Introduction
The following is a list of essential or desirable locations for geologists or travelers to visit. It contains many of the interesting geological wonders of the world, with links for most of them. Other interesting natural phenomena are also presented. Much of this website is basically a modified and extended version of a list from an outstanding article written by Lisa A. Rossbacher (President, Southern Polytechnic State University in Marietta, Georgia) in the April, 1990 issue of Geotimes. The credit for any redeeming value in this document goes to her. Additional thanks go to the University of Cincinnati Geology Department for permanently archiving my webpages, and to those people who have sent in the suggestions which have been added to this page. A guest registry application has now been included (below) which allows anyone to enter additional suggestions to the geologist's list which are viewable by everyone. Some great additions have been posted here! Thanks! This website was last updated December, 2002.
"The best geologist is the one who has seen the most geology"
"For geologists, life is a field trip"
An erupting
volcano. Possible locations include Hawaii, Italy, or
Iceland. "The man who feels smug in an orderly world has never looked
down a volcano"
A glacier, preferably continental.
An active geyser, such as those in Yellowstone or the type locality of Iceland.
The Cretaceous/Tertiary (KT) boundary . Possible locations include Gubbio, Italy, Stevns Klint, Denmark, the Red Deer River Valley near Drumheller, Alberta.
A river whose discharge is above bankful stage, (significant 20th century floods), (photographs of the 1997 flooding in Cincinnati), or a catastrophic flash flood (photos of flash flood damage).
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).
An open pit mine, such as those in Butte, Montana,Bingham Canyon, Utah, Summitville, Colorado, Globe or Morenci, Arizona, or Chuquicamata, Chile.
A subsurface mine.
An ophiolite, such as the ophiolite complex in Oman or the Troodos complex on the Island Cyprus.
An
anorthosite complex, such as those in Labrador, the Adirondacks,
and Niger.
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 (click here for a larger version of this excellent picture), Brimstone Canyon, Spooky Gulch and the Round Valley Draw.
Varves, whether you see the type section in Sweden or examples elsewhere.
An exfoliation dome, such as those in the Sierra Nevada.
A layered igneous intrusion, such as the Stillwater complex in Montana or the Skaergaard Complex in Eastern Greenland.
Coastlines along the leading and trailing edge of a tectonic plate (This link is from The Dynamic Earth - The Story of Plate Tectonics - an excellent website).
A ginkgo tree, which is the lone survivor of an ancient group of softwoods that covered much of the Northern Hemisphere in the Mesozoic.
Other suggestions: Living and fossilized stromatolites (Glacier National Park is a great place to see fossil stromatolites), a field of glacial erratics, a large catastrophic mass-wasting event, a sand dune more than 200 feet high, a fjord, a caldera, a recently formed fault scarp, sizable breccias, an actively accreting river delta (scenic photos), a natural bridge, a large sinkhole, a glacial outwash plain, a sea stack, a house-sized glacial erratic, an underground lake or river, the continental divide, fluorescent and phosphorescent minerals, petrified trees, lava tubes,"booming" sands,...
The Grand Canyon. All the way down. And back. (Here are more links)
Meteor Crater, Arizona, also known as the Barringer Crater, to see an impact crater on a scale that is comprehensible (Photo-D. Roddy and LPI). Click here for a new perspective on this picture!
The Great Barrier Reef, northeastern Australia, to see the largest coral reef in the world. (nice photo). (Here are more links)
The Bay of Fundy, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, Canada, to see the highest tides in the world (up to 16m) (photo here).
The Waterpocket Fold, Utah, to see well exposed folds on a massive scale (nice photo).
The Banded Iron Formation, Michigan, to better appreciate the air you breathe.
The Snows of Kilimanjaro, Tanzania, even if viewed from a distance.
Lake Baikal, Siberia, to see the deepest lake in the world (1,620 m) with 20 percent of the Earth's fresh water.
Ayers Rock, Australia. This inselberg of
nearly vertical Precambrian strata is about 2.5 kilometers long and more than
350 meters high.
(Here are more
links)
Devil's Tower, northeastern Wyoming, to see a classic example of columnar jointing (and to experience some of the best crack climbing in the world).
The Alps.
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.
The Li River, China, to see the fantastic tower karst that appears in much Chinese art (like this).
The Dalmation Coast of Croatia, to see the original Karst.
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.
The Goosenecks of the San Juan River, Utah, an impressive series of entrenched meanders.
Shiprock,
New Mexico, to see a large volcanic neck.
Land's End, Cornwall, Great Britain, for fractured granites that have feldspar crystals bigger than your fist.
Tierra del Fuego, Chile and Argentina, to see the Straights of Magellan and the southernmost tip of South America.
Mount St. Helens, Washington, to see the results of recent explosive volcanism.
Giant's Causeway and the Antrim Plateau, Northern Ireland, to see polygonally fractured basaltic flows. (Here are more links)
The Great Rift Valley in Africa.
The Matterhorn, along the Swiss/Italian border, to see the classic "horn".
The Carolina Bays, along the Carolinian and Georgian coastal plain, just so that you, too, can have a theory about how these parallel surface depressions may have formed (here is an interesting article).
The Mima Mounds near Olympia, Washington, to see these mysterious landforms of unknown origin (photo).
Siccar Point, Berwickshire, Scotland, where James Hutton (the "father" of modern geology) observed this classic unconformity and recognized the meaning of stratigraphy. (nice photo)
Other suggested sights: The moving rocks of Racetrack Playa in Death Valley (photo), Yosemite Valley, Landscape Arch in Utah, the Burgess shale, the Channeled Scablands of central Washington, Bryce Canyon - (nice panorama photograph), the Grand Prismatic Spring at Yellowstone, Monument Valley, The San Andreas Fault, The dinosaur footprints in La Rioja, Spain, The volcanic landscapes of the Canary Islands, The Pyrennees Mountains, The Lime Caves at Karamea on the West Coast of New Zealand, Denali (an orogeny in progress), Druid Arch in Utah, The giant crossbeds visible at Zion National Park, the black sand beaches in Hawaii (or the green sand (olivine) beaches?), Barton Springs in Texas, Hells Canyon in Idaho, The Black Canyon of the Gunnison in Colorado, TheTunguska impact site in Siberia, ...
Feel an earthquake with a magnitude greater than 5.0.
Find dinosaur footprints in situ . Try the backcountry of southern Utah, there are millions of them.
Find a Trilobite, relatively easy in the Ordovician limestones and shales around Cincinnati. See also - information on Cincinnatian trilobites from the Dry Dredgers Homepage, an association of amateur geologists and fossil collectors in the Cincinnati area.
Find gold, however small the flake.
Other suggestions: (Witness) see a tsunami, experience a volcanic ashfall, find a meteorite fragment, experience a sandstorm,...
Totality!! A
total solar eclipse is claimed to be the single most
spectacular phenomenon in all of nature. They occur somewhere on this planet
at a rate of approximately one every 1.5 years (world map of
total eclipse
paths from 1997 to 2020). The next total solar eclipse
paths to cross the North American continent will occur in the year 2017
and again in the year 2024 (map of total
eclipse paths in North America for years 2001-2050).
Witness a tornado, firsthand. (important rules of this game).
Witness a meteor storm,
a term used to describe a particularly intense (1000+ per minute)
meteor shower
. Meteor storms are extremely
rare and hard to predict. The 2033
Leonid showers
are possibilities.
View Saturn and its moons through a respectable telescope.
See the
Aurora borealis, otherwise known as the northern lights.
(Incredible photos here) by Jan Curtis.
View a great naked-eye
comet, an opportunity which occurs only a few times per
century (see "Great Comets in History" at
this website). Both Comet Hale-Bopp (1997) and Comet Hyakutake (1996) fell into this category, two great comets in two years. For a brief time, Comet Hyakutake had a spectacular tail over 70 degrees long (only visible from dark skies).
The only way
to fully appreciate a bright comet is to get far away from
the light pollution of
the cities and suburbs. Nice photographs of these two recent comet can be found at
this website, perhaps the second best website ever created by upright man.
Other suggestions: See a
lunar eclipse,
view a distant galaxy
(great photographs) through a
large telescope, experience a hurricane,
see noctilucent
clouds, walk through an ancient redwood grove, see the green
flash, witness a supernova, witness hail
3 inches or larger falling from the sky, ball lightning,...
"A journey of a thousand miles begins with one step"
"Tomorrow's life is too late. Live today"
Many remarkable sites, natural phenomena, etc... exist which are not listed on this website. Help fellow "geotravelers" by posting your comments or suggestions for additions to this list
here Tread lightly!
(http://www.uc.edu/geology/geologylist/index.html)
Post comments or suggestions for additions to this list,
or view those left by others
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Science Related Links
Links of Interest to Travelers
This page was produced by
Terry Acomb (created 2/25/96; last update December, 2002)
while completing an M.S. Degree at the
University of Cincinnati Geology Department.
This site has won awards
