Now moved to 3rd Monday evenings at 7:00 p.m. Our speaker will be Dr. Emily Cahoon, and Alyssa Smith returns with her Geology in a Nutshell News and Research.

Zoom link here.

Title: Lithium Mining in Oregon

Now moved to 3rd Monday evenings at 7:00 p.m. Dr. Paul Hseih will present The Geology of Oman, and Alyssa Smith returns with her Geology in a Nutshell News and Research.

Zoom link here.

Title: Geology of Oman

Description: 

For someone passionate about geology, visiting Oman is akin to an art enthusiast visiting the Louvre. Oman is well known for its Semail Ophiolite, generally considered the world's largest and best-preserved sheet of oceanic crust and upper mantle emplaced onto continent. This presentation is a photo tour of geologic sites visited during a trip organized by the UK company GeoWorld Travel and led by the company founder, James Cresswell. Among the sites visited during 8 full days of travel in northeastern Oman are: outcrop of the Moho (transition between the upper mantle and oceanic crust), mountains made of mantle rock (peridotite), sheeted dyke complex, pillow basalt, thrust sheets of marine sediments, fossilized hydrothermal vents (black and white smokers), atoll formed on top of a submarine volcano, complexly folded radiolarian chert, and the world's largest sheath fold. Contemporary ideas of how the Semail Ophiolite was emplaced onto the Arabian continental margin are briefly explored.

Brief bio: 

Paul Hsieh retired in 2018 from the U.S. Geological Survey after 41 years of service as a research hydrologist. His research at the USGS spanned over diverse topics that included groundwater flow and contaminant transport in fractured rocks, development and application of computer simulation models, interaction between groundwater and earthquakes, and volcano hydrology. One of his goals during his retirement is to visit important geological sites in the US and around the world. In the last few years, he visited the Henry Mountains of Utah, rafted down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon, hiked to Burgess Shale fossil sites in the Canadian Rockies, and travelled to Oman to see the Semail Ophiolite.

PSU graduate student Natalie Culhane will present Understanding Mount Hood's Twin Lakes Fault, and Alyssa Smith returns with her Geology in a Nutshell News and Research.

Zoom link here.

Title: Understanding Mount Hood's Twin Lakes Fault

Description: Immediately south of Mount Hood, the Twin Lakes fault cuts off several drainage channels, forming a series of basins. This talk will summarize findings from lake sediment coring, surficial geologic mapping, geophysical surveys, and paleoseismic trenching I and my colleagues performed between two of these fault-dammed basins, Frog Lake and Lower Twin Lake, in one busy summer of 2024. Preliminary interpretations of these various data sources suggest multiple fault ruptures in recent geologic time, deeming the Twin Lakes fault an active tectonic feature that should be considered in local seismic hazard modeling.

Brief bio: Natalie Culhane is a second-year masters student at PSU working in the Active Tectonics lab under Dr. Ashley Streig. On her path to becoming a professional geologist, she has cored lake sediment from the Australian alpine, produced a USGS data release and publication on the runout lengths of earthquake-triggered landslides, and performed geohazard assessments at a local consulting firm. She currently interns part-time at DOGAMI, mapping landslides in the Sandy River corridor.