Tamanowas Rock Update

I noted a large number of page views of an old post adakite-and-tamanowas-rock-chimacum starting yesterday. This usually means something new has happened and Dave Tucker's blog alerted me as to what that was. The Jamestown S'Klallam Tribe completed a purchase of the Tomanowas Rock as noted in a Peninsula Daily News article by Arwyn Rice Olympic-Peninsula-tribe-buys-site-of-sacred-rock.

This rock is a unique feature geologically as noted in my previous post. The Daily News article notes that one ancient story regarding the rock is that it was a refuge site from a great flood. The article notes a tsunami from 3,000 years ago - I suspect this was a typo that had one too many 0s. A more likely date would be 300 years ago and to be precise 313 years ago from the January 1700 subduction quake along the outer coast. Discovery Bay, located just to the west, as well as Sequim Bay both would have been subjected to very large waves from a tsunami. Discovery Bay in particular is shaped in a manner that may accentuate tsunami waves and tsunami deposits have been recognized at the head of the bay along the tide flats of Snow Creek http://nosams.mblwhoilibrary.org/works/1838 and https://gsa.confex.com/gsa/2005AM/finalprogram/abstract_90220.htm.

It strikes me that as local coastal villages were decimated and flooded this would be a logical place to gather and assess the disaster for coastal communities of the area.

The other ancient story it that it was a site for looking out for mastodons is also fitting. For at least a brief time the continental ice margin was located a short distance from here near present day Port Townsend. Tomanowas Rock would have been a great viewing site over a glacial ice margin river flowing through what is now Chimacum and at that time the valley floor was likely just a bit above sea level. We do know that mastodon hunting was taking place in the vicinity at that time thoughts-on-manis-mastodon.

Lincoln Highway 1938 - Phelan McShane

My grandfather, Phelan McShane, was a self taught electrical engineer. For a time he traveled to mine sites and oil fields that used heavy duty electrical mine and drilling machinery. During those travels in the 1930s and 1940s he took color slides of some of his work sites. The trips west must have been very adventuresome for a native of Ohio and later Pittsburgh. It was during this period that he developed an interest in geology; his old geology books were passed onto me.

Utah-Nevada State Line, 1938 (Photo-Phelan McShane).

It appears that Nevada side of the line is unpaved. 

I have been scanning some of Phelan's slides and found the above of some interest as I have been over many Utah/Nevada state line crossings. Based on other pictures in the collection of the salt flats of the Great Salt Lake as well as a Google Earth Street View of Interstate 80, I am fairly certain this crossing is near the current Interstate 80 Route. There is a bit of development at the site now with Wendover having expanded from roughly 200 people then to about 2,000 today. Legalized gambling had not yet happened and the Wendover Air Base, was of little consequence in the pre WWII era.

The road Phelan was driving was the first cross country road in the United States - the Lincoln Highway. The Lincoln Highway is 100 years old this year. The original Lincoln Highway was an assemblage of a variety of mostly county roads linked together with the goal of paving the entire highway across the county lincolnhighwayassoc.org/map. The original Lincoln Highway passed through Dugway, Utah and crossed the border south of this location. However, Utah preferred a more northerly route and received federal funding to pave their sections of the highway along what would would later become Interstate 80. Nevada preferred the more southerly route on the original Lincoln Highway and delayed paving perhaps in the hope that they could still route cars on the more southerly path. Another factor may have been that Nevada was concerned about paving costs over a much longer route from Wendover to Ely than the previous shorter path. 

The highway from Wendover, Nevada to Ely, Nevada is still called the Lincoln Highway and the name pops up elsewhere along the old Lincoln Highway route. From Ely the Lincoln Highway heads west essentially on what is now US 50 - The Loneliest Highway in America. As other highways were funded and built, the vast majority of traffic across Nevada follows a more northerly route using Interstate 80. 

My introduction to the Lincoln Highway came while working at Dugway Proving Grounds. A weather beaten sign marked the highway and I'm familiar with southern routes as I spent some time on those old roads when doing some work at Dugway Proving Grounds and vicinity. It was a fun gig as the Dugway Proving Grounds is mostly closed to the public and my assignment allowed me to wonder a fair bit except when sitting on a drill rig. Some of the other portions of the original route present some challenges that may have pushed Utah to want a more northerly route. The original route crosses alluvial fans subject to flooding and washout and takes one into some very isolated areas even by desert standards.  

The Lincoln Highway has some significance in the development of our nation. As noted above, in 1913 the "highway" was really mostly a collection of county and city roads. Most states and the federal government were not in the road building business.

As cars became more available and began to be used more widely, roads were seen as a potential economic development and "highways" such as the Lincoln Highway began to be pushed by communities in the hopes of economic development as well as access to and from the communities. It was the very early stage of shifting away from rail and ship transport.

Money for road building came slowly at first, with the Lincoln Highway being one of the leading routes for some federal funding to complete the highway. It was otherwise a long slow trip. Dwight Eisenhower made the drive across the country as a military exercise and concluded from a military perspective that improved interstate highways were a national security issue. This was further brought home so to speak by WWII and seeing the German roads. As president, Eisenhower spear headed the interstate highway system and a major alteration of our landscapes.

In Washington State the Yellowstone Trail was the equivalent cross county highway scheme. That route was generally the precursor to Interstate 90. Although local investors in Kennewick and Pasco put together funding for the first bridge across the Columbia River as part of the Yellowstone Trial effort. 

Yellowstone Trail Bridge at Kennewick-Pasco

Environmental Regulations, Crime and Lead

Yesterday I ran into an old associate in geology. We did a rapid catch up on what we were up to and then got to talking about lead testing. I have on occasion worked on lead contamination in soils. My business partner Kim has done some recent lead testing work. Environmental regulations impact our landscape and our life. They also very well might reduce crime. Saving pain and suffering and tax dollars.

"Experts often suggest that crime resembles an epidemic. But what kind? Karl Smith, a professor of public economics and government at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, has a good rule of thumb for categorizing epidemics: If it spreads along lines of communication, he says, the cause is information. Think Bieber Fever. If it travels along major transportation routes, the cause is microbial. Think influenza. If it spreads out like a fan, the cause is an insect. Think malaria. But if it's everywhere, all at once—as both the rise of crime in the '60s and '70s and the fall of crime in the '90s seemed to be—the cause is a molecule."

A very interesting read motherjones: lead-crime-link-gasoline.
 

Giant Columns and Palagonite

I was going through some old photo slides and came across a couple of the Columbia River Basalt Group in eastern Washington from a past field trip. Both images were taken east of the Columbia River east of Vantage.

 

Orange palagonite and pillow basalt

 

This first site is an example of lava flowing into a lake. The orange palagonite forms from the shattered basalt fragments formed as the lava flowed into water. The site is just up Sand Hollow on State Highway 26 just east of the junction with State Highway 243. Given the presence of rivers and likely lakes as well, lava flows into water are not uncommon in eastern Washington Columbia Basalt Group. Besides this site there are numerous examples within the road cuts of Interstate 90 between Vantage and Rye Grass Summit east of Ellensburg. Tom Foster has a nice post with way better pictures of this exact spot as well as other sites on his Ice Age Floods Blog basaltic-lava-pillows-pillow-basalts.

 

The other site is a famous site amongst northwest geologists. Giant basalt columns standing in a single line. 

Columnar basalt at Frenchman Coulee

 

Frenchman Coulee is one of several dry canyons carved by the great Missoula Floods as part of the flood waters poured over the cliff walls on the east side of the Columbia River. The floods carved the landscape here with what must have been a spectacular water fall that somehow left a single line of columns standing between the receding cataracts.

 

A great spot to study flood basalts, Missoula Floods and perhaps some of the later floods that surged down the Columbia Valley. The site is accessed off of Interstate 90 via Silica Road and then Vantage Road. Silica Road is a reference to some open pit mining in the area that mined diatom deposits formed in lakes between lava flow events.

December 2012's Extreme Weather

Part of assessing geologic risk is understanding weather and climate. This past month has had some extreme weather. Not the kind that gets a lot of attention, but we did have some landscape altering weather this past month.

First, Felton at the Seattle National Weather Service noted this:

CLIMATE NOTE...WITH 0.05 INCHES AT SEA-TAC TODAY AS OF 9 PM THIS WAS
THE 27TH DAY WITH MEASURABLE PRECIPITATION THIS MONTH. THIS IS THE
MOST DAYS WITH MEASURABLE RAIN FOR THE MONTH OF DECEMBER ON RECORD.
THE OLD RECORD WAS 26 DAYS IN 1971. THERE HAVE ONLY BEEN TWO MONTHS
WITH MORE DAYS OF MEASURABLE PRECIPITATION SINCE RECORDS STARTED IN
SEATTLE IN 1891. JANUARY 1953 AND JANUARY 2006 HAD 28 DAYS. THERE
WAS MEASURABLE PRECIPITATION THE LAST 26 DAYS OF THE MONTH IN
JANUARY 1953 WHICH IS PART OF THE RECORD 33 STRAIGHT DAYS OF
MEASURABLE PRECIPITATION FOR SEATTLE. FELTON

While we have not had any huge rain events or flooding, it really has been wet and cloudy even for western Washington. The constant dribble of rain has led to numerous episodes of slope failures on very steep slopes subject to saturation along the railroad between Everett and Seattle as well as a few other places that don't make the news so often.

This steady wet weather brought about another subtle but extreme event at least where it took place. The extreme event was not the amount of snow, but the amount of a certain kind of snow. Cool and wet with days of chilly rain in the low lands led to days of steady snow in the mountains. Cliff Mass proposed that the steady right-around-freezing temperatures at discrete elevations mixed with lots of wet snow took out hundreds of trees in areas that experienced that sort of weather why-are-so-many-trees-falling. A follow up on his proposal would be to assess the kinds of trees that were susceptible to being taken down by days of wet snow and see if this kind of event took place in other Cascade valleys that do not have highways. The tree collapses closed the Mount Bake Highway for a few days and closed Highway 2 over Stevens Pass for several days. It was a fascinating phenomenon given that the locations where the trees collapsed typically get lots of snow. The extreme even was not the snow but the kind of snow - days of wet sticky snow.

One other extreme event this past month was the combination of very high winter tides coinciding with a low pressure system and winds that were just right causing the highest tide level ever in Seattle. Some minor flooding was associated with event not only in Seattle but elsewhere as well. And erosion and deposition along shorelines from the event may have lasting impacts that will manifest later. For example the erosion of the toes of slopes will cause slopes to become over steep setting up future shoreline bluff failures.

Bluff slope at Birch Bay

  

The 46%

One of my political talking points sources brought up the 46% of Americans don't pay federal income taxes. This number or similar numbers came up during the just completed election cycle. It's worthwhile perhaps looking at just who are the 46% who don't owe federal income tax. I should add that before the Great Recession the number was 40%.

So of the 46%, 61% are working poor that do not earn enough to owe federal income tax. 22% are poor elderly that again do not earn enough to owe any federal income tax. Working poor that are paying pay roll taxes, Social Security taxes, and medical taxes as well as state and local taxes. The other non owers of federal income taxes are as noted in the above chart. I will only add that I know a few folks that will likely never owe federal income tax and they really do need help.

In following the fiscal cliff (I prefer Austerity Bomb) more closely than is good for me, I do hope that policy makers remember that most of the 46% are working poor or elderly poor. Punishing them for not making enough money may very well be counter productive.
 

Cisterns, Out Houses and Erratics

I had conducted a geology hazard assessment a while back and had the opportunity to take a look at the foundation excavation at the site. Most of the excavation was into very hard glacial till, sediment deposited directly by glacial ice. The specific area was covered by a few thousand feet of ice during the last glacial period approximately 15,000 years ago.

But there was more to this foundation excavation than just the glacial till.

Note the rounded concrete patch with curved bricks

 and the pipe on the excavation wall

Close up of masonry lined basin now filled with cement

In excavating the foundation a couple features from that past were encountered. One was an old out house pit. My first experience with that was within my own yard as our home predated sewer by approximately 50 years. But the brick feature was something else. In the early days of this community water supplies were challenging as the community is on a peninsula with no major streams. One solution was to construct cisterns to store water.

From a geotechnical perspective, features such as these fall into the somewhat unexpected category, but features inconsistent with the geology should always be expected in urban environments.

Besides the unexpected anthropocene features, I enjoyed checking out the soil profiles the excavation exposed.

Dark organic rich soils overlying very compact glacial till

Closer view of till/topsoil interface

The glacial till at this site is a bit sandy. It will drain very slowly despite its extremely compact condition. The upper soil just above the till though will hold lots of water and in this case has developed into a thick organic rich soil. But with removal of the thick top soil layer also removes water storage capacity fro stormwater.

Besides the unexpected anthropocene features shown above, glacial till or drift can provide some other difficult surprises - big erratics.

This granodiorite boulder was carried from the British Columbia Coast Range

And for the excavators - not a bad view