My husband and I enjoy the daylights out of these lectures. It’s amazing what we are learning! Thank you for what you do!! Next time you’re wear of the mountains doing a field trip let us know! We would love to join you for a walkabout.
PLEASE wake me up when Ned Zinger starts talking about Tootsie Rolls, Ruffle's ridges, Crinkle-Cut Fries, German Chocolote Cake etc. Nick has some wonderful lectures and discussions on RU-vid!
Always so much fun.. what a great teacher he is.. Before I found this guy I knew almost nothing about the geology of the northwest though I have lived here most of my 68 years..( I was even born in eugene oregon) Now I know a bit about it and want to know more.. He just draws it out of me.. fantastic.. carry on Nick.. I thank you!
@ 33:58 - The Ford Model-T's needed to back up steep hills because gasoline flowed from the tank to the engine via gravity. If the grade was too steep it wouldn't work, but going backwards up the hill did.
It's been quite an eye opener finding these lectures by chance, and their being so well put together as to take us on a 4D landscape tour of an otherwise completely unknown state on the other side of the world! Such an amazingly varied place to be able to live; and we are so lucky that generations of explorers and scientists have brought us to the level of understanding, that Nick so expertly conveys, with just the right amount of wonder. Great stuff! A suggestion for another lecture, if you can find good enough sources to help, would be the subject of pollen identification and palynology. I always wanted to be able to identify pollens, but could never find much about it in the age of books and library visits, and, now, in the RU-vid Age, I can only find a few poorly narrated videoes where English is not the first language, and it's mostly just for people who want to work for oil companies. I'd like a general intro to how pollen grains are retrieved from sediments, and how they are keyed out to family and species. If Nick could make a pollen detective story like this one on the macroscopic parts, that would be another winner: I'm sure. (y)
As someone who has driven back and forth from Missoula to PDX or SEA over 100 times, over the past 20 years, I can't tell you how much more fascinating your lectures have made those journeys. This piece had a particular charm all it's own. Your story at the end about the journals reminds me of the story Robert Redford tells about meeting with Norm Maclean to get the rights to the book A River Runs Through It. "...we'd meet 3 times, to build trust, and then at the end if it was No, I'd walk away..." so delighted that George Beck's work will be honored and preserved!! Thank you for sharing your passion in such an approachable and inviting way! Please do more. Come do some lectures at the U of Montana when you can...or at the Burke. You're a far better of "Nick at Night" than what's on cable anytime!!
Oh my! I didn't realize you had obtained the recordings. How wonderful that his grandson has put all of these materials where they will be preserved to honor George Beck.
So impressed with your knowledge and style of teaching, I learned so much tonight, its the wee hours in the morning now. since covid my sleep patterns are all messed up, I am hooked on u tube, especially your lectures and field trips, and they way you bring Geology to a old lady who only had high school education. From an huge mining town in Morenci Az. I am grateful for your expertise, your generosity in making learning free. I bow to your work ethic.
Tonight in May, 2023, I am up in the wee hours totally fascinated and enjoying another lecture/field trip by Nick Zentner. I, too am an “old lady” almost 80, and my education diid not include this kind of geology.. Yes, covid disrupted our lives, but it had a hidden blessing in being cooped up in the lock down with time, lots of it, to explore the internet and you tube. I dscovered Nick’s channel and have been enjoying, tuition free, going back to school. They say that all things come to those who wait. My family moved from Montana to Yakima, WA in 1956. I distinctly remember a visit to the Ginko “Petrified Forest”. I was about 12 yrs old, and was very disappointed. I had imagined a whole forest of standing trees made of stone. I do not remember a museum or any buildings, but they must have been there somewhere. All I recall is a big log on the ground, and nothing to see.in that bleak place with a cold wind blowing. Where was this forest and what was a Ginko? Thanks to Nick, my question and much more was answered tonight. In those days the olny way to get to Ellensburg from Yakima was via a 2 lane highway through “the canyon”..When the route over Manashtash , with its vistas of the tortured looking barren hills and rocks, I used to wonder what had happened…it looked like a seacape of rolling waves and breakers, or more like a series of tsunamis..turned into a desert.. Nick has captured my imagination and curiosity with his lectures and field trips , teaching and explaining the history of the land,our home in the PNW. One of his lectures was all about how the Ellensburg blue agates were formed and where to hunt for them. Our kids were “rock hounds” and we collected “pretty rocks” as a family hobby. I sure wish we had known just where to find the famous blue agates back then. 💍⛏️💎🏔️
I love these presentations. Love of rocks runs in the family; all of us collect rocks wherever we go. Years ago I found a small piece of petrified wood on the beach near Port Townsend. It was cream and brown with a grain to it but at first I thought it was bone! I wonder how it got to that beach.
Ian Miller, Mark Brandon and Leo Hickey pretty much nailed the Baja BC hypothesis to the wall as more than a controversy in their 2006 paper, "Using leaf margin analysis to estimate the mid-Cretaceous (Albian) paleolatitude of the Baja BC block", Earth and Planetary Science Letters 245 (2006) 95-114. They unequivocally produced dating sideboards for the unparalleled diversity of Methow Cretaceous plant fossils (mid-Albian, 105 MA), as well as the magnitude of northward displacement (∼2200 km of northward offset relative to stable North America). I fear too many geologists were arguing whether paleomagnetism was an actual field of geology or not to notice that the biologists solved their riddle for them.
Another great lecture. I’m hooked on these videos now. The discussion on the PETM got me curious. As a mechanical engineer, am well versed in heat and mass transfer. So am curious from that perspective. Did some research and it seems most people want to attribute it to some large GHG release 56mya. To me, A more plausible explanation would be an increase in heat flow from the mantle through the oceanic crust to the sea floor in one or more of the mid ocean rift zones leading to warmer ocean temps. These rift areas are where the earth’s crust gets very thin and mostly made of basalt, rhyolite and gabbro which have much higher thermal conductivities compared to sedimentary carbonates, clastics and shales. The combination of thin crust and much higher thermal conductivity associated with mid ocean rift areas results in much higher heat flow compared to the rest of the crustal areas insulating the mantle. 56mya is not too off from the time when the Pacific plate made a nearly 90 deg turn in movement from being pushed north to being pushed more westerly as evidence by the hot spot tracks left by the Hawaiian hot spot. Was this turn caused by a new rift opening up to the south east of PD Hawaii and thereby adding more heat flow to the ocean from the mantle in the Eastern Pacific? Or could there have been an increase in rift spread rate 56mya in either the Atlantic or Pacific as measured by paleo mag banding? i.e Does a higher spread rate result in a larger surface area of thin basalt oceanic crust resulting in higher heat transfer from the mantle to the deep ocean? Also was the change in direction of the Pacific plate 49mya somehow related to the end of the Laramide orogeny 35-50mya?
Loved you using one of Hank Green's vids. He and his bro are some of the others I have watched on YT. In fact, I started getting recs for Nick vids from having watched the Green brothers.
I agree most dinosaurs died Except for the ancestors of my favourite dinosaur the chicken, I don’t care for duck or geese though the turkey is a good meal just not as good as a pasture raised chicken! Thank you for all the work that you have done in the past I am enjoying your program. I have bought a local guide to the rocks in New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island inspired by your programs this year. I can’t wait for next year to tour the rocks in my city Saint John
Lecture Update: For those of you wanting to know how the four lectures went, permit me to say they went great! Nick said it will be a week or two before they get edited and arrive here. In A-Z we dove deep. In the four lectures he pulls it back and together at the same time. You’re gonna love em.
Y'all come down south to Duck Country where the Willamette ends we can go hunt up some nice chunks of petrified redwood in the west Cascades along the middle fork of the Willamette, and in Springfield there's even a folksy stone wall of petrified wood from before it was hunted so hard.
I saw the thumbnail of the last one ant thought "Why is RU-vid recommending Nick's old stuff?" Dunno if you uploaded this before, but you are always good for a good time.
@@cyndikarp3368 I am very familiar with Nick's channel. (Was a regular on his live streams this year, but had discovered him before.) It's just him (re-?) uploading his older content that threw me.
@33:58 it is often said that one had to back a Model T up a hill because of the gravity-feed gas tank. But that was only true in early cars, and only if you were low on fuel. No longer an issue after Ford moved the gas tank behind the dash in about 1926. The reason people still would use reverse for steep uphills was that it had the best traction. Reverse was geared lower than the lowest forward gear, in fact you had nearly half again the power. I figure it must have been so you could back out of ditches. Roads were narrower back then, not well paved, and did not have fancy shoulders like now, nor reflective markers to show the edges at night. So slipping into a ditch was probably pretty common.
Hello Sir, I thoroughly enjoy your lectures and videos. I am an avid hiker of the Cascades, and WA State, having lived there for 32 years. I am in Michigan now, but returning in 2024. You have inspired me to add geology to my hiking interests, renewing my excitement to keep learning. Thank you so very much!
Were the tree trunks cut by pre-canadian loggers, and stored in a lake temporarily, when the lava flow wiped out the pre-canadian loggers and swept the tree trunks out of the holding pen, so they ended up in the base layers of the lava. Then millions of years later, canadians arrived and started logging again.....pending the next basalt layer arriving, they are storing the logs in holding pens again on the river...
Loved this, definitely going to stop by the park next time though. Haven't been there since I was a kid. If all the trees were deposited there way do they call it a forest ??
In the Colorado Florissant fossil beds the experts still don’t know if the elevation was3000 ft lower or the temperature was warmer and allowed sequoia trees to grow I think in the Miocene
A geologist at my former employer said that he found some wood embedded in a Columbia River Basalt flow at a rock quarry near Vancouver, Washington that wasn't petrified at all and he was able to burn some in his fireplace. I believe he said it was from pillow basalts similar to the examples in the video, but he was at a loss for words as to why it hadn't petrified after millions of years.
Back in the 80’s we found a bunch of fossilized clams on summerset hill a suburban development in Bellevue overlooking Lake Washington. I’d guess +500’ above sea level.
I was drilling 2 water wells in Valley Ford Wa. in the late 70s and we blew small chunks of wood out of one of the wells that was underneath 185 feet of basalt into a layer of clay several feet thick then sand where the water was. My boss said it was ginko but I have no idea if that was true or not. What ever it was it was millions of years old.
I live in Maryland now and our native trees include a mix of coniferous and deciduous trees including a number of the named species. Not that I question the paleobotanists or geologists, just that I'm not sure it's *remarkable* to have a melange of trees found in water. Water flows and it transports all kinds of things.
Nick, idk if you read the comments but have you ever spoken with Mr. Randall Carlson about hos theories on many od the water eroded formations in the Pacific NW region? I cant help but yhonk that if the two of you ever collaborated on a couple of projects together you would literally take the acedemic world by storm describing that region. Just an idea.
What direction are the logs in? They would line up to get there Are area we used to log way back in the woods and use rivers to move logs If they were flowing with a river flood they would be in more natural every direction but they would have to line up some to flow better But they would naturally line up or mix in the lake setteling in some I found fern fossils in Tumbler ridge BC Canada they were in black rock that breaks apart Theres lots of coal in this area we had black sand everywhere
Is there a case for the water that protected to wood to have been boiling or near boiling point. If the water was already tropical in nature and lava near it wouldn't have taken much to heat that water up to boiling point. Would have killed a lot of bacteria off in the logs. Before they would have been "incased" in rock.
Actually ginkos go a long way back and there were Ginkos during the time of the dinosaurs, but not in that particular location. e360.yale.edu/features/peter_crane_history_of_ginkgo_earths_oldest_tree
do you subscribe to the giant meteor striking the gulf of Mexico being the cause of the end of dinosaurs? what about the iridium at the K-T boundary? Al in Boise
