This spring, I traveled to west Texas to assist Joshua Villalobos of El Paso Community College in capturing a series of GigaPan images, in hopes of creating a comprehensive virtual field experience revealing that area’s spectacular geology. Since then, my student Robin Rohrback-Schiavone has been using our GIGAmacro photographic imaging system to make a series of hand-sample GigaPans to accompany the outcrop-scale images that Joshua and I made. The whole collection is online here: http://www.gigapan.com/galleries/10948/gigapans
The macro GigaPan of a “xenobomb” is cool in its own right…
[gigapan id=”142656″] link
…but it’s even cooler if you can place it into the context of its home volcano…
[gigapan id=”129453″] link
…but there you see that the blocks and bombs are mixed in with finer pyroclastics. So check out the ash and lapilli from this site, instead:
[gigapan id=”145310″] link
Or you might opt to see the Campus Andesite in outcrop at Cristo Rey…
[gigapan id=”129449″] link
…and then examine a hand-sample of the rock for petrographic analysis:
[gigapan id=”140390″] link
Or how about the contact between the Red Bluff Granite and the Mundy “Breccia” (Basalt)?
[gigapan id=”129332″] link
Here, you can take a look at it close up:
[gigapan id=”140996″] link
Elsewhere, this same granite intrudes the Castner Marble:
[gigapan id=”129367″] link
Further up the road is an instructive outcrop of this metamorphosed limestone:
[gigapan id=”129271″] link
In places it shows remnant sedimentary structures:
[gigapan id=”129285″] link
…and even stromatolites survive:
[gigapan id=”145143″] link
There’s one spot where a clastic dike cuts through.
[gigapan id=”141111″] link
Here’s a piece of it:
[gigapan id=”145138″] link
There are plenty of other pairings possible. Soon we’ll have a website put together to explore the whole scene. In the meantime, this GigaPan gallery of “El Paso geology” is the place to go: http://www.gigapan.com/galleries/10948/gigapans
Doubtless this will be an important resource for our students in the joint EPCC-NOVA field exchange this coming spring semester.