Motley Moose – Archive

This is the second of my two-part diary of the fossils from the Chuckanut Formation (C/F), located near Bellingham in Northwestern Washington State. As noted in part 1, (flora), this formation developed during the  Eocene Epoch, some 50 million years ago (ma). This area was a subtropical fluvial plain on to which sediments were deposited and ultimately hardened into sandstone, shale, and siltstone that captured specimens of both flora and fauna of that time. (No new pseudofossils in this part.)

                         Racehorse Creek land slide and fossil beds

I am fascinated by the structures of the earth and how its most beautiful and intriguing features came about, and indeed are still forming. However, as a non-geologist, I am still boggled by the geologic time frame of millions of years. Millions of dollars seem to be tossed around a lot and are of little significance anymore in some circles. But millions of years to a non-geologist remains difficult to conceptualize.

                                          Geologic feature in Chuckanut Bay

Some of the largest cataclysmic geologic events on earth occurred in what is now the Pacific North West. About 11 million years of volcanic flow activity, ending about 6 million years ago, created the Columbia Plateau with basaltic lava formations up to two miles deep. This huge basaltic plateau covering much of Eastern Washington and Oregon and adjacent parts of Idaho was later inundated by massive Ice Age floods ending about 15,000 calendar years ago. The scale of these events has been seldom seen elsewhere as it carved a landscape that appears œother worldly. (In fact, the resulting terrain so closely matches that seen on Mars that NASA tested the Sojourner robotic rover here before its 1997 mission to Mars.

 

                                                                Scablands from basalt and flooding

                   

                         The Columbia River continues to cut into basalt

As many as 100 floods deposited layers of sediment atop the basalt that today provide the soil for growing some of the best wine grapes and hence wines in the country and in some cases, the world. These are the wines of Oregon and Washington State.