100 Things You've Done Meme: A Geologist's Version

MJC Rocks over at Geotripper has created a wonderful new meme based on the 100 Things You've Done meme that has been going around. Read about how he came up with/adapted this list here. This one is just to great not to do!

Bold the ones you have done and tell us some great stories!

1. See an erupting volcano
2. See a glacier (in Glacier NP, Banff NP, and Alaska, and from a plane while flying over Canada)
3. See an active geyser such as those in Yellowstone, New Zealand or the type locality of Iceland
4. Visit the Cretaceous/Tertiary (KT) Boundary. Possible locations include Gubbio, Italy, Stevns Klint, Denmark, the Red Deer River Valley near Drumheller, Alberta. (in Big Bend NP)
5. Observe (from a safe distance) a river whose discharge is above bankful stage (this past spring when the Mississippi broke the levees the week I moved)
6. Explore a limestone cave. Try Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico, Lehman Caves in Great Basin National Park, or the caves of Kentucky or TAG (Tennessee, Alabama, and Georgia)
7. Tour an open pit mine, such as those in Butte, Montana, Bingham Canyon, Utah, Summitville, Colorado, Globe or Morenci, Arizona, or Chuquicamata, Chile.
8. Explore a subsurface mine. (worked at one in Alaska - Independence Mine State Historic Park)
9. See an ophiolite, such as the ophiolite complex in Oman or the Troodos complex on the Island Cyprus (if on a budget, try the Coast Ranges or Klamath Mountains of California).
10. An anorthosite complex, such as those in Labrador, the Adirondacks, and Niger (there's some anorthosite in southern California too).
11. A slot canyon. Many of these amazing canyons are less than 3 feet wide and over 100 feet deep. They reside on the Colorado Plateau. Among the best are Antelope Canyon, Brimstone Canyon, Spooky Gulch and the Round Valley Draw.
12. Varves, whether you see the type section in Sweden or examples elsewhere.
13. An exfoliation dome, such as those in the Sierra Nevada. (in Oklahoma [Arbuckles] and Missouri [Ozark Dome])
14. A layered igneous intrusion, such as the Stillwater complex in Montana or the Skaergaard Complex in Eastern Greenland.
15. Coastlines along the leading and trailing edge of a tectonic plate (check out The Dynamic Earth - The Story of Plate Tectonics - an excellent website).
16. A ginkgo tree, which is the lone survivor of an ancient group of softwoods that covered much of the Northern Hemisphere in the Mesozoic. (Love love love Ginkgo trees! I use to walk by one every day one my way to and from school)
17. Living and fossilized stromatolites (Glacier National Park is a great place to see fossil stromatolites, while Shark Bay in Australia is the place to see living ones) - (obviously from my prior post you know I have seen thousands of these suckers in Glacier NP, but have also seen then in the Green River Fm.)
18. A field of glacial erratics (in Alaska, Wyoming)
19. A caldera (in Alaska/Wyoming/Arizona...)
20. A sand dune more than 200 feet high
21. A fjord (in Alaska, Kenai Fjords NP)
22. A recently formed fault scarp
23. A megabreccia (Alaska)
24. An actively accreting river delta (from a plane, does that count?)
25. A natural bridge (Utah)
26. A large sinkhole (Arkansas, Texas, Missouri)
27. A glacial outwash plain (Alaska, Glacier NP)
28. A sea stack
29. A house-sized glacial erratic (Alaska, from my window every morning..I never noticed how big it really was till I was almost up to it! HUGE! Scales are a little off up there at times)
30. An underground lake or river (Arkansas)
31. The continental divide (Montana, Wyoming, Colorado)
32. Fluorescent and phosphorescent minerals (we have quite a nice collection at Augustana)
33. Petrified trees (PEFO)
34. Lava tubes (Craters of the Moon National Monument, Idaho, where I was stung by a wasp!)
35. The Grand Canyon. All the way down. And back. (ok, I have not been all the way down and all the way back, but I have been down someways and we plan on doing the whole thing this next spring, does that still count?)
36. Meteor Crater, Arizona, also known as the Barringer Crater, to see an impact crater on a scale that is comprehensible
37. The Great Barrier Reef, northeastern Australia, to see the largest coral reef in the world.
38. The Bay of Fundy, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, Canada, to see the highest tides in the world (up to 16m)
39. The Waterpocket Fold, Utah, to see well exposed folds on a massive scale.
40. The Banded Iron Formation, Michigan, to better appreciate the air you breathe.
41. The Snows of Kilimanjaro, Tanzania,
42. Lake Baikal, Siberia, to see the deepest lake in the world (1,620 m) with 20 percent of the Earth's fresh water.
43. Ayers Rock (known now by the Aboriginal name of Uluru), Australia. This inselberg of nearly vertical Precambrian strata is about 2.5 kilometers long and more than 350 meters high
44. Devil's Tower, northeastern Wyoming, to see a classic example of columnar jointing
45. The Alps.
46. Telescope Peak, in Death Valley National Park. From this spectacular summit you can look down onto the floor of Death Valley - 11,330 feet below.
47. The Li River, China, to see the fantastic tower karst that appears in much Chinese art
48. The Dalmation Coast of Croatia, to see the original Karst.
49. The Gorge of Bhagirathi, one of the sacred headwaters of the Ganges, in the Indian Himalayas, where the river flows from an ice tunnel beneath the Gangatori Glacier into a deep gorge.
50. The Goosenecks of the San Juan River, Utah, an impressive series of entrenched meanders.
51. Shiprock, New Mexico, to see a large volcanic neck
52. Land's End, Cornwall, Great Britain, for fractured granites that have feldspar crystals bigger than your fist.
53. Tierra del Fuego, Chile and Argentina, to see the Straights of Magellan and the southernmost tip of South America.
54. Mount St. Helens, Washington, to see the results of recent explosive volcanism. (from a plane, twice!)
55. The Giant's Causeway and the Antrim Plateau, Northern Ireland, to see polygonally fractured basaltic flows.
56. The Great Rift Valley in Africa.
57. The Matterhorn, along the Swiss/Italian border, to see the classic "horn".
58. The Carolina Bays, along the Carolinian and Georgian coastal plain
59. The Mima Mounds near Olympia, Washington
60. Siccar Point, Berwickshire, Scotland, where James Hutton (the "father" of modern geology) observed the classic unconformity
61. The moving rocks of Racetrack Playa in Death Valley
62. Yosemite Valley
63. Landscape Arch (or Delicate Arch) in Utah
64. The Burgess Shale in British Columbia
65. The Channeled Scablands of central Washington
66. Bryce Canyon
67. Grand Prismatic Spring at Yellowstone
68. Monument Valley (just this past 4th of July!)
69. The San Andreas fault (I had Thanksgiving dinner practically on it last year! Yikes!!)
70. The dinosaur footprints in La Rioja, Spain
71. The volcanic landscapes of the Canary Islands
72. The Pyrennees Mountains
73. The Lime Caves at Karamea on the West Coast of New Zealand
74. Denali (an orogeny in progress) (even the summit!)
75. A catastrophic mass wasting event
76. The giant crossbeds visible at Zion National Park (beautiful!)
77. The black sand beaches in Hawaii (or the green sand-olivine beaches)
78. Barton Springs in Texas
79. Hells Canyon in Idaho
80. The Black Canyon of the Gunnison in Colorado (just down the road!)
81. The Tunguska Impact site in Siberia
82. Feel an earthquake with a magnitude greater than 5.0.
83. Find dinosaur footprints in situ (more than I can count)
84. Find a trilobite (or a dinosaur bone or any other fossil) (check, check, and check)
85. Find gold, however small the flake (Alaska, working in a gold mine....)
86. Find a meteorite fragment
87. Experience a volcanic ashfall
88. Experience a sandstorm (I lived in Lubbock, Texas. I am lucky I still have skin!)
89. See a tsunami
90. Witness a total solar eclipse (once, when I was still in High School)
91. Witness a tornado firsthand. (Important rules of this game). (I grew up in tornado alley, I have seen more than my fair share)
92. Witness a meteor storm, a term used to describe a particularly intense (1000+ per minute) meteor shower (in Alaska, it was AWESOME!!)
93. View Saturn and its moons through a respectable telescope.
94. See the Aurora borealis, otherwise known as the northern lights. (during #92, which made it that much more AWESOME!! Until the moon came up and ruined it all with all that light)
95. View a great naked-eye comet, an opportunity which occurs only a few times per century (Hale-bopp in Yellowstone/Glacier)
96. See a lunar eclipse
97. View a distant galaxy through a large telescope
98. Experience a hurricane
99. See noctilucent clouds
100. See the green flash


Not bad - I am 50/50 - half way there I guess! And John has done 54 of them. Now I just need to find some $$ so I can see something off this continent!