From the article: Rocky Roadside Geology
Some of the best lessons in life come from making mistakes. Part of a scientist's education is learning how to turn mistakes into advances. Mistakes aren't pleasant, but when we grow as a result, those mistakes make pleasant stories afterward. Share Your Experience
Igneous rocks in Texas
- The Canadian River rises above Raton in NE NM and has cut a huge valley across the Texas Panhandle. To do this it had to cut through the layers of the sedimentary Caprock. High up on the sides of the valley, many rounded igneous rocks can be found, apparently washed down from the granites of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains to the west before the river had cut a deeper valley. If there is an alternative explanation for colorful quartz river rock hundreds of miles from any igneous rock, I don't know it.
- —oldbogus
Mismapped striations
- A myth . . . A geologist (unnamed) mapped glacial striae in the mountains of Georgia, only later to find out they were cable scars from logging operations. . . . He didn't learn much from the experience.
- —Guest mdoukas
Humility in West Virgnia
- Brief background to the story. I'm from New York and my field partner is from Delaware. We went to college in North Carolina. On our first field mapping trip in West Virginia, we found what seemed to be some sort of bizarre breccia cobble in a stream bed. Excitedly, we brought it to our professor, a North Carolinian who loved to rib the two of us for being from The North, who very carefully examined it, looked up at the two of us and said, "You dumb Yankees. That's a piece of shower floor." It was a piece of poured concrete floor with black decorative chips in it. This was our sophomore year, and that story lived in infamy among the geology students and faculty until we graduated.
- —Guest Casey
Geologic Humility
- As a geology undergrad at Brooklyn College I got permission to do a study on Staten Island. One day I came upon a completely unknown outcrop of Triassic redbeds, wide and flat. For weeks I mapped it in detail, visions of glory in my head. An unknown Triassic outcrop! One day I stopped in at the Natural History Museum in St. George which I had passed many times. The curator said he had seen me hiking past and asked what I was up to. I started in about my redbeds when he said, "Ah yes, the old paint factory." It turned out that during the Revolutionary War, a paint factory was there that imported wagonloads of Triassic redbeds from New Jersey to grind up as pigment. Nearby they made a huge holding pond for the excess red slurry, and those deposits were what I had been mapping. The following Monday I returned to class and told the professor my story. I will never forget his reply: "Don't be upset. You have just experienced your first lesson in geologic humility!" How right he was!
- —Bob Shepard
