake over plane continual uh basalt lavas that were maybe more than ten thousand years old let's say but then there was some renewed activity down here in the vent blowing up a bunch of this basalt stratigraphy converting it to cinders and having the cinders pile up around the margin of the vent on top so adding to my story as we go i'll give you a quick memory before we quit i mentioned in the last video that i'm here to attend starting tonight attend a big geology reunion at idaho state university and i've done some thinking on my way here and it was labor day weekend 1986 kind of my first weekend out just kind of exploring this area and my new one of my new classmates was david ettner who now is a geologist in norway and so etner and i took my brand new toyota tercel topaz no air conditioning no radio no floor mats uh i'd my first car driven it out here babied it you know like this making sure that everything's working properly and etner says let's uh you know i just met david he says let's go out and explore the snake river plane it's labor day weekend there's nothing else going on and so we did and before i knew it we were on this absolutely terrible rocky gravel road with with my brand new toyota tercel i was so stressed out you know we're hitting the oil pan in the bottom you know and things bottoming out but the whole reason for my story is it was labor day weekend and i still remember this older couple i suppose they're my age a couple in their late 50s maybe mid 60s or something and they had just retired and they were all excited to visit with us number one hear our story like we had just come from different parts of the car country and we were just getting started to study geology at idaho state so they they were very interested in hearing about our plans and excitement and but they were very excited about their camper on their truck and their plans to experience all these places that they had heard of and this conversation was at a little parking lot at a place called crystal ice caves which i haven't been back to since i don't know if i was that impressed actually but i was impressed with this couple for a number of reasons and one of the one of the reasons was i was so nervous about this upcoming grad school experience and this is long ago where i i wasn't even sure i had made the right decision to come out to idaho and to study geology so i was full of anxiety and stress and other labels that i probably were unknown to people at the time and i just remember thinking maybe even said to david god it would be so relaxing to switch places with these guys and i don't have to deal with all this high performance geology stuff i could just drive around with them or or they can start this grad program and try to prove themselves and learn all this crazy stuff and i can just take their truck and drive around and not have any problems but of course it didn't turn out that way and now here i am 35 years later visiting everybody that i remember from long ago is there a point to that story i guess that i'm remembering labor day weekend fondly secondly i'm uh reminding myself that all of that work and stress was good for me and i'm able to do what i'm doing now because of that experience in that program craters of the moon cotm c o t fm you gotta love it so oh my this is very impressive lava's here as young as two thousand years old and some spatter cones and cinder cones on the horizon you i don't know if you ever been to the big island of hawaii kilauea hawaii volcanoes national park man this is this is lots of similarities man and yet we're here in the middle of the mormon potato fields oh it's a beautiful sample wow i mean many of you know the words pahoehoe and uh-uh and certainly this ropey stuff here is pahoehoe that forms as lava flowing with a certain amount of fluidity has a cooled skin a rigid cooled skin but the interior is still molten and red and so you develop these folds that's the pahoey hoy the ropey stuff like this this other stuff is tempting to call uh-uh but i don't think it is i think it's just more pahoehoe that's been busted up for some reason because i'm seeing enough of these remnant pahoehoe surfaces on these individual blocks so if you've seen video or you can get on youtube and just type in ah flow yeah i i don't think that's what this is it is blocky but i i don't i'm not sure that's what we're looking at so i don't really know how to understand these individual little blocks because again the blocks look at this oh each of these blocks is ahoy holy type stuff wow uh we might have some volcanologists watching and they'll go come on man you really you really don't know obviously this is an older pahoehoe surface and then we had some sort of whatever shattered ring or i i don't know yeah where's the part where i said i wasn't gonna babble beautiful cinder cone on the horizon oh god i gotta go over that one that's that's eye-catching damn imagine being israel russell out here geologist in 1900 making maps and trying to piece a story together looking at all these features yeah stuff's like i just can't stop holding up these pieces that was a little heavy so creators of the freaking moon does not disappoint what did the native americans make of this place or they didn't have to imagine something that happened millions of years ago i mean if we have eruptions here as recently as 2000 years ago they're here well that's quite a thought did first nation people sit here and watch this did they stay away did they come closer was this a holy site wouldn't you guess that all humans are naturally attracted to watching a eruption like this especially if it's not incredibly violent i would guess that what a thought wow were there folks here three thousand years watching these flows cool and then telling their children about it and bringing their children and their children wow you

Channel: Nick Zentner

Views: 19,194

Rating: 4.9631901 out of 5

Keywords: Nick Zentner, Nick From The Field, Craters of the Moon, Idaho Geology

Id: bsxWEUjDxUw

Length: 45min 23sec (2723 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 08 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/syncopator]

I love this guy's videos. I wish I had taken more geology courses in college and watching his presentations is basically like a GEOL 101 course without a test and there's one for pretty much every feature in the PNW.