In early June 2019, the Penn State Geology Field School began the annual trip out West for a six-week investigation of the geology of the intermontane western United States, with thirty- six students. The group was led by professors Erin Dimaggio, Roman DiBiase, Donald Fisher, Maureen Feineman, Andrew Smye, and Kevin Furlong, and assisted by a team of graduate teaching assistants led by Julia Carr and including Tsai-Wei Chen, Troy Ferland, Collin Oborn, Kalle Jahn, Clarissa Crist, Jacob Cipar, and Kirsty Mackenzie.
The first stop was the Yellowstone Bighorn Research Association’s facility on the eastern side of the Beartooth uplift near Red Lodge, Montana. The students received training in ARC-GIS from Dimaggio and completed mapping and stratigraphy exercises in Elk Basin where they learned to interpret satellite imagery and topographic data, think critically in three dimensions, and collect and report geologic data.
The caravan then passed through Yellowstone National Park and spent a week based in Teton Village, where students mapped Quaternary geology and fault scarps along the Teton mountain front with DiBiase. Students combined a field investigation of the landforms characteristic of glaciated landscapes using satellite imagery and lidar-derived topographic data to establish the geologic history that gave rise to the geomorphology.
Fisher then took students to east-central Idaho where they camped in the metamorphic core complex of the Pioneer Mountains and mapped faults, unconformities, and volcanic deposits to craft arguments for the relative timing for the area’s deposition, folding and faulting, erosion, and volcanism.
For the final two exercises, the group traveled to Little Cottonwood Canyon, Utah. As in past years, the students completed a map and cross section of the overthrust belt to estimate the shortening and fault slip due to thrust faulting and stratigraphic repetition. Snow prevented mapping in the Albion Basin, so Smye and Furlong led the last exercise in a new area near Brighton.
Students identified and located metamorphic isograds in the field that are used to estimate peak temperature changes with distance from the Alta Stock. Thermal models are then used to place constraints on the dimensions of the pluton and the crustal conditions during cooling.