Recently joined GSOC member William Burgel, retired from working for and consulting with the Union Pacific Railroad, spoke to GSOC in September 2018 about his experiences in preparing the railroad system for earthquakes. His expertise stretches back to the 1960’s, and along with performing his job for the railroad company, helped organize and deploy early warning systems for earthquake shaking applicable to government and industrial participants.

August 12, 2018 at Rice NW Museum of Rocks and Minerals, Hillsboro

This year’s GSOC annual picnic was at the Rice Northwest Museum of Rocks and Minerals in Hillsboro. It was attended by over 70 club members and was a very great success! The money collected at the picnic was used to purchase a one-year membership for all GSOC members and to secure a guest speaker, Dr. Nicholas Famoso, USNPS Chief of Paleontology of the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument, who will also be a guest field trip leader at Camp Hancock in September.

One outstanding happening at the picnic was that Rosemary Kenney, GSOC member for 54 years, presented 45 fossil items to Famoso for donation to the John Day Fossil Bed’s collection. The presentation followed the conclusion of Nick’s lecture at the picnic. Some of the major items were also displayed the day before in a case at the NARG Fossil Fest, also at the Rice Museum.

Synopsis of July 13, 2018 GSOC Friday Night Lecture by Emily Cahoon, PSU PhD Candidate

PSU PhD Candidate Emily Cahoon spoke to GSOC at the July Friday night meeting about her research into the origin of the Clarno and John Day magmatism. Her research is part of an ongoing push in the geoscience community to determine the origin of the magmas to erupt in Oregon. This is a tricky question when the magma originates somewhere in the earth’s mantle, is filtered by partial melting of intervening subducting plates and/or continental crust, erupts onto the earth’s surface, and is then is pushed and pulled, rotated away from its original location, covered up in some places and eroded away in other places.

May’s GSOC Friday night lecture from retired USGS research geologist Ray Wells gave the listeners a big picture of the tectonic motion of the Pacific NW and explained much about the distribution and function of shallow crustal earthquakes and their associated faults in the region. This picture had sharpened over Wells’ 40-year career at USGS, as our understanding of plate tectonics evolved and new techniques contributed to the store of information and provided corroboration for earlier findings. 

Synopsis of GSOC Friday Night Lecture, April 13, 2018

Tom Pierson has been a research scientist at the USGS Cascades Volcano Observatory (USGS CVO) since 1981. His field-based research focuses primarily on the hydrological response to volcanic eruptions—lahars, debris avalanches, and floods. Pierson spoke to GSOC in February 2014 about the debris flows following the eruption of the Chaiten Volcano in Chile. Pierson’s April 2018 topic hit a lot closer to home, although the Pacific Northwest also has plenty of volcano hazards.

Synopsis of the GSOC 83rd Annual Banquet lecture given on March 11, 2018, with speaker Dr. Ellen Morris Bishop

Dr. Ellen Morris Bishop – geologist, writer, and photographer – drove from her ranch near Enterprise, Oregon, to speak to an enthusiastic GSOC audience at the 83rd Annual Banquet on Sunday, March 11, 2018. The purpose of her talk was to introduce GSOCers to the geology of Oregon’s Wallowa Mountains and Hells Canyon (WMHC).

Bishop began by showing the location of WMHC on a terrain enhanced road map of Oregon, then a satellite view, and finally a geologic overview as depicted by the Oregon Department of Geology and Mineral Industries’ (DOGAMI’s) online interactive map. Studying the DOGAMI map one sees that the bulk of the Wallowa Mountains consists of outcrops of the “Wallowa Terrane” and “Nevadan Intrusives”, which can both be viewed as a result of the docking of ancient island complexes to the North American continent by the mechanism of plate subduction.