nationalparkstraveler.com
Baked by time like some multi-layer geologic tort, Canyonlands National Park in southeastern Utah features a landscape cut by canyons, rumpled by upthrusts, dimpled by grabens, and even pockmarked, some believe, by ancient asteroids.
perfscience.com
Hats off to a new year! Let’s celebrate with a new round of “Spot the Rock.” Anyone have an inkling where these rocks are mingling? Post your guesses below, and we’ll reveal the answer next week!
Photo by: Jeremy Harwood
UPDATE: Location Revealed!
Our friends were “spot” on guessing last week’s “Spot the Rock”! This photo shows Mexican Hat, the famous sombrero-shaped rock perched in the Halgaito Formation. The Halgaito and Honaker Trail Formations appear as red and greenish-gray ribbons on the western flank of the Raplee anticline. Farther south on this route, the rock ribbons take on a scalloped appearance that is due to differential erosion of the soft and hard rocks; the softer Halgaito is wearing away from the crest of the anticline.
By: Paul Inkenbrandt
The City of Millville, located in a prime location for aquifer storage and recovery (ASR), is having issues with elevated nitrate in the Glenridge well, a public water supply sourced from the Cache Valley principal aquifer. To alleviate high nitrate, the city performed an initial injection and pumping test using the Glenridge well. Millville injected water from Garr Spring, another public water supply source of which they own water rights, into the Glenridge well for one week at a rate of 500 gallons per minute. They then pumped the well while monitoring geochemistry to determine the effects on the Cache Valley principal aquifer system. The pre-injection nitrate concentration in the Glenridge well was 7.65 mg/l nitrate as nitrogen, and the nitrate concentration after pumping more than 172% of the volume of water injected was 6.52 mg/l nitrate as nitrogen. There is likely some dispersion of the injected spring water via advection in the aquifer.
Remember the family of Utah Raptors that arrived in a 9-ton ‘block’ in Salt Lake City a few months ago? Our Paleontologists here at the UGS have been working very closely on this project for years. Check out this wonderful highlight on their work so far, where you can see interviews from Utah State Paleontologist James Kirkland, and Paleontologists, Don DeBlieux and Scott Madsen.
news.nationalgeographic.com
A nine-ton block of sandstone that was pulled from a Utah mountain late last year holds the biggest fossil trove ever found of the giant predatory dinosaur known as Utahraptor. Covered in feathers, with a huge sickle claw on each second toe, Utahraptor looked like a pumped-up version of the Jurassic Park star Velociraptor.
And further reading in this article below…
washingtonpost.com
Reports of what looked like a human arm brought Utah state paleontologist James Kirkland to a particular sandstone hill in 2001. But it turned out that his graduate student had actually found something entirely different — a veritable mass grave of Utahraptor dinosaurs. Now they’ve found the remains of six individual dinosaurs, and there may still be more inside of the 9-ton sandstone block they’re excavating.
Colorado River, Grand County, Utah
Photographer: Adam Hiscock; © 2014
Late-winter ice still clings to the Colorado River near Big Bend, north of Moab. Boulders of Jurassic-age Wingate Sandstone and Triassic-age Chinle Formation line the banks of the river, eroded from the cliffs and ledges cut by the river as it has incised its channel over millions of years.
washingtonpost.com
Gray-green plateaus and rock formations in a palette of fiery oranges and browns take up much of the landscape on the 400-mile drive from St. George, Utah, to Dinosaur National Monument. Arid and sprawling, it’s not the subtropical terrain that made up the late Mesozoic era, but that didn’t stop the 5-year-old aspiring paleontologist in the back seat from imagining a hungry allosaurus or herd of sauropods pounding across the land in search of dinner.
usatoday.com
For a dinosaur, celebrity status is usually achieved by being big, belligerent or both. The big headliners of 2014 were a dinosaur as massive as a 747 and a sharp-toothed predator that outweighed T. rex.
The Utah Geological Survey (UGS) is a division of the Utah Department of Natural Resources. Several specialized programs comprise the UGS: Data Management, Energy & Minerals, Geologic Hazards, Geologic Information & Outreach, Geologic Mapping, Groundwater & Wetlands, and Paleontology.
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