Last full day on the road!

Marie McBride
Unfortunately today is the last full day on this adventure. So far the experience has been amazing. I feel like this trip has turned me into a geologist, a rock climber, and a photographer. The sites we have seen have been awe inspiring. I could have just sat at these places all day.

Right now we are driving over beautiful rolling hills to our next adventure.  :)

Haiku 3: The World Changes

Unjust clast divide
Parted by the matrix of
Grainy oppression

Day 1 Wrap Up

Greetings and good morning!
This is Andy, your LPSA staff assistant. Yesterday was our first full day in the field and I am not exaggerating when I tell you that we are having an incredible time.
 We took measurements at some of our first columnar basalt outcrops, felt the strange soapy/slick water at Soap Lake, examined the erratic (foreign; transported from elsewhere by glacier) rocks at the terminal moraine from the last Ice Age, and studied the astounding scablands landscape features at Dry Falls and Frenchman's Springs.

The complex cooling history of the Columbia basalts and the intensity of the Missoula Flood are very apparent. These landscape features are BIG!
I would love to write more but it is time for us to depart on our next expedition. See you in Moscow, Idaho tonight.

The adventure of a lifetime-Scablands

With every place there is feeling,

that part of you that is touched by what you see touch and feel,

Today science truly became real,

From rock sliding, to Goddard day singing, we all had a great time.

The ambition that it takes to climb rocks and explore,

Made this experience what it was and so much more,

The people, the words, the loess, the birds,

Today nature explained knowledge and I learned tons!

Adventuring with my LPSA crew was so much fun!!!

Joshua "The Joker" Mann

Haikwo Two

Bleary-eyed start with
One rock, two rock, tree rock, chalk
Up columnar basalt

Jake

Daily Haiku #1

The first in what will be a highly acclaimed rock-related poetry series by Jake.

Disorderly. Cracks

flow through what once flowed to the

distant mountain peaks

We made it!

Scablands Engage

Hey, I'm David Kutai Weiss, an LPSA intern from the College of Charleston and one of the (aspiring) field geologists in the program.  We’re leaving early Sunday for Washington, and I'm extremely excited to travel to the Channeled Scablands this week for a number of reasons…

Reason Number One:

Basalt columns…

On Earth…

Basalt Columns in Porto Santo Island (Wikipedia)

And on Mars…

Basalt columns on the inside of an impact crater on Mars.  These columns were found using data from the HiRISE camera onboard the Mars Reconnaisance Orbiter.

The basalt columns' stunning hexagonal shape has puzzled scientists for hundreds of years, and although we have a better understanding of their formation today, the columns remain fascinating to study for scientists (like myself).



In areas, the Scablands exhibit pristine basalt columns, which is my primary interest on the trip because it directly relates to my NASA research project.  With much help from my fellow interns, I will be acquiring measurements of the physical properties of these columns (height, width, etc) and relating them to basalt columns recently discovered on Mars with the HiRISE camera onboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.  By taking measurement and aerial photos (Thanks to Neil and Josh), I will be able to use these columns to plot the relationship between stria (A physical byproduct of the basalt cooling process) heights and column width.  I can then compare this relationship with the measurements I am currently taking from the HiRISE camera to infer stria heights on Mars.  By knowing these physical properties of the basalt columns on Mars, we can derive knowledge of the thermal evolution of these columns— how long they took to cool, to what extent water played a role in their cooling, and the general physical environment they were emplaced in!

That is a summation of my research project this summer, so as you can imagine, traveling to the scablands is an integral part of my research.  Additionally, as an outdoorsman and (aspiring) field geologist, (Reason Number Two) I’m just happy to get outdoors!  It is a great excuse to bang rocks with a rock hammer, use my hand-lens an unhealthy amount, and climb lots of rocks.  This is going to be a great learning experience with great company, as our mentors and interns are all top-notch!

Meet the Expedition Leaders: Jason Barnes

Dr. Jason W. Barnes is a planetary scientist and Assistant Professor of Physics at the University of Idaho.  He will be providing a local perspective on the area, having both lived in the channeled scablands for the past 3 years and led a prior field trip to the area in 2003 (see pictures from that trip at: http://barnesos.net/homepage/lpl/fieldtrips/CRB/ ).  After having grown up in St. Louis, Missouri, Jason received his B.S. in Astronomy from Caltech in 1998, and his Ph.D. in Planetary Sciences from The University of Arizona in 2004.  He and Brian Jackson are therefore old grad school buddies.  Jason studies two disparate fields of planetary science: extrasolar planets, and the geology of Saturn's moon Titan.  His extrasolar planet work involves working with NASA's Kepler mission to characterize giant planets in other solar systems.  For Titan he works with the Cassini spacecraft, specifically the Visual and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (VIMS) instrument, looking at Titan's surface from orbit around Saturn.  Jason is presently working to design a possible future mission to Titan: an unpiloted airplane, making involvement with the RSESTeP airplane particularly appropriate.  Read more at: http://barnesos.net/pro .

Remote Sensing Earth Science Teacher Program (RSESTeP)

During our upcoming trip to Washington, LPSA participants will be working with RSESTeP in order to learn a little about remote sensing. As explained by NASA's website, "RSESTeP is a three-tiered (Satellite, R/C Plane and Ground-truthing) Remote Sensing Earth Science Teacher Program that trains 4th – 12th grade classroom science teachers how to use cutting edge NASA resources and technologies to implement Earth Science Missions with students and communities." While in the past the program has worked with science teachers across the country, this summer it will be partnering with LPSA to investigate basalt columns in the Channeled Scablands of eastern Washington state.

We will first record various ground measurements of the columnar basalt at different locations in order to verify previously collected data. Next, in partnership with pilots from the Academy of Model Aeronautics, students will use instruments aboard the R/C planes to collect aerial photographs of the same sites. All of this information will be combined to gain a greater understanding of what geologic processes take place during the formation of basalt columns.

Ultimately, we wish to relate the structure and history of the Scabland basalts to similar formations that have been recently identified on Mars by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE). The discovery of columnar basalts on Mars is a very exciting because they suggest the presence of liquid water.

Meet the Expedition Leaders: Patrick Burkhart

Dr Patrick Burkhart joined the faculty of Slippery Rock University in 1998, teaching Hydrology, Hydrogeology, Environmental Geology, and Glacial Geology.  His professional interests lie in water resources, landscape evolution, and environmental change.  He is a strong supporter of collaborative undergraduate research, as both an advocate for systemic enhancement and as an accomplished practitioner.  His student collaborators have sought adventure-based discovery in the Badlands of South Dakota, glaciers in Alaska, watersheds of Costa Rica, and many aspects of Pennsylvania geology. He has also worked as a consulting hydrogeologist, examining water budget analyses, contaminant transport, and aquifer remediation of petroleum hydrocarbons.  His research has taken him from arctic to tropical settings in pursuit of understanding the evolution of geologic thought and the history of science, particularly enjoying travel in the footsteps of Charles Darwin.


Read about some of his research here: http://www.geosociety.org/gsatoday/archive/19/12/article/i1052-5173-19-12-4.htm

Meet the Expedition Leaders: Brian Jackson

Brian Jackson is a NASA postdoctoral fellow at Goddard Space Flight Center. He received his B.S. in Physics from the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta GA and his Ph.D. in Planetary Sciences from the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory at the University of Arizona in Tucson. His graduate research focused on tidal effects on extra-solar planets. During his graduate work, Brian showed that many of the first rocky extra-solar planets found may be volcanically active, as a result of tidal heating. As a post-doctoral fellow at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Brian has expanded his research to consider atmospheric evaporation from extra-solar planets very close to their host stars and to search for the transits of these planets. He has authored and co-authored numerous scientific papers and conference proceedings and crisscrossed the country to give invited talks at Caltech, MIT, Harvard, among others. He has contributed several short articles to "Astronomy" magazine and given numerous public talks. Brian lives with his wife Maki in Silver Spring MD.

Greetings!

Welcome to the official blog for the LPSA expedition to the Channelled Scablands of eastern Washington. Here you will find useful links, information about the trip leaders and participants, testimonials direct from the field, and tales of our findings. Please take a moment to check out the links on the right hand side of this page. At this moment, we have included: A comprehensive overview of the Scablands written by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), a link to the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) home page where you can view photographs of the martian surface and the columnar basalts for which the Scablands will serve as an analog, and a link to the biographies of the participating LPSA interns.

We hope you enjoy!