Baja California Field Trip

Our first field trip in 1998 was to Baja California, Mexico.

Click here for our Grad Students' Baja field trip home page, complete with images.

Click here to read my research report, which was about theories of periodicity of mass extinctions.

Once again I helped prepare the field trip guide book, and here is the introduction, which gave a brief preview of our trip:

The Planetary Sciences Field Trip Heads South of the Border

Encouraged by the unqualified success of our field trip to Yellowstone National Park last September, (and bolstered by the fact that Jay's last Planetary Surfaces class managed to bring back all of their vehicles from Mexico,) this semester we once again expanded the range of our field excursions and travel to Mexico to explore the Baja peninsula.

Apart from the obvious lures of sand, surf, and fish tacos, we had an opportunity to see a region of North America that many of us have never seen before, a region which is somewhat geographically (and culturally) isolated from us.

Some of the targets on this trip were familiar to us (at least those of us old-timers who have been around here for years), such as Anza Borrego, that freak of nature the Salton Sea, and the ever-popular Pacific shoreline. Also, making an encore appearance due to their great popularity on the Yellowstone trip, we've seen lots of algae and microbial scum.

But perhaps the highlight of this trip was something new for most of us: a chance to examine the K-T boundary. This thin, iridium-rich stratigraphic layer marks the end of the Cretaceous period, and the beginning of the Tertiary about 65 million years ago. It also marked a significant transition in the fossil record, and hence the evolution of life on Earth. It signaled the end of the big, arguably very ugly, reptilian monsters of the Mesozoic, and the ascension of the nice, furry, friendly mammals that were to become our ancestors.

We had talks on the likely cause of this important transition, a large impact event, on the effect on the unfortunate* creatures that happened to witness it, and on the ever-debatable theory that this sort of thing happens to Earth fairly regularly every 26 to 30 million years.

In another first, we were treated on this trip to an animation of plate tectonic movement of the Baja region, presented on a laptop computer which the department had obviously decided it doesn't need any more.

In addition to the usual geology stuff, we also had supplementary talks on the local vegetation and on satellite navigation, as we cruised in leather-upholstered style through the malpais of Baja Norte. (At least we didn't have to worry about getting lost in the middle of nowhere, with our GPS receivers and our resident expert on navigation, Ralph . . . unless of course we would have somehow gotten separated from Ralph . . .)

But of course it wasn't all be leather and iridium. We had to be prepared to deal with not only the usual field trip hardships, but also the unpredictable wrath of El Nino, banditos, the Federales, and U.S. Customs. So we grabbed our passports and visas, and packed those fire extinguishers, because we headed sur de la frontera, to meet our destiny, for better or worse. As the redoubtable Chris Chyba would say, "Te vere en infierno!"

* But fortunate of course for all those who survived the cataclysm to feast on roast dinosaur.