A Letter to My Daughter

I love looking at Google Earth with all the labels and borders turned off. You get a quick view of the geology of North America. It is cool. You can see all the older mountain ranges on the east coast that have been weathered, all the pot holes left behind by glaciers in the upper Midwest and up into Canada, and the spectacular mountain ranges of the west. I love the American West. I don’t associate a state as being where I am from so much as I do the Western U.S. The Rockies are amazing. You can follow them from where they begin, just south of Mexico City, northwest into Canada. 

Nevada is a geologist’s dream. I remember, when I was still in school and working one summer with the geologists at Echo Bay in Battle Mountain, a few of them were roommates and they invited me over for dinner and we got a little drunk. There was a geologic map of Nevada on the fridge and I looked at it through my drunk eyes and said “look, Nevada is covered with stretch marks!” I thought it was hysterical, but they really are stretch marks. They start at the California line and go east into Utah, Idaho and Wyoming. The Tetons are the easternmost stretchmark associated with the Basin and Range. That type of faulting creates spectacular relief. The Tetons rise over 7000 feet from the valley floor in Jackson Hole with no foothills. The mountains in Nevada are like that too, just not quite as dramatic. The valley we lived in when we were in Round Mountain was beautiful. The valley itself was pretty boring, with nowhere to drain, the big lakes that were there during the last glacial period just dried up, so the soil is very alkaline and vegetation is low and sparse. But the mountains are stunning.

The mountains in the Basin and Range were formed during a period of crustal extension. One belief is that, as the North American Continent moved over the Yellowstone Hot Spot, and another hot spot that is now under New Mexico, the combined heat from the two, caused the area between them to expand and lift. The crust was stretched so it thinned and split causing a lot of parallel mountain ranges, and a lot of volcanic activity that produced rocks on the continent that are normally created on oceanic crust: basalts and gabbros and other higher temperature igneous rocks. The Columbia River Basalts were formed during this time, as well as Craters of the Moon National Monument in Idaho. Both of which stand out in the image below (if you know where to look).

I am not sure about the timing, but I think those hot spots are also believed to have caused the uplift that created the Colorado Plateau, which eventually resulted in the Grand Canyon. The Colorado Plateau is very red, and really stands out. 

But I must admit, even if they aren’t my favorite, the stars of the show are the volcanic ranges along the coast, starting at the tip of the Aleutians (in Alaska) and going all the way south to the southern tip of Chile. I have only seen the US portion and it is stunning.

I would like to visit the Andes. A mountain range that is high enough to create the driest place on the planet must be spectacular. The picture below is from Patagonia, near Punta Arenas.

I am really looking forward to going to Alaska and Denali. For most of my life I have thought that I really had no interest in visiting Alaska, then I visited Juneau for an interview and got the bug. I would really like to hear wolves howl at night. I believe that might make me cry.

Denali

I love planning vacations to tropical places and I dream about living on an island, but I don’t think I could ever actually leave the West. I spent a couple of winters in Florida and hallucinated that there were mountains under the clouds. It was an event when we drove back through Texas and saw the first mountains on our way back.

In the picture above, you can see all of the geology of the U.S. There was a time when the mountains in the east were as dramatic as the mountains in the west, but they are many millions of years older and have been weathered. If you zoom in on the east, you can see what is left of all the folds and wrinkles that formed when two continents collided.

It must have been similar to what the Himalayas are now. In the picture below you can see the arch that is the Himalayas that formed from India slamming into Asia. Look at how green India is below and how brown and dry the Tibetan Plateau is to the north. That happens because the air that comes up from the south must travel up and over the mountains. It gets cold and can’t hold as much moisture, so it rains on the southern slope as it rises and cools off and snows once temperatures reach the freezing point and then when it descends on the northern side it is DRY and instead of adding moisture to the land, it takes it away. That is called a rain shadow and that is why Nevada is so dry. Air from the Pacific Ocean has to travel up and over the Sierra and it loses much of its moisture, then it goes down the other side, warms up and removes moisture from the land.

Learning about geology has made places that I once thought were boring and ugly, interesting and beautiful. They have a story to tell. If you don’t have Google Earth on your laptop, download it. It is fun to travel around using it. It has a lot of interesting features. You can look at the moon and Mars and the sky too. 

Life isn’t about going to college or making money or being famous, it is about being the best person you can be and being happy. You need to find what makes you happy. Please stop agonizing about your plans. Your next step doesn’t have to be permanent. It might end up that way because it makes you happy or it might not. Just take it knowing that the step after it can be in a different direction. You need to be able to enjoy the moment you are in, instead of stressing over what is coming next.

— 

I love you,

Mom