Entries by Utah Geological Survey

What Did the Continents Look Like Millions of Years Ago?

theatlantic.com The paleo-tectonic maps of retired geologist Ronald Blakey are mesmerizing and impossible to forget once you’ve seen them. Catalogued on his website Colorado Plateau Geosystems, these maps show the world adrift, its landscapes breaking apart and reconnecting again in entirely new forms, where continents are as temporary as the island chains that regularly smash […]

Swarm of earthquakes shakes Yellowstone

sltrib.com Until recently, Bob Smith had never witnessed two simultaneous earthquake swarms in his 53 years of monitoring seismic activity in and around the Yellowstone Caldera. Now, Smith, a University of Utah geophysics professor, has seen three swarms at once. READ MORE    

POTD September 23, 2013: Goblin Valley State Park, Emery County, Utah

Goblin Valley State Park, Emery County, Utah Photographer: Keith Beisner At Goblin Valley State Park on the southeast side of the San Rafael Swell, morning sun gives Wild Horse Butte an ethereal glow. The butte exposes all four geologic units present in the park: the Entrada Sandstone and Curtis, Summerville, and Morrison Formations. These strata […]

POTD September 20, 2013: Snow Canyon State Park, Washington County, Utah

Snow Canyon State Park, Washington County, Utah Photographer: Tyler Knudsen About 27,000 years ago, lava flowed on top of the Navajo Sandstone, forming black “ropey” basalt in Snow Canyon State Park, Washington County. Utah is peppered with volcanoes and other signs of the hot molten rock (magma) that forms within the crust beneath us. Magma, […]

POTD September 19, 2013: St. George basin, Washington County, Utah

St. George basin, Washington County, Utah Photographer: Robert F. Biek Beyond the 350,000-year-old (Pleistocene-aged) Sullivans Knoll (Volcano Mountain) cinder cone near the town of Hurricane, the snow-covered Pine Valley Mountains are the eroded remnants of one of the world’s largest laccoliths, a shallow, mushroom-shaped igneous intrusion that formed about 20 million years ago. The red,  […]

POTD September 18, 2013: House Range, Millard County, Utah

House Range, Millard County, Utah. Photographer: Michael Vanden Berg The Notch Peak quartz monzonite (foreground) was magma during Jurassic times and intruded into Cambrian limestone and dolomite hundreds of millions of years after the Cambrian rock was deposited as sediment in tropical seas.