Jerome Lesemann | October 2, 2021 Nick joins professor Jerome Lesemann's glacial geology field trip near Kelowna, British Columbia. Jerome and his Vancouver Island University geology students are featured.
As a resident of Kelowna I am glad that someone has got you here to view some of the geology that this area has to offer. Since viewing your videos and online classes I really appreciate the interpretation of some of the geology that we look at every day. Wouldn’t a pop up geology session be great up here? Looking forward to the next stop.
This was great! What an eye-popping assortment of 'really cool rocks!' And that Layer Cake Mountain across the way is fascinating. More "northern Disneyland" please! I bet these students are really enjoying Jerome's class.
I could spend hours looking at those rocks. What an assortment. And then the layer cake across the way. I loved the comment Jerome made regarding 'the other parking lot for Disneyland'.
I took a 10 day field course in the south Okanagan 15 years ago through BCIT. and 2 six week in class courses the Autumn before. then got a job with an exploration company to build Core Drilling platforms on the North Face of a mountain 20 minutes north by helicopter of Revelstoke. We took a helicopter to and from the jobsite daily for 2 months, what an adventure that was. Now I'm studying more of the geology in the area because I plan to retire around there within 5 years spending my leisure Prospecting and such. I have enjoyed many of Nick's videos and always wished he'd go and visit southern BC. Great to see you have finally.
That was enjoyable. Thanks for filming continuously. I’m sure it wasn’t convenient but made it easier to watch. I learned a lot. Nice afternoon surprise.
Welcome to Canada Nick. So glad you were able to make it. Living close to the Okanagan, the rocks are fascinating as they are in the Kamloops area. I look forward to when you can make it here too.
Having watched Mr. Z's videos for quite some time now, I sleep well knowing that our future geologists at the US GS and Universities, Colleges and all the private geotechnical firms in North America have been educated by some of the finest minds in the field.
Oh, this one was so exciting! The variety of rocks and that layer-cake formation are amazing! Kelowna (and the Okanagan River) is just one river valley west of the Columbia River drainage. Where I live, south of Kettle Falls on the Columbia, there is an astounding variety of rock types found on the cliffs and beaches of what is now Lake Roosevelt, similar to those in Kelowna. 1500-2,000 above the lake are gravel pits...on top of the mountain range, full of glacial till. Fascinating stuff. Glad you brought us along for the ride, Nick. Thank you.
I spent my early years in the high Okanogan. There is a small deposit of Zoisite above Riverside that was uncovered about 1960. On our ranch ( which we no longer own ) there is a large lens shaped piece of granite, roughly 10 plus feet in diameter. The ranch is about 2,600 feet in elevation.
Aloha Laurence, I spent my early years around Tonasket, but spent my time caring for apple trees and a little time wandering around in the hills above the T&O irrigation canal.
“The city spent four-and-a-half million dollars contouring that face….” I just had to laugh out loud on that comment. That must be a fun class. Nick looks at a rock and says. “You’re not from around here, are you?
Nick, It’s fun watching your brand grow. Are you ready to be the “Neil deGrasse Tyson” of geology? I can see you poking you nose everywhere, perhaps having your own dedicated show, interviewing various scientists and their studies. There’s definitely a growing audience for it to happen.
Wonderful seeing the layers in that area, especially the Layer Cake Mt. And with the ice originating in Canada, it would make sense that the rocks found there are so diverse. Thanks Nick
I lived on the other side of Layer Cake Mtn. for 22 years, on Gallagher Rd. I hiked in that area you are in and spent many afternoons in the swimming pools at the bottom of the canyon.
Glad to see you as mystified by Layer Cake as I always have been. A professor at Okanagan College once told me the layers are due to cooling of a large lava “pool” that sat without flowing, and each layer cooled near the surface and settled to the bottom sequentially.
Hooray, till!! Thanks for covering this and posting a video about it! I had hoped you might cover it in the 351 course, but getting a whole field trip about it is extra cool!
Thanks for doing this Nick, and welcome to BC. I would love to see Jerome Lesemann doing what you do with your field trips in Washington, here in British Columbia. Thoroughly satisfying.
That mountain is bizarre. As somebody who grew up in and still lives in the Midwest, mountains are foreign to me anyway but wow, that one is the strangest.
What an exciting time to be a geology fan. We are right in the middle of a major paradigm change. Something tells me BC's missing glacial till is related to the the missing topsoil of the eastern Washington's badlands. The Lake Missoula "ice dam burst" is on very shaky ground. It's looking like "gradualism" is loosing it's death grip on the scientific community... or at the very least, gradualism is interrupted by massive cataclysmic events.
a historic channel of the columbia river ran passed either side of layer cake mountain, now gone leaving a mess of old river gravels and gold. the hill behind layer cake is black knight mountain, once larger then the rockies apparently
The columnar jointing on the layer cake is quite spectacular, and very similar forms exist beside Fingals Cave on Staffa. Its not the case that columnnar jointing is straight, they deform quite spectacularly with a chaotic cooling regime.
Nice to get a look at the BC geology. I'm wondering if western BC geology is much of the same crash and smash hodgepodge that makes up much of the Puget Sound coastline under the glacial depositions or if its more genuine continental bedrock.
I love your videos. My wife lives Pacific Northwest during the summer but mostly I live in Texas. But I love hiking up there and your videos give me a virtual kick. Keep up the good work!
IIRC, the unconsolidated form is just called “till” (the generalization is a “diamicton”, till, being a special case thereof), and the consolidated form is a “tillite” (whose generalization is then “diamictite”). Edit: that gneiss at 28:00 reminds me of an Icelandic knit wool sweater
Yup, 'glacial till' is redundant. It's either till or glacial diamicton. There's no other till (no fluvial till, eolian till, etc). Till is glacial by definition. There are other types of diamictons (e.g. debris flows, etc). Tillite is for lithified or indurated till (not consolidated specifically since some type of till are often consolidated or over-consolidated). Should have clarified this but the students were already up to speed on this - this take is freeform to say the least!
I am not sure how long your in the Kelowna area. But there is a volcano there called Mt Boucherie. I would like to know more about the Skaha bluffs. We’re these created via glacial til? There is so much to see in our province. Knowing all about Washington State and the glacial melt. British Columbia is another piece of the puzzle that I would love to learn about it all?
So interesting, thankyou! I live on top of glacial till (edge of the coulees in Lethbridge, Alberta) and am now looking at those deposits much more closely. Will this be part of another course which you will record & post?
One of those last boulders makes me want to jump in the truck, head north, snatch it somehow, and bring it back across the border to “decorate someone’s yard” (mine). Could add it to the glacial erratics already deposited here. It would fit right in. But not sure how they would charge duty on it.🤣😂😜
That rock at 18;50 looks a lot like the rocks around my hometown in southern/ eastern quebec, looks like some base for serpentinite, the term I'm using my be mistaken but it sure as helll looks like it, without the actual asbestos coton like mineral deposit
Any idea force needed to push glacial ice uphill? Eg a tongue of ice pushed 10 miles up the clarks fork up 100 foot elevation gain . From lake pend oreil beleave the ice was up to 3500 feet over the lake sloping to 2500 at lake mazoola so the ice was moving plastically
7:40 "what the hell's going on over there"...at Crystal Cove State Park here in Orange County, CA, the north end bluff, there's folding like this...takes place, I learn, when things are hot then cool, wet clay like then solid...I see this in the current volcano vlogs...lava is like water so hot, then cools off, loses it color like a dying mahi mahi!...so there's that...then there's the foldings that comes from pressure, the stuff of earthquake earth moving...and I imagine the moving and pressures could reheat a formation...folding a folding...clip notes some of the rocks could have been scratched one way by the glacier, another way by erosion, whatever else came along-scratches atop scratches atop scratches...is there a term for multiple events evolving rocks, rock formations?(edit:10:00 overprinting!)..maybe that's it, evolution...I dunno...😃😃😃unconformities disconformities crosscuttings!🙄migmatite self similarities🐬
Hey Mr. ZENTNER the Volcano in LA Palma. Spain flowing laxa also is it hydro thermal. Thr geologist I got blurbs late in feed. But said Americs is watching fir a tsunami on our east?
That columnar basalt mountain across the valley is intriguing. I am wondering what the shape of that face is. Looking up the valley along that face, is it U-shaped, V-shaped, or something else that might indicate what ripped the columns away in layers. It has that German-chocolate-cake look.
*VANCOUVER* - a primer. Vancouver, BC, CA is a city NOT on Vancouver Island. Both are, of course, proudly Canadian. Vancouver, WA, USA, is on the Columbia River. Denizens of Portland, OR might view Vancouver, WA as a northern suburb. OTOH, Vancouver probably views Portland as the Kansas City, KS to its Kansas City, MO. *COLUMBIA* - a primer. A river, a "district" between Maryland and Virginia, and a supercontinent roughly 1/3 the age of Earth, but I digress ...
Ooooooh, those last boulders are incredible, like easter eggs. Wow. I really enjoyed the class, too, and wth must look up layer cake mtn. ALWAYS more questions. Thank you, Nick! 🤓💗🤗
I watch a lot of Canadian Prospectors and I always see so much heavy bedrock in the BC area and I have to wonder why the Cordillera ice sheet didn't grind it to till like here in Western Washington. It makes me sad to see their prospers have bedrock with good gold on it but I have to drive over to at least Central Washington. Do you know how their bedrock survived Nick?
Vancouver Island University used to be Malspina College, just like Thompson Rivers University used to be Cariboo College back when there were only 3 Universities in BC; UBC, UVIC and Simon Fraser.
What's the organic material content by volume of till and does it differ in any way from soils or reworked wash? Could heating samples of each and testing the produced off gassing with a spectrometer tell us anything diagnostic? I dunno, just rambling.
The organic content of till is essentially zero. Organic content of soil ammended with organic matter for the purpose of agrictulture (or that includes a lot of forest duff or sod) is easily 50-80% by weight, but keep in mind that organic material is mostly water. Organic content of soil you may find miscellaneous places near the ground surface (i.e. near highways or buildings) might be around 20%, but will vary widely. I have never tested organic content other than by weight and never to greater accuracy than 0.01% of the total volume, so I can't speak on that.
