Calcrete with Skye Cooley

I love that I have enough background now to grasp not only what an expert like Skye is talking about, but even occasionally what he's hinting at. Nick has opened up a whole world to me. His approachable style makes learning complex topics almost effortless. This lesson from Skye was so interesting and enjoyable. I wish I could be there, even with the cow smell!

Clarification: I think I used Wisconsin instead of Pleistocene or mistakenly said 150,000 yrs - Please excuse, I was very tired after spending more than a week in the field. Also, unconformities Richard Waitt and I observed at the Rulo Site in northern Walla Walla Valley, described by Professors Nick Bader and Pat Spencer of Whitman College (Bader et al., 2016), are likely older than last glacial (>75 ka). My comments were unclear regarding their work. Each of the Rulo unconformities is separated by roughly 100,000 years. Strata there could plausibly correlate to the calcretes near Othello.

I didn't think I'd be able to watch 43 minutes of dirt, but I got hooked by this info.

I am fully convinced that during the 1950's America's top geologist, Professor Zentner (not his real name) was called to area 51 to look at the geology around the area where I was told by someone high up that they ran experiments. Professor Zentner was pulled into a time warp and now spends his days looking at the local geology of Washington but he knows so much more!

The last time I stopped in Othello, I was in high school. It was the mid 70’s and my team was playing against Othello High School in the WIAA state football playoffs. We won the game on the efforts of my neighbor who played fullback and ran for over 200 yards in that game. It was a great game and the kids from the home team were just as enthusiastic as our fans. Truly the best experience a kid can have in high school is playing under those Friday Night Lights!

This is such an exciting time for those interested in geology. Thank you Nick. Very few academics are willing to take on areas of their fields that are ambiguous.

That’s my back yard. I grow up in Quincy but played on all the hills around. There so much to be learned from there.

I’m watching two guys on the other side of the world looking at rocks that others are not so interested in looking at. Just wonderful. Love it.

Thanks for bringing Skye back ,Nick. We admire him so much, and love his sense of humor . We’re watching this one again right now. It’s a lot to take in.

Thanks for this one, Nick! I like that Skye Cooley gravitates towards these kind of “liminal” subjects in geology—it seems like he enjoys working in between and on the edges of the familiar, both expanding and further connecting the body of knowledge of PNW geology. Paleosols and pedology doesn’t get nearly enough attention in geologic education, IMO. Besides calcrete, there are all kinds of hard pans or “duricrusts”, like silcrete (silica rich hardpan/duricrust), gypcrete (gypsum rich), ferricrete (aka laterite), alcrete (basically bauxite), and other “orecretes”, or super gene ore deposits. I’m interested in these Plio-Pleistocene older floods. There were many Ice Ages before the most recent, and the newer floods likely wiped out flood deposits from older floods, which would have traveled along similar paths, so it’s no surprise that evidence is scanty. Besides the Ice-marginal story, with the Missoula floods, there is of course also Lake Bonneville and the Bonneville flood, and many other huge lakes existed in the PNW during Plio-Pleistocene time. I think the idea of the river competing with the volcanic pile is smart, though. Volcanics dam river, river incises volcanic pile, outburst flood results, leaves a fossil surface as a high and dry grassland (or sagebrush land), where it just bakes and accumulates carbonate for hundreds of thousands of years. It would be interesting to correlate these horizons with the glacial cycles and the Milankovich cycles that controlled them, since the formation of these calcretes depends a lot on climatic conditions.

I really enjoy the field trips and lectures. I wish we had someone, like you Nick, here in the coalfields of southwestern West Virginia and eastern Kentucky to help make some sense of our unique geology; with the many coal seams, sandstone, shale and limestone layers. It’s truly amazing and baffling to me, as a lifelong coal miner and one who always has been in awe of our precious earth and how it all came to be as it is

I love this episode! Absolutely held me in a trance for the duration. So easy to follow. Drew me in. Speckled with laughs! Just a gem! Thanks.

I grew up in Yakima and Selah. We had a small ranch with open pastures. We wanted to raise cattle, so fences are pretty important. Easy right, post hole digger - just go for it. 1-2 feet down, hardpan so hard and so thick that building fences almost requires explosives to break up the layer (we did and it worked). Next time, I will use pneumatic or electric jackhammers. Hard getting explosives now days. Funny thing is it just depended where you lived. Some areas had better soil than others. In Yakima, we had river cobble.

Here in Texas we call calcrete Caliche. Had to look that up to see what you meant. Lots of that in north Austin. Cool to hear how it forms. Learn one thing and learn lots more!

Natural Calcrete for ceramic slip has excellent results! Most unusual is the white purity/absence of iron oxide, even less than 1% of FeO stains anything brownish/yellowish after firing, rather firing Calcrete above 1200ºC a pure pale with greenish granular tones emerged. Also shocking how the Othello Calcrete is exactly identical from my local Barcelona: pure white, cracked cemented chunks perforated with roots and insect action, only my road outcrop was several meters high of uninterrupted Calcrete on top of a 177 meter deltaic mountain. Amazing info!👍

Love Skye, what a character

I'm gobsmacked to now pile on another area of geology that is even closer to my backyard. I grew up seeing Caliche layers farming Eltopia, lamented digging through it with backhoes, and motorcycling around the region seeing the layers. I understood old stuff basalt, new stuff floods, but wondered about that intermediate history and thinking it might be a 60 foot band of concentrated time gave me an "Aha!" moment. And I swear I could smell the smoke coming off Mr. Cooley's brain as he's trying to sort a complex picture into a paper to publish. Thanks BOTH OF YOU for sharing with a interested geology novice and giving me even more to think about!

Hey, I have stuff in my area that looks like that. I am in Santa Clarita California. I don't know how to post a picture, but I have fossilized spiral shelled creatures that as far as I have learned are 400 to 300,000,000 years old. The earth that I have found them in is generally light and powdery like this fossil layer. It is located at a huge transition between tectonic plates and geological features. From what I have learned it goes from 10 million years to 400 million years in about 5 miles

I note that there are calcretes exposed in the canyon walls of the Deschutes river, in Deschutes and Crook Counties in Oregon also. They are embedded within the lavas from a complex of flows from the primordial cascade range to tbe west, and lavas from Mt Newberry Caldera.

To find interesting exposures, you guys should take a train ride through all this and stick a go-pro out the window and record all the cuttings. Then find the interesting photos and publish them on a map. Like a Google street view, but for geologists.