(bright music) - So we're here at Seminoe State Park for the University of Wyoming's geology field camp.

So we're spending a week here studying sedimentary rocks and looking at different depositional environments and depositional studdings and also learning how to make a geologic map.

As an educator, the thing that I really love to see is students starting to make these connections in their own minds, finally starting to put enough pieces of the puzzle together and say, "Oh, I know what's going on as I look out across the landscape."

So seeing these students work in groups and starting to take their observations and turn those into interpretations and put together these sort of big pictures and big stories, that's one of the things that I get most excited about seeing.

(Western music) (Western music continues) The folks who are going to the Goose Egg outcrop.

- [Student] That's Cougar.

- Team Cougar, there you go.

So I think I'm gonna hike over with you guys right now to get started on that.

Have any of you guys measured section before?

- [Student] No.

- All right, well, no worries.

That's the sort of thing where the more you do it, the easier it gets.

I really love field camp.

I really love being able to teach out in the field and being outside with the students.

When you're out in the field and hiking around, you see things sort of off the cuff, and so that's really, really enjoyable not to have sort of this rote, I'm just following the syllabus or following sort of prepared marks or prepared topics.

What do you think?

Get in there, take a look at it.

Textures, morphology.

Did you guys bring an acid bottle?

- I have an acid bottle.

- I have mine today, too.

So one thing we do, we'll put dilute hydrochloric acid.

and if it's a limestone or a dolomite or a rock made out of carbonate, then it will fizz vigorously.

So, yeah, so it's a carbonate.

Does it look like the Madison that we saw, the Madison limestone?

- [Students] No.

- No, I mean, one, it's kind of pinkish.

What about the textures in there?

Is it like a nice uniform the same everywhere?

- [Student] No.

- No.

So, I mean, looking at, in the outcrop, it looks pretty lumpy.

So yeah, it's a weird unit.

It's sort of this pinkish limestone.

It's not like the Alcova that's dark gray and has these laminations.

So we'll see it again.

Right now, maybe just tuck it away in your memory.

(bright music) So the students are walking all over the park taking measurements in different places and so they'll take those measurements and then they'll put that on a map and then they can start to see large patterns that emerge.

So maybe they can see where rocks have been bent into a large fold, where the rocks have been offset and moved along a fault, and they can start to interpret those from all those collection of measurements.

(bright music) - I think it's a quartz arenite.

- [Jay] Why do you think it's a quartz arenite?

- It's got a lot of quartz in it.

- [Jay] Yeah.

What else do you see besides quartz?

- [Student] The glauconite.

- That would be my interpretation, too.

Now I want you to get up and sort of walk through the outcrop, around the outcrop and go make some more observations.

So these are dunes.

If you've ever seen sand dunes, on the surface of the dunes, there's little ripples as the wind's blowing across those.

And so a lot of these layers we see in the rocks here are actually those little ripples that are moving across.

Then more ripples move across and they leave these layers behind like this.

So sand has to come from somewhere, so if there's glauconite, where do you expect these dunes might've been?

Do you think they would've been like the middle of the Sahara?

- [Student] Near shore?

- Yeah, like near shore.

So maybe like beach dunes, right?

Somewhere where it's picking up that material and it's getting reworked into the dune system.

One of the most attractive things about this type of geology, sort of field geology, is what the rocks are telling you and the story they're telling you.

Even just going for a hike, I get so much more out of it thinking about the history of the earth and the history of the rocks and everything that's happened to make the landscape look like it does today.

(bright music) - So what about the Alcova here?

Looks like you drew it and then it stops right there.

Did you guys walk that out or?

- [Student] Um...

Yes.

So this ridge, we had Alcova, but we weren't sure.

We kinda lost it there, I think.

- Yeah, that's right.

The big reveal at the end of the week is they'll be working on their geologic maps and hopefully they'll start to map out these different faults and they'll see how the different units have been moved, and then we'll eventually look at those maps and we'll look at cross sections they make and we can see how the whole mountain range is shaped, like its geometry, its structure.

So that's the individual work they're doing.

They sort of build up this picture and eventually can talk about sort of tectonic processes happening in a plate tectonic scale.

(bright music) - So we're gonna go take these people reluctantly up the hill and show the different minerals and the things of interest that we saw and give 'em our interpretation for each section.

(bright music continues) - All right, guys, so we measured the Goose Egg formation.

It goes from the start of the tent sleep there all the way out to the road is the section we measured.

We start off in this pretty large bed here of...

If you wanna look at this and see what you think it is.

- It's gypsum.

- Yeah.

- Gypsum, yeah.

- We have this large bed of gypsum through here.

It's pretty weakly bedded.

It's nodular all throughout it.

So we decided that this starts out in some sort of more arid climate, a drying marine environment.

- Saline rich.

- Saline rich.

So we have this large area of evaporates of gypsum all through here.

- It is kind of cool to be able to show them, hey, this thing you've been working on, this is what it means and this is how it forms.

And, I mean, this is how we do geology.

We don't know the big answer.

We have to do sort of the field work and the bits and pieces and the grunt work in some ways and hike around and get all the data and eventually we can build up the layers and come up with a interesting story and see what's going on.

- It went pretty good.

I think walking through that again helped us figure out the environments more, but I think when we went through it, we had the right idea about what was going on there, and it was, I'm glad we picked that formation.

It was a cool one to look at.

But yeah, it's been a good experience.

A lot of us were COVID students and so we haven't had a lot of opportunity to do this kinda stuff before, so a lot of this is a lot of our first time actually getting out and doing real geology mapping.

(bright music) - You know, being able to walk through a landscape like this and have these deeper levels of meaning, you don't just see a rock or see a white cliff over there.

We see sand dunes or we see a beach where dinosaurs might have walked around.

And so on a personal level that's sort of a deeper meaning to the landscape.

It makes it more interesting.

It makes it sort of more intellectually richer in a lot of ways.

So that's sort of an intangible thing that I hope students get out of it.

I hope they are able to go out to places and be outside and be in sort of the wilderness and nature and have a deeper appreciation of it on some levels.

Certainly one of the things I really appreciate about geology.

(bright music continues)