Mesa Verde National Park

Chaco Canyon, located in what is New Mexico today, closer to Arizona, is one of the archeological sites with many hypothesis and conclusions full of contradiction because of its complexity of what was happening there during Chaco’s economical peak. It is one of the prehistorical places that hold the history of the humans and how complex the organization between social, religious and economical was. The remains of the amazing tall and complex buildings surrounded with roads helped the archeologists to hypothesize the use of those buildings and those roads that surrounded them.

Day Maker 23 had a very rocky shoreline characterized by many of the islands within Voyageurs National Park. These rocks vary in size, with some rocks having large cracks with small caves (Appendix C). The rocks around the shoreline were typically light grey in color with some variations in texture and crystal size. (Appendix B) I do not remember the rocks being particularly sandy, however, I have also not been to the site in four to five years. These

Located in the southwestern part of Colorado, Mesa Verde National Park was the home of Ancestral Puebloans from AD 600 to 1300. Located within the park are thousands of archaeological sites and hundreds of cliff dwellings. Whether you have half of a day or a week at the park, there are many opportunities to see not only the cliff homes that were built so long ago, but also to enjoying some truly amazing geographically features in and around the park. When the Ancestral Pueblo first inhabited this area, they lived on the mesa tops, close to their farmlands, but during the 1190s, they “began living in pueblos they built beneath the overhanging cliffs” (Cliff Dwelling). Numerous cliff dwellings have their own names and can be visited while at the park, along with hiking, and sites on the top of the mesas.

With its windswept mesas, colorful cliffs, water-carved slot canyons, chiseled earth, rich colors, and magnificent vistas, the Colorado Plateau is one of the most beautiful and unique areas in the world. Ten national parks and eighteen national monuments lie within the boundaries of the Plateau. Located in the Four Corners region of the southwestern United States, the Colorado Plateau contains one of the seven wonders of the world—The Grand Canyon. Cline Library and Northern Arizona University is ideally positioned to focus on collecting the stories, images, and records of the

One interesting feature of the southwestern United States is the area known as the "Four Comers." the only place in the United States where four slates meet at one point. Within the 130,000 square miles of the Colorado Plateau in this region lie many wonders of nature. The plateau contains eight national parks, twenty national monuments, as well as numerous other nationally designated areas and huge tracts of national forests. This wealth of natural features and the cultures of the various Native American tribes in the region have made the area an important destination for tourists, especially those interested in natural history and culture.

The Ancient Pueblo People (Anasazi) are the first group of people to have inhabited the Grand Canyon. According to Lorraine Tufts, Artifacts and figurines were found in limestone caves

Many petroglyphs, animal fossils, and artifcats are visible throughout this formation in addition to the exposed, petrified logs. Chinle is broken up into smaller members and from oldest to youngest they are- Mesa Redondo Member, Blue Mesa Member, Sonsela Member, Petrified Forest Member, and Owl Rock Member. Each member is made up of unique materials that are responsible for their remarkable color. The Paleozoic sandy conglomerate and siltstone of Mesa Redondo Member is red, yellow and purple and was once part of the river’s floodplain before its deposition between 225-227 million years ago. The Blue Mesa Member consists of multicolored mudstone cobbles in blue, green, grey, and purple colors and dates to 220-225 million years ago. These older members make up the badlands of Petrified Forest and display their colorful banding. The 216 million year old Sonsela member includes a few smaller bedded areas with brown cross-bedded sandstones, more multicolored mudstones in blue, grey, and purple, white and grey sandstone beds, and white cross-bedded sandstone conglomerates with an assortment of sizes for cobbles. The Petrified Forest member, an area within the Painted Desert feature, is approximately 213 million years old with thick red and brown mud and sandstone layers. As one would guess, this member contains a good majority of the fossilized wood segments and uranium-bearing minerals that are often present with such organic matter as trees and logs. At 205 million years old, the youngest Owl Rock Member represents an area where there had once been a dry inland lakebed, leaving observable trace minerals from the evaporation process. The colors found here are typically light to dark red with orange and white, resulting from the mudstone littered with thin layers of limestone throughout. The wide variety of color

There are even more types of cave formations that probably haven’t even been discovered. Entering the Timpanogos the first major thing that caught my attention was the Hidden Lake. The Hidden Lake had many formations around it but the one that caught my eye was the Shelf Stones which were formed from pooled water. Another thing the Hidden Lake had was Christmas Tree Coral which was the most recent formation to be discovered! These Christmas Tree Coral literally looked like little Christmas tree attached to the

It cooled from a felsic intermediate magma which means medium silica content. After it cooled completely, the Boulder Creek Granodiorite was uplifted to the Earth’s surface due to the tectonic forces from the Ancestral Rockies mountain building event. This caused the granodiorite to be exposed to the surface creating a mountain-like structure which allows river to form and flow downstream. These rivers have high energy due to gravity and are able to transport big clasts of cobble size and deposit them at the bottom of the mountain. At the bottom of the river, the energy of the stream drops abruptly creating a poorly sorted conglomerate. As the stream continues to flow, it carries along sand to a beach environment. Here, the Lyons Formation is formed. Beach is an ideal environment for this formation because there a lot of sand and the oscillatory flow of the beach created ripple marks on the Lyons sandstone. Beach is usually a windy area, so it helps with the ripple formation and also the dry up the muddy area at the beach shore. This supports the evidence of mudcracks that were observed in the Lyons Formation. Based on the paleocurrent data from Morrison, CO, the wind was blowing to the East and these are the dip directions of the mudstone and sandstone beds. From the beach environment, these sea level advanced a little bit creating a shallow marine environment. This kind of environment supports the formation of the mudstone and sandstone where there is slow current. The water is shallow enough for sunlight to get to the bottom for the cyanobacteria, the earliest life on Earth, to obtain their nutrients and finally settle down in the beds forming ridge-like shape on the Lykins sandstone. With that depth of water, calcite is also able to precipitate out the water and is trapped in the pores of the sandstone. The Entrada and

Coarse cobble point bars are essentially pointed cobble that has been piled into bar like formations. These formations are generally formed when sediments carrying cobble leave it behind. 3 Ground formed into a steep slope as part of fortification. 4 “Moraine” is a word used to describe the earth, stones and debris a glacier deposits. “Terminal” describes that these items were deposited where the glaciers maximum extent was, in this case Long Island.

In the early 1800s, farmers moved into the area and started growing the time period's most profitable crop in the southern area of the country, cotton. They moved in, cut down the trees, and started plowing and planting their seeds in long straight lines. Of course, the farmers did not realize at the time, that their methods of farming were damaging the property. These traditional farming methods were initiating a string of events that would drastically change the landscape. Had the farmers known about land preservation techniques such as rotating the crops in the field every year, growing cover crops to protect the soil, and plowing the soil with the contour method, the landscape would have never been altered and the canyon would not be there today. However, these methods were not fully developed until 100 years later, and so the farmers just used the best knowledge they had at the time.

Sandstone with grain-size histogram See above on Sandstone; but likely instead of iron oxide coloring the material, these were likely formed as

The site is managed by both the city of Albuquerque and the National Park Service, and features a spectacular variety of natural and cultural elements. The latter are of great interest for their age and specificity: more than 20,000 carved images can be seen on the volcanic facades, all recorded to be the product of prehistoric and historic Native American and Hispanic peoples. While many of these images are very difficult to

The first sedimentary rock unit that occurred during the Sevier Orogeny is the Kootenai Formation. This formation consists of four members; each has a distinct characteristic. The first member of the Kootenai Formation is a clastic unit with a high energy system. The second member is the middle limestone unit that indicates the activity of folding. The third member is similar to the first member as it is also a clastic unit; however, the upper clastic member has a finer grain size compared to the lower member, which indicates a narrow channel deposition. The upper clastic unit marks the start of Laramide orogeny, where the thick skin deformation began to occur. The fourth and the last member of the Kootenai Formation is the Gastropods limestone. Gastropod limestone formed a border between the Kootenai Formation and the Blackleaf Formation. This formation took place during the emergence of the Western Interior Seaway. Blackleaf Formation consists of the Flood member and the Vaughn member. Flood member is a clastic sandstone that has a high energy depositional setting, while Vaughn member has a low energy depositional environment such as the shallow

The type of preservation, as stated above, that are a shared style within these various deposits, referred to by Garson in the Academic Journal ‘Dynamic palaeoredox and exceptional preservation in the Cambrian Spence Shale of Utah’, the “BST (Burgess Shale-type) preservation”. She, along with the other authors of the journal, claim, “Insight into the preservation of BST assemblages may be just as important as the exceptional fossils themselves as it speaks directly to the unique environmental conditions that were widespread in the marine realm at the time” (Palaeoredox 2012). I was almost positive this type of preservation was pretty basic until Gaines and his associates told me differently; here we jump back to ‘Mechanisms for Burgess Shale-type Preservation’, get into the nitty gritty and further discuss the different ways BST preservation actually goes down.