The Volcano in Owens Valley California; The Big Pine Volcanic Field
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- čas přidán 30. 07. 2024
- Within Owens Valley in California there is a seemingly obvious volcano which is somewhat largely ignored. What I am referring to are a series of approximately 40 vents that are largely cinder cones which last produced a volcanic eruption a mere 17,000 years ago. As a result, it is quite likely that a portion of the Big Pine Volcanic Field will one day erupt again.
Thumbnail Photo Credit: This work "OwensValley1", is a derivative of a photo (resized, cropped, text overlay, image saturation increased, brightness increased, more red added in to the photo via color balance, overlaid with text, overlaid with GeologyHub made graphics (the GeologyHub logo and the image border)) from "2012_01_02_owens-valley_149", by: Doc Searls, docsearls, 2012, Posted on Flickr, Flickr account link: www.flickr.com/photos/docsearls/, Photo link: www.flickr.com/photos/docsear..., CC BY 2.0. "OwensValley1" is used & licensed under CC BY 2.0 by / geologyhub
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Sources/Citations:
[1] U.S. Geological Survey
[2] The Google Earth KMZ file used in this video used to show the Geologic Map of California was downloaded from: U.S. Geological Survey, California geologic map data, at mrdata.usgs.gov/geology/state...
[3] Vazquez, J. A., and Woolford, J. M. (2015), Late Pleistocene ages for the most recent volcanism and glacial-pluvial deposits at Big Pine volcanic field, California, USA, from cosmogenic 36Cl dating, Geochem. Geophys. Geosyst., 16, 2812- 2828, doi:10.1002/2015GC005889.
[4] Adamo, Nasrat & Al-Ansari, Nadhir & Sissakian, Varoujan. (2021). Review of Climate Change Impacts on Human Environment: Past, Present and Future Projections. Engineering. 13. 605-630. 10.4236/eng.2021.1311044., CC BY 4.0
[5] Varnell, Ashley. “Petrology and Geochemistry of the Big Pine Volcanic Field Inyo County, California.” (2006).
[6] CZcams Creative Commons, Video at 0:18-0:21 of Salton Sea mudpots: • The new mudpots / mud ... , CC BY 3.0 license
0:00 Volcanoes in California
0:44 Big Pine Volcanic Field
1:50 Geologic Setting
3:17 Rhyolite Dome
3:28 Crater Mountain
4:06 Conclusion
I just drove past this last month and was disappointed there wasn't more information on it but now there is so I'm going to be quite happy to watch this.
I actually camped by Lone Pine around 2015 during my geology class for Igneous/Metamorphic Rocks and their structures. The long drive down Owen's Valley was full of cinder cones and basalt flows~
I live in the Owens Valley. I never get bored of the scenery here.
Had my geology intro field course here! Mapped around Crater Mountain and climbed around the fish springs cinder cone. Such a beautiful area
My favorite part of the drive along the 395. Driven it dozens of times. I frequent SD and Reno. Will be driving through again in 10 days. Love this video. Thank you Geohub
New Geology Hub video always means a great rest of the day
I've driven by that area dozens of times and always wondered about the nature of the volcanos.
Thank you for enlightening me! :)
The 395 is a great drive. Cinder cones, lava fields, and hot springs.
this area along 395 has always fascinated me.. antiquity, totally looking back in time.. thanks for the information, appreciate you
Thanks, as always. Crater Mountain reminds me of the Fagradasfjall volcano that erupted in 2021! I envision its eruption was similar to Crater Mountain's.
Your analogy is right on point. Fagradasfjall is a perfect comparison to what Crater Mountain once looked like, although there is a chance it emitted minor amounts of ash.
@@GeologyHubThanks,
Thank you for covering this. I had the most miserable night camping of my life at owens valley!
Why was it so miserable? Mosquitoes or wind?
@@ambersgrace1 You are at the base of a valley with the mountains above, so cold air washes down on you unimpeded from like 14.5k feet at night. Winds blowing up the valley are also just generally insane, the first thing you'll notice is that the fire rings are stacked to waist height. just one valley over and there are sand dunes.
regardless it's a must-see place if you want to witness some gorgeous geology. accessible, beautiful, and usually empty.
There were no bugs when I was there.
@@wingdingdmetrius8025 Oh I see. I was curious cause I live in the area. I had a feeling it was wind.
I've driven through this valley several times, and kinda miss it since I moved out of state. There's a lot of obsidian shards in various places from historic explosive eruptions. The whole thing is just gorgeous. There's a familiar formation that my dad always referred to as "frog rock", maybe a hummock? But it looks like a frog from far away.
Thank you. I asked that you discuss this particular basin. I have seen soccer size obsidian blocks and huge pumice borders that I push without any problem. I went into lava flows that I wouldn't want to fall in because these stones were very sharp.
Can we get a few episodes on volcanoes in South America/the Andes? Say, Cotopaxi, Tungurahua, Guagua Pichincha, the Galapagos, Cordón Caulle, etc.?
Additionally, the boiling lake in Dominica would surely be worth a video.
Mapped parts of this for field camp, very interesting area
I have a possible hypothesis to explain why it only erupts during glacial maximum.
The mass of the ice sheets towards the north likely caused the faults in that region to become more active due to the ground uplifting in the area.
It’s the same reason why the Chesapeake Bay region is currently subsiding as it had been raised by a considerable amount during the glaciation period and, with the end of the last ice age, is now subsiding back to normal levels.
The Chesapeake Bay's subsistence is well explained by ground water removal.
@@hugmynutus also, that.
The Coso volcanic field might make for an interesting video. One of the fascinating features of the field is Fossil Falls. Where an ancient river was cutting through the basalt lava flow before it dried up leaving a "fossil" trace.
I'm pretty sure he did one, You have to go back through his catalog
@@dougc190Yes! You are correct it's from a couple years ago and I only just found it last month 🌋
@@dougc190 Found it. Thank you!
Thanks for the video.
I used to do some work in Searles Valley. I think that was one valley over from Owens Valley.
Thanks!
I would request a video on what’s happening with two newly discovered hot spots on the planet that I’ve read about in recent times. Evidently there is a new hot spot deep underneath Northern New England that will eventually reach the surface many thousands of years from now. There is also a significant volcanic hot spot that is actively melting glaciers under a huge area of Northeast Greenland with high soil temperatures due to the hot spot.
How do you seem know all these thousands upon thousands of years ago so accurate. Did I miss that episode?
Where can I find a comprehensive map with extinct, dormant, and active volcanoes on it?
I often drive Hwy 40 back home to Kingman, AZ from CA. Somewhere just east of Newberry Springs CA, there's a very fresh looking lava flow and small cinder cone visible just south of the freeway. I've checked it out on satellite imagery and I can see evidence of other older flows and cones. This seems a distance away from 395, but it's within the zone affected by the Silver Creak caldera further east. (Very informative video on that, btw. It explains why the Cerbat mountains look so different at the southern end.) Is there still some life in the Silver Creek caldera or are these flows from a more recent isolated system?
Gosh that's exciting
Thanks, great content. Is there any way to cover the Sonoma Volcanics? Wondering if that was all related to Clear Lake or it’s own system?
Have you done a video on the buttes of Southern California, specifically the long buttes in Los Angeles County?
Have you done an episode on Fossil Falls yet? I’ve been there several times, it’s an interesting feature in the lava field a bit north of Inyokern.
What’s the tectonic mechanism under the extension? Imho, the divergent mantle upwelling that’s part of the East Pacific Rise spreading ridge in the Gulf of California; but it’s under the North American continent because it was overridden @20MA and is still active.
I know that a lot of the state of Nevada is a "basin & range" set-up. Can you outline that and why Nevada is "the Silver State"?
Great topic. Very interesting but moved too fast to see the damn thing and orient in the valley.
Does anyone know if the Basin and Range Providence in North America still actively spreading and at what rate or is it inactive?
Driving 395 watching for interesting looks, i found many faults and many explosive holes, ground water and moving magmatic rock do not mix well, can you talk about these. I also found a mountain of obsidian.
I have scoria collected from Red Mountain.
hawaii, phillipine & indonesia volcano erupt almost at the same time hmmm
I happen to believe this whole region all the way north to mono lake has the real chance of creating another very large eq like in Ridgecrest or the United States next rhyolite eruption in and around Coso Volcanic field. I've seen that this region is spreading slowly from NA craton and eventually there will be a long inland sea that resembles gulf of California. But that is probably a million years from now.
Very interesting area of California
Yeah the region known as the Sierra Nevada Great Valley block/ microplate appears to be getting sheered off of North America largely via the relative difference in motion of the Pacific and North American plates and thus the region has already largely become detached except to the North where it is somewhat braced against Cascadia.
At some point so long as NA keeps moving to the southwest Cascadia will not be able to hold the microplate onto the continent resulting in the next San Andreas like transform region which will eventually get carried up to Alaska where it will reaccrete and or subduct onto the Continent as the Pacific plate carrying it dives into the Aleutian trench.
Based on the Seismic tomography beneath the continent there appears to be a vast solid mantle discontinuity which matches the boundaries of the Basin and Range Province and links up directly to both the Juan de Fuca ridge to the west and the East Pacific Rise to the South so along with paleomagnetism and other lines of data there seems to be pretty good odds that for as long as the Aleutian Cascadia and Trans-Mexican Volcanic Belt subduction zones keep pulling North America Southwest chunks of the Basin and range will keep getting dragged by the underlying Pacific mantle block and carried up to Alaska.
Its a shame that the timescale at which this plays out is so vast compared to a human lifetime as the process looks to be quite fascinating. At what point will the slab pulling end completely and when that does happen how will the continent behave? The EPR appears to be a much deeper and thus geologically persistent structure of the Earth's upper mantle so it seems unlikely for NA to be able to overcome it making the death of the Cocos and Juan de Fuca plates likely more important in the long term fate of North America.
If you haven't already I recommend checking out Nick Zentner's At to Z Baja BC controversy series.
@@Dragrath1 Thanks. Could this have an impact on the future of the Pacific Ocean as a whole, as it is possible that the EPR is a deeply embedded mantle feature?
@@TheSpaceEnthusiast-vl6wxYeah this has been a question I've been wondering about since I learned about the discontinuity in Seismic tomography. Given how old the Pacific Ocean is and more importantly how fast spreading it is compared to other Mid Ocean Ridges I suspect this has already had a significant effect on the history of the Pacific Ocean.
Right now there are two possibilities the first and likely more probable one is that the feature provides a path of least resistance for heat escaping from the mantle and thus Mid Ocean Ridges may preferentially focus around the region, there certainly is a number of minor and major hot spots which funnel up through the discontinuity of which Yellowstone is probably the most famous.
The other which I have read about is a newer deeper variation of plate tectonics which couples the oceanic lithosphere and the upper mantle into continuous deeper plate features. This seems to have some connection to mantle hydration and may help explain why plate tectonics appears to have progressively gotten deeper with time and
As for the Future history I think it seems likely as based on Robert S. Hildebrand's discussion the two sides of the Discontinuity particularly beneath Colorado & Wyoming appear different in terms of the wave propagation with the Basin and Range side being hotter while the other side appears "colder" with the subducted slab walls piling up beneath the discontinuity along with what might be the subsurface bulk of the North American continent getting stalled and or degraded. The Basin and Range Province as a whole also appears to be moving and or getting dragged in the direction of motion of the Pacific plate with the timing of onset for this event notably appearing to coincide with the loss of integrity within the section of the craton which became notched against. This combination suggests that as North America continues to be dragged Southwest by slab pull the section crossing over the EPR mantle discontinuity is effectively acting as a giant lithospheric thrust sheet with the deformable asthenosphere serving as the weak layer where slippage can occur. This coupled with the extension is thus ripping this part of the continent away with the main thing holding it back being the Bulk North American continent to the North as well as the Juan de Fuca plate. This pressure is likely responsible for the high rate of uplift of the Cascades which are getting compressed from both the subduction and the crust to the south. There may also be a future sea along the Snake river plain depending on if enough water can come in to support it. Frankly there is so much going on its hard to guess what forces will ultimately win out.
My guess is that the Pacific Ocean will in some sense survive as since it appears to have a deep root in the mantle which allows it to act like an exotic form of hotspot able to degrade and rift continental plates including cratonic crust and slab pull is the dominant source of plate motion North America's SW movement as well as eventually South America's western motion will eventually stall out once there is no longer any slabs East of the Ridge to subduct. Of course since subduction is hard to kill it is possible this effect might gradually balance out subduction and spreading until the two stabilize so this likely will require computational model testing. Either way as NA and SA are slowed into the same general frame of reference as the EPR mantle discontinuity maybe young crust formed from the upwelling heat will like the Gulf of California likely restart and or sustain sea floor spreading carrying away any land which had passed over the boundary. The crust lost from the continent will in all likelihood barring major plate rearrangements end up carried up to the Aleutian trench where much of it will likely accrete to build up Beringia.
Of course if the Amur plate keeps rifting away from Eurasia this might lead into a major continental continental collision which could certainly mess things up quite a bit.
And we can't forget the important role that the Atlantic may have on the future of the Pacific as there appears to be a subduction zone forming along the Azores Gibraltar fracture zone which should it continue to develop has a good chance to force the east Atlantic to start to fold in on itself as that has to some degree already begun as one part of the Atlantic the younger half to the North is getting thrust up and over the older southern half which is a remnant of the Tethys ocean. If that Happens Africa will likely see more dramatic movement towards the Northwest possibly serving to seed even larger scale subduction of the Atlantic.
There are so many factors to consider this barely even touches them so its frankly impossible to tell ATM what the future will look like for the Pacific or really anywhere.
@Dragrath1 That is a superb comment. I think it is of note that the Atlantic Ocean is somewhat slow in its seafloor spreading, which might just cause the Atlantic to subduct faster than widen. This might form a slightly different version of Pangea Proxima. I am not a geophysicist, so my opinions might be totally wrong, Speaking of Pangea Proxima, based on our current understanding of plate tectonics, which future supercontinent scenario holds the most merit?
@@TheSpaceEnthusiast-vl6wx Honestly I'm pretty sure all our models will be wrong as if Earth has shown us one thing its that the tectonic plates can occasionally undergo pretty widespread rearrangements usually coinciding with one or more flood basalt Large Igneous Provinces. I don't think anyone knows why this happens though it is suspicious how many of them appear to line up with major impact craters though that is far from proof or anything.
If we define supercontinent cycles in terms of opening and closing oceans I suspect it will be the Atlantic which is most likely to close given that North America's efforts to close the Pacific seem to be leading to its own fragmentation.
The scenario for closing the Arctic seems plausible however the artic ocean is extremely weird in that the crust there behaves in a more cold rigid behavior with volcanism along the ridge tending to be surprisingly explosive and thus building stratovolcanoes and caldera complexes. This is frankly really really strange as while they do erupt basalt they also erupt basaltic andesite so depending on how this process has been unfolding the Arctic might be too buoyant to subduct normally instead behaving more like continental crust and or an interior seaway. The Arctic also appears to be slowly and intermittently propagating into Siberia with a chain of volcanoes in the arctic off the coast of Siberia which are volcanic in origin but highly understudied. There are some curious satellite photos which even appear to show what might be volcanic activity but I don't think that has ever been verified. Given that location and the ongoing rifting of Amur via the Baikal rift zone I wouldn't be too surprised if Amur and parts of Siberia ultimately end up breaking off of Eurasia and colliding with North America (or rather Alaska and the parts of North America the relative motion with the East Pacific Rise is chunking off.
There is also questions about various processes which may or may not change the eventual fate of the continenets.
For one the New England seismic zone or the Adirondack hotspot I have to note that if it really is a plume its location is suspiciously close to the old Suture between Avalonia and Laurentia. Either way any model which has the general shape/configuration of modern continents is obviously wrong.
Antarctica is also another continent in the throws of getting ripped apart which raises questions about what will happen to it in the future.
Then based on work by Karin Sigloch and others it does seem that Earth has historically had the tendency to form long subduction belts out in the oceans as a way of balancing internal heat regulation the most recent such belt was effectively the Pangaea era equivalent of the Pacific ring of fire before it ultimately got bulldozed into by North America in the late Jurassic and Cretaceous with only parts of the Caribbean serving as the remains of this original belt of subduction arcs. Thus its possible that this belt might reform nucleating around the various subduction zones in the region.
Also in the southeastern parts of Indonesia the Australian continental shelf is starting to get subducted which is likely to eventually lead to slab failure that may add the arcs to the coast of Australia as has recently happened with New Guinea. In this case we might see Australia building up a Andean style arc which will move in whatever direction is best indicated by slab pull. While it is likely to collide with Eurasia the timeline and angle aren't really set as subduction zones are complicated.
The point is its complicated and all of these models will probably be wrong in some way as its tricky to chose which forces are most likely to win out especially when some factors related to the evolution of the Earth system are still unknown.
Eclipse paths on Oct 2023 and on April 2024 makes an X marks the spot in Texas. The Oct 2023 eclipse will go over Three Sisters. Will Bend survive? Could it be another Tonga?
which two states in the lower 48 are statistically more likely to produce a volcanic eruption than California? Washington is a given, but I’m not so sure Oregon is second.
Can you make a video on interesting geology in National Security sites like the Nevada Test Site, Dugway Proving Ground, White Sands Missile Range, etc.
👍
Close to LA?
Not really.
There is talk that the whole Long Valley is a caldera, like Yellowstone.
That's because it is. It blew up like 640,000. I believe they can find Ash all the way to the Mississippi.
"only 16,700 years ago."
Long in a human time scale and an instant in the Earth's time scale.
Geologyhub, please slow down your speech rate. You started out at a moderately fast clip and continued to speed up towards the end.
Very interesting indeed!
But might I respectfully suggest you speak a little slower in future videos.
The narrative proceeds at breakneck speed, and is just too fast to properly assimilate and understand this otherwise fascinating material...
Narrator: You need compression on your voice. Use a compressor. The dynamics of your voice make it impossible to understand every word you say, as your vocal volume drops out in certain places in your sentences. Had to bail at 2:30 for being frustrated I couldn't understand you.
Shaasta...long "a"
Like Nevaada... long "a"
You lost me when you started talking about millions of years ago. At the rate of mass the sun is losing daily, that we measure, if you reverse that 100 thousand years ago the oceans would've boiled into evaporation. Same with the moon slowly moving away from the earth, reverse that and the gravitational pull would ripped each other apart. Someone has been lying to you. 👿
Today I will be going to the Long Valley Caldera for my volcanology class 🫢