Just discovered Myron Cook

[Dub]

I’m sure Tamarack knows of this guy. Just delightful ( to me), interesting and informative geology.

[Marshall]

Acadian Orogeny - Weren't they a Canadian Folk-Rock band?

Plate tectonics are mysterious and cool. To comprehend them, we really need to remove the oceans. We're so used to looking at maps with big oceans and visualize the continents floating in a sea of water. Truth is, the crust of the earth moves on it's own as a whole. The oceans just fill in the low spots.

The true miracle of the universe is GRAVITY. What causes particles to stick together until stars and planets are formed. The fact that the crust of the earth (any planet) floats on a molten inner core has to do with the extreme pressure created by gravity that heats up and liquifies the core. The solar furnace of the sun and all stars is created by the very very extreme pressures inside the core of the star which ignite a nuclear fusion reaction.

Crazy incomprehensible stuff. But where does gravity come from in the first place ?

[Tamarack]

I hadn't heard of Myron Cook before. He's not a professor or a published researcher, he's a retired petroleum geologist who enjoys talking about geology. Very listenable and quite accurate -- he neither dumbs down nor overcomplicates geologic description. Structural geology (folding and faulting, anticlines and synclines, etc) involves lots of tedious field work, measuring strike and dip (north-south orientation and tilt of rock layers).

I haven't dealt with this stuff since grad school. During the summer of 1979 I spent six weeks in the southern Appalachians, in the Smokies and to the east and west. We spent lots of time tripping through kudzu, measuring strikes and dips, and doing quick textural analysis of sedimentary rocks. The cool part about the Smokies is that the collision of continental plates ended up with older metamorphic rock on top of younger sedimentary rock. The "coves" in the Smokies are younger limestones and stuff surrounded by ridges of older metamorphic rock.

Mr. Cook didn't have time in a brief presentation to talk about the differences between the northern Appalachians and the southern Appalachians, also a fascinating subject.

[Dub]

Mr. Cook has a whole library of talks. I’m guessing he talks about northern Appalachians somewhere. If not, I figure whatever he says will be interesting and well done.

[Marshall]

I love that the Appalachians, and Scotland, and Norway are the same mountain range.