Wooster Geologists in Southwestern Utah (March 2019)

During our 2019 Spring Break, Dr. Shelley Judge, our ace technician Nick Wiesenberg, and I took two students (Anna Cooke ’20 and Evan Shadbolt ’20) to southwestern Utah for Independent Study (IS) research and geologic exploration. We had a great time, and as always we’re planning the next expedition. Anna and Evan collected nearly a hundred pounds of rocks from the Middle Jurassic Carmel Formation for their IS projects. Here are links to our daily blog posts in classic superpositional order (youngest on top):

March 20: Local culture on our last day in Utah
March 19: A free day spent geologically in southwestern Utah
March 18: Wooster Geologists return to Zion National Park
March 17: Last day of fieldwork for Team Jurassic Utah 2019
March 16: East of Zion
March 15: Fieldwork continues for Team Jurassic Utah, plus a museum visit
March 14: A much more pleasant day in southwestern Utah
March 13: Team Jurassic Utah endures polar conditions
March 12: A productive first day for Wooster Geologists in Utah
March 11: Team Jurassic Utah 2019 begins its adventure

(You can also search the tag “Utah2019”.)

This is the local stratigraphic column (modified from that on the Zion National Park website). The area is dominated by the magnificent Navajo Sandstone. The Carmel Formation (red dot) is one of the few carbonate units.

This expedition builds on the work of last year’s Team Jurassic Utah, Galen Schwartzberg ’19 and Ethan Killian ’19, along with a past generation of Wooster students in the 1990s. We thank them for their contributions to this continuing geological adventure.

Updates on our progress with these projects will be in future blog entries.

For our records, here are our collecting and measuring localities —