Steve's Blog
Wonderful NewslettersLakes in Great Basin
January19th (Tuesday), 6 p.m., via Zoom (online) - Open to Public. Presentation: “The rise and fall of latest Pleistocene pluvial lakes in the northern Great Basin”; Presented by Daniel Enrique Ibarra, Univ. of CA, Berkeley. G.K. Gilbert’s 1890 monograph on Lake...
Craters of the Moon Nov. 2016
CRATERS OF THE MOON Just a few miles west of here you will find the eastern boundary of a geologic province like no other. Most often referred to as the Snake River Plain, this unique landscape cuts a swath from the Oregon-Idaho-Nevada border all the way across Idaho...
Teton Quadrangle Nov. 2016
You can’t tell where you are going unless you know where you have been. ~ Unknown SPARRING WITH SERAPH In the dystopian sci-fi movie The Matrix Reloaded, Neo, the main protagonist, must spar with Seraph, the gatekeeper, before consulting the Oracle for a big-picture...
Earth Mars Oct 2016
TERRESTRIAL ANALOGS In their insightful book Rare Earth: Why Complex Life is Uncommon in the Universe, Peter Ward and Donald Brownlee propose that life may be ubiquitous in the universe, and give many good reasons why this could be so. For example, they note that some...
Iceland Oct. 2016
A VICTORY FOR THE PROLETARIAT There are - in the same loose sense of the term that there are only two kinds of anything - only two kinds of Earth crust. Continental crust is the stuff of... well, continents. Oceanic crust is the stuff at the bottom of oceans. The...
Satellites Sep 2016
Man must rise above the Earth - to the top of the atmosphere and beyond - for only thus will he fully understand the world in which he lives. -Socrates THE GREAT COSMIC QUILT In 1729, Isaac Newton theorized that if a cannon ball could be shot into space...
Burgess Shale Sep 2016
THE EXPLOSION OF LIFE Life began very early in Earth’s history, perhaps nearly 4 billion years ago, but complex life, animals that we might recognize, literally exploded onto the scene in the early Cambrian time, some 500+ million years ago. Before that were...
Mt. St. Helen Aug 2016
And I would have liked to have known you But I was just a kid Your candle burned out long before Your legend ever did -Elton John, Candle In The Wind THE FLEETING GLORY OF YOUTH It is surprisingly difficult to find good photographs of pre-1980 Mount St Helens. There...
Greenland Aug 2016
SECRETS OF THE BIG EMPTY Greenland. The name alone beckons forth a dull-white canvas so vast and subtle that detail is difficult to apprehend even at the widest embrace of the human eye. At greater distances, contradictions emerge that only add to the mystique of this...
Continental Collisions July 2016
THE FIRST FIFTEEN MILLISECONDS GJH member John Daily, who happens to be a nationally recognized crash expert, finds his deepest joy in crashing vehicles into each other. It could be a mini cooper and a cement truck, a couple of pickup trucks, maybe a corvette and a...
Crinoids July 2016
KEEPING ONE EYE ON THE BIGGER PICTURE July, 2016 It is easy to understand why some people are so obsessed with fossils. Our geography and weather, our families and friends, hopes and dreams, plans and schemes - all of the substance that constitutes our individuality...
Pegmatites June 2016
THE LAST ONE PERCENT While it is a deceptively simplistic observation, humans and chimpanzees share about 98.8% of the same DNA ( DNA: Comparing Humans and Chimps ). Now, we can all agree that chimpanzees are pretty cool in their own right, swinging around in trees...
Gros Vente September 2014
THE SECOND FIDDLE The Gros Ventre Range is an old structure. Originally extending all the way west to what is now the suburbs of Rexburg (a lot closer to here at the time), it was mother nature’s singular object of affection in Teton County and the source material...
Story of Earth September 2015
RETHINKING THE STORY OF EARTH It is easy to regard oxygen as an essential gas that constitutes about 21% of our atmosphere. This is .0001% of the whole story. The remaining 99.9999% of the earth’s oxygen is locked up in rocks and minerals. Most of the atoms in the...
Permian Matters April 2015
WHY THE PERMIAN STILL MATTERS Permian time is best remembered by the earth science community as an ending. It expired in a desperate fizzle that marks the greatest extinction event known to science (aptly referred to as “the Great Permian Extinction”) and from its...
Nuanced History March 2015
A NUANCED VIEW nuance |ˈn(y)o͞oˌäns| nouna subtle difference in or shade of meaning, expression, or sound: the nuances of facial expression and body language. -Apple Dictionary It is an easy thing for many of our friends and members to visualize the geology of the...
Teton Fault February 2015
UNDERSTANDING OUR FAULT The history of humanity is highlighted by astounding acts of bravery, charity, and sacrifice. We have created works of art, music and literature that live on through the ages. We have extended the frontiers of science beyond the imaginings of...
Past Future February 2015
Using his new back-yard observatory here in Jackson, GJH Member Mike Adler recently captured this image of Messier 81, a large spiral galaxy in our neck of the cosmic neighborhood. It is interesting to note that what we can see today (through Mike’s lens) is an 11.8...
Geology Comes to Life March 2014
WHEN GEOLOGY COMES TO LIFE We know much more about the last ninth of the Earth’s history than we do the remaining eight ninths combined. From the Cambrian to the present the geologic time scale is largely informed by and sometimes arranged according to a series of...
Himalayas February 2014
26,795 foot high Dhaulagiri I at Dawn, Nepal. Image captured by GJH member Mike Adler. WHEN INDIA MET ASIA Dancing shoes Though the distances divide us There’s a paradise inside us We can’t lose Dan Fogelberg, Dancing Shoes I remember the day I met my wife as if it...
Backstory July 2013
The Biggest Backstory "Though justice be thy plea, consider this - that in the course of justice, none of us should see salvation." - Portia, in Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice Greetings GJH friends and members. Things are always more complicated than...
Summary Sedimentology Frontiers
October 18 (Tuesday), 6 p.m., Teton Co. Library Auditorium - Open to Public. Presentation: " Sedimentology Frontiers from Earth to Mars: Dunes, Deformation, & Diagenesis”. Presented by Margie Chan, University of Utah. An enticing challenge of sedimentology is...