The Lecture
On Saturday February 19, geologist and photographer Marli Miller spoke about the geology of Oregon and Washington as seen along our federal and state highways as outlined in her recent Roadside Geology books. With its spectacular mountain ranges, lush valleys and awesome rivers, the Pacific Northwest landscape offers an incredible geologic story grounded in continental accretion and mountain-building, magmatism, and glaciation.
Beginning with the Crescent Terrane (Siletzia), the latest addition to North America, she described elements of continental accretion that form the underlying but diverse basement of the region, followed by a photographic “roadtrip” up the Columbia Gorge that illustrated younger features. Along the way, the many geologic complexities raise important questions, opportunities for new research, and fascinating stories. The Zoom broadcast was free and open to the public, as are all our recorded events. Marli’s book on Washington Roadside Geology is available from Amazon as well as local booksellers.
The Speaker
Marli is a tenured Senior Instructor II and Researcher in the Dept. of Earth Sciences at the University of Oregon and maintains the website geologypics.com, which offers free downloads of more than 4,500 of her searchable geology photographs. This site is a godsend for instructors and authors
Ultimately, Marli thinks this whole science of geology boils down to teaching—if we can’t communicate what we’ve learned, what good is it? Fortunately, the geology department here really values teaching, so there are plenty of people with whom she can share ideas.
The Chuckanut Formation is one of North America’s thickest sequences of non-marine sediment. It was deposited by a meandering river that flowed westward across Washington at a time when the Cascade Range had not yet been created. The strata accumulated to a thickness of at least 6,000 meters (20,000 ft). The oldest beds were deposited in the late Paleocene, but most deposition occurred in the early Eocene.
George Mustoe was born and raised in Nevada, arriving in Bellingham with his family at the formative age of 15. After some years at WWU getting educated as a geochemist, he eventually made a switch to paleontology as his main research interest. George has published close to 100 peer-reviewed journal articles that span a range of geoscience topics—a publication record that he cites as evidence of wide-ranging scientific interests or maybe just a short attention span. Following his retirement in 2014, George became a Geology Research Associate at WWU where he continues his pursuit of paleontology.