Talk: America – West of the Rockies
18th February 2025 @ 7:00 pm - 8:00 pm
Dorset Geologist’s Association Group (DGAG) will host a talk on the Tuesday 18th February 2024.
Title: America – West of the Rockies
Speaker: Martin Gledhill who, after retirement, discovered an enthusiasm for geology through the Sherborne Geology Group, U3A (University of the 3rd Age) and DGAG. He is set to make a welcome return to our talk series having previously given a wonderful talk on New Zealand geology in Sept 2022.
Time: Talk will start at 7pm; finish approximately 8pm
Venue: Activity Meeting Room: Dorford Centre, Bridport Road, Dorchester, DT1 1RR
Lecture Entry Cost: £6 (£5 for DGAG members) collected on room entry
Booking a seat: Contact DGAG events at email: cwebb48578@aol.com
Talk Description: The talk is a summary of the speakers observations after a family trip to America in the spring of 2024. They spent three weeks driving around several of the most amazing National Parks in America. Some of the geological wonders seen are well known – the San Andreas Fault and the Grand Canyon should come to mind. But they saw many of the less well known sites, including a meteor impact crater, the foothills of the Rocky Mountains with the remains of volcanoes, and a thousand year old native American village on top of a mountain, as well as the rift valleys of the Basin and Range Province where the earth’s crust has been so stretched that it is the thinnest anywhere on earth. We are used to finding the most dramatic geology near the boundaries of the tectonic plates, but in the Western USA the plate boundaries are often thousands of miles away from these most interesting sites. The speaker will go through some of the latest theories which try to explain this apparent paradox.
Photo: Courtesy of the speaker – Iconic Buttes of the American West
Additional Links:
1. Buttes and background _opens in a new tab
2. An introduction to Basin and Range Geology with neat animations and videos_opens in a new tab