May 19, 2025 - Rocky Mountain GSA Day 1 - Things I learned and retained (Monday - D18)

As Technical Program Co-Chair with Dr. Matt Olson (UVU), we were required to help out with orienting session chairs about the equipment in the Utah Valley Convention Center at 7am each day of the meeting. Being 'on' at 7am is not usual for me, nor is getting up at 5:30am for my particular type of career, but it is what it is and at least I didn't have to drive in from Salt Lake City like Matt. Unfortunately, there was a bit of a micky mouse show going on with the UVCC staff. The workers were only sort of sure what was going on with their audio/video equipment and we ended up having to move talks onto the laptops in each room via borrowed thumb drives (from student volunteers). By the afternoon session the GSA staff had come up with a solution for the less than prepared Provo Convention Center Staff. Other than this headache for Morgan, Matt, and Me the day was full of interesting talks and wonderful posters. I also got to catch up a little bit at lunch with Dave Marchetti and Chuck Bailey, making sure to let them know that I am about to dive into the writing up of the Earthquake Geology story for the Thousand Lake fault and thanking them again for the wonderful work they did leading the FOP trip this past fall. 

Learning highlights for me: 

Rock Glaciers

- There were a lot of talks and posters on Rock Glaciers in Utah and across the Rocky Mountain Region. I saw a very helpful talk by a Stanford undergraduate thesis student which showed that the Timpanogos Rock Glacier today (modern climate conditions), is sitting right at a critical temperature regime where any cooler and the Rock Glacier could become more ice than Rock and revert to glacial conditions and any warmer and it could rapidly become just a rubble field without interstitial ice. 

I also thought more about the formation of Rock Glaciers, the first time I though about these were way back in 2002 when I was tasked with leading a field trip stop about Rock Glaciers on UVM's Regional Geology of Colorado, led by Dr. Stephen Wright (also my very first Geology teacher for Geology 1 at UVM in 2000). I was relatively convinced about the model for how Rock Glaciers get their ice after the talks which I watched at this meeting of the preferred model of these investigators. Basically, that these rock glaciers persist by alternating seasons of high and low snow where sometimes snow fields stay all year, potentially being buried by mass wasting of rock falls, trapping the ice within the rubble. The evidence for this model was exposure of ice in Timpanogos Rock Glacier that was stratified between rock layers. Other models include the remnant ice model, where the ice is thought to be remnant from past valley/cirque glaciers within the rocks as the glacier receded and winnowed down. This is also appealing to my intuition for some reasons, but it seems like if the Rock Glacier is to remain active, so long after glaciation, then the other model, mentioned above should at least also be important. The other model imposes the idea that seasonal snow melt percolates into the rock field and freezes onto permafrost and this probably works in many areas, but according to the authors of the talks I saw, permafrost shouldn't exist at these elevations and latitudes, so this is an unlikely primary source for the ice formation. Of course, once the rock glacier is there, it is permafrost, so... I guess the process could have relevance too, but I think I am convinced that it is not the primary mechanism. 

Depositional Rates in the Western Interior Seaway

- the fortunate part of having to help manage moving talks via jump drives is that I saw a talk on the Western Interior Seaway and sedimentation rates in that shallow marine environment. This was fascinating for me because I saw that the depositional rates were pretty low relative to continental erosion rates 10-50 m/Ma vs typical drainage basin erosion rates of 100-200 m/Ma based upon compilations of cosmogenic isotope studies. I got to thinking why there would be this type of discrepancy. Ideas:

1. Obviously deposition cannot exceed erosion rates... 

2. Some erosional material is lost to dissolution and may be moved to other areas over the broader and more extensive interconnected ocean basins of the world as compared to the continents which are much smaller in area. 

3. Some sediment is trapped in non marine basins on the way to the sea. 

4. Some sediment in these basins could have been deposited, but not preserved. 

5. compaction to rock... could this be more dense than the weathered bedrock at the surface (not sure about this idea). 

Anyway, makes me want to read some sort of review study on this. I think I saw an interesting talk on erosion of the Hawaiian Islands by Steve Nelson (BYU) a few years ago where he tried to do mass balance analysis comparing erosion and deposition there. It is fascinating. I'll have to do a literature review some day soon. 

Geotechnical Engineering 

- A common issue with engineering project failures is that one company makes recommendations, projects are started, paused, resumed often with a different company and then mistakes are made, retention walls have more fill put on top of them (out of design spec) and they fail. OR One company recommends a certain fill and leveling procedure, but then they are not the company that is hired to do the work and the next company adjusts the plan, but doesn't re-analyze the design. 

FLAM MAP - Free software for modelling wild fires. Could be good for student GIS projects. 

I also helped judge undergraduate posters! 

12 hours at the meeting! Fun times.