Chinchorro Cemetary - Gigapan

This is a Gigapixel image I took of an exposed Chinchorro cemetery on a steep north-facing slope of the Morro, which overlooks the northern city of Arica. My friend and colleague, Bernardo Arriaza, asked me to take this photo to help protect this area from development. This is just one of many cemeteries still waiting to be excavated on the Morro. Apparently the problem is less about funding the excavation as it is having storage for the excavated material.

Standing in this location and looking north out over the city, it is easy to see why this site would have been chosen for a burial and occupation site. The steep slopes provide a strategic defensive position and the views are unparallelled in the area - at least when looking northwest to northeast. They also had easy access to the ocean and rivers, for food, water and wetlands filled with the all important reeds they used for mats, windbreaks, and wrapping their dead prior to burial.

Geologic Mapping on the iPad - For real?

I've spent a lot of time over the last year downloading and playing with applications for the iPad that have some relevance to geology. However the dream of using a lightweight tablet with a stylus and built-in GPS for field mapping is getting closer to reality. I always thought the limiting factor was the ability to make use of digitizing on the tablet to draw contacts, annotations, etc. However, I think the free iCMTGPS app provides a viable tool for actual field-mapping. It isn't as slick and easy as using ArcPad, however it works and it's as accurate as many of the GPS units are folks are using for 1:24,000 mapping.

You can email the support staff at CMT for a user guide, but it's a little thin on some of the specifics so I put together a short review and tutorial illustrating how it can be set up for field mapping applications. Strengths, weaknesses and quirks are all discussed in the video. Any and all feedback is appreciated!

Accretionary Wedge #35: Favorite Geology Word

For this month's Accretionary Wedge, Evelyn Mervine from Georneys asked us the impossible... to settle on one favorite geology word. I've been mulling this question over off and on for the last week, and found myself sifting through words like yardgang, pingo, sandur, tor, felsenmeer, molasse, tuya, tombolo, doline, nunatuk, moulin, firnschnee, thalweg, polje, inselberg, tafoni, etc... probably a lot more I can't remember right now. Clearly I like words that are unique and often derived from another language, I'm especially partial to German-based terms. Hopefully I'll get around to blogging about each of these words and sharing my photos of them, although I don't have a good photo of a polje. Guess I need to take a trip to Eastern Europe!

However one word that has always fascinated me and drawn me to its country of origin is jökulhlaup. A term derived from the Icleandic for glacier ( jökull) and burst or flood (hlaup), which we use to describe a glacially-derived outburst flood. They are often triggered by a tuya - also in my list - which is a subglacial volcanic eruption. These two events are excellent reasons why Iceland is called the land of 'fire and ice.' Here are two videos that illustrate this process in action following the eruption of Eyjafjallajökull in 2010.

I didn't become really fascinated with jökulhlaups until after I had read about the Wegner-esque experience of J. Harlen Bretz. Faced by similar dogmatic biases from the geologic community, Bretz challenged the status-quo and argued that the scablands of the western United States were created through a catastrophic flood. However, similar to Wegner, he failed to provide a 'smoking gun' that would convince his detractors. The origin of this flood (although, generally accepted as multiple flooding events) was later identified by J.T. Pardee as jökulhlaup events from Glacial Lake Missoula. Two excellent books on this topic are "Glacial Lake Missoula and its Humungous Floods" by David Alt and "Bretz's Flood" by John Soennichsen.

Fortunately for me, I also lack photographs of a jökulhlaup in action but here are a few photos taken while traveling through the scablands in 2000:

Chinchorro Landscapes - Caleta Vitor, Chile

These panoramas were taken in Caleta Vitor, a small fishing village on the coast of Northern Chile and home to the Chinchorro culture approximately 6,000 - 7,000 years B.P. The primary evidence for their existence is extensive middens and in rare cases well-preserved mummies. The reeds visible in both panoramas were an integral artifact in their culture; they were used to make mats for sun and ground protection and more interestingly they were used to wrap the mummies before burial.

This is a view looking east towards the Andes along an ephemeral stream that supports the local reeds and abundant vultures. It is lower quality than the Caleta Vitor GigaPan I shot in a similar location but looking south shown below.

This GigaPan provides an excellent perspective on a typical Chinchorro landscape, however wave movement along the beach has created a number of ghosts I couldn't correct.