CATACLYSMIC FORCE: THE BUILDING OF BC

Waterfront Property fetches a high price today, even in this economy. Investing early is clearly the way to go. We've all heard tales of folk who bought up acreage in the early days for pennies and much to their delight, the bit of land they chose is now worth millions.

How early is early is a matter of perspective. Some 270 million plus years ago, had one wanted to buy waterfront property in what is now British Columbia, you’d be looking somewhere between Prince George and the Alberta border. The rest of the province had yet to arrive but would be made up of over twenty major terranes from around the Pacific.

The rock that would eventually become the Cariboo Mountains and form the lakes and valleys of Bowron was far out in the Pacific Ocean, down near the equator. With tectonic shifting, these rocks drifted north-eastward, riding their continental plate, until they collided with and joined the Cordillera in the Pacific Northwest and helped to shape British Columbia.

Continued pressure and volcanic activity pushed and shoved, sculpting the tremendous slopes of the Cariboo Range we see today. Repeated bouts of glaciation during the Pleistocene carved the valleys and mountainside into the slightly smoother finish we see today. Wish I'd been around to stake a claim, even a little bit earlier... land as far as the eye can see... open vistas... and all for a penny.

The image above was taken from a jet ranger helicopter on the way to the fossil exposures near Castle Peak. I've flown in many times to search for exquisite Hettangian ammonites. These extinct cephalopods, now find high in the rockies, lived in the open ocean while BC was still being formed.

HORNBY ISLAND PALEONTOLOGY

Hornby, one of the northern Gulf Islands on the west coast of British Columbia, draws me back year upon year. Both for its picture perfect sunny days, stormy seas and the island's own rugged beauty.

Hornby also has some of the best preserved fossil specimens of the Pacific Northwest. Many species of ammonites (mainly Pachydiscus), crabs, bivalves, sharks teeth, echinoids, wood and bone can be found in the Upper Cretaceous shales and concretions of the Lambert Formation. Interestingly, they are remarkably similar to the ones you find in the French and Tamil areas of Pondicherry, India, telling us a great deal about what was happening back in the Maastrichtian some 70-million years ago.

If you happen to find yourself in Pondicherry, be sure to take in the exceptional cuisine and fossils at Thriuvakkarai. Photo by Tina Beard, beautiful friend and artist, on a particularly lovely afternoon.

FOSSILS FROM THE PARIS BASIN

QUARTZITE KIND OF BLUE

Paddling in time to the wind, I soak up the view of Isaac Lake, a vast, deep green, ocean-like expanse that runs L-shape for nearly 38 kilometres. The strata I paddle past is primarily calcareous phyllite, limestone and quartzite, typical of the type locality for this group and considered upper Proterozoic, the time in our geologic history between the first algae and the first multicellular animals.

It is striking how much this scene fits exactly how you might picture pristine wilderness paddling in your mind’s eye. No power boats, no city hum, just pure silence, broken only by the sound of my paddle pulling through the water and the occasional burst of glee from one of the park’s many songbirds. Somewhere in the back of my head Miles Davis is working through Kind of Blue, in time to the wind and my slow, smooth strokes - perfect pairing for this lazy day.

EYE ON THE PRIZE: PACIFIC OCTOPUS

THROW ANOTHER SHRIMP ON THE BARBIE

What looked to be a small stroke of genius in the fight against global warming has resulted in huge disaster.

Planktos, a California-based company that sells “carbon credits” to businesses looking to reduce their carbon footprint and contribution to global emissions has been taken down by a swarm of shrimp. They had planned to harness the photosynthetic power of algae to lower greenhouse gases.

Algae come cheap, requiring light and water. They also require iron, which may be the sixth most abundant element in the Universe, but still relatively rare in the ocean. The small bits algae utilize are blown in by the wind and runoff from rivers and streams.

While some scientists and environmental groups object to their plan fearing harmful changes to the ecosystem, Planktos went ahead and dumped a hundred tons of iron dust mixed with seawater into international waters off the coast of the Argentina.

Expecting a plankton bloom and carbon credit riches to follow, their plans were literally eaten alive by a swarm of algae-loving shrimp. They did get their bloom, but it was not the algae they were expecting.

Instead of large diatom algae, they got millions and millions of haptophytes, a tiny algae common in the open ocean and extremely abundant in the fossil record. They are also the fellows responsible for the white foam you sometimes see on the edge of beaches.

Most importantly, however, they are the food of choice for the equally common copepod, a shrimp-like crustacean who complete with krill for forming the largest animal biomass on earth. And perhaps, having the largest appetite.

Sometimes brilliance arises from thinking outside the box. Sometimes not. The copepods ate all the haptophytes and Planktos' dreams. It seems the wee shrimp-like fellows didn’t get the memo. Instead they got an all you can eat coupon to a fine seafood buffet.

HIGH-ELEVATION ICE CAPADE

Our base camp near the Tyaughton fossil exposures, Taseko Lake area, British Columbia.

ROCKIES: FOSSIL FIELD TRIP

BORN OF FIRE: DECAYING BEAUTY

TIDE POOL DWELLERS: GREEN ANEMONES

BLUE PLANET EXPLORER: EN PROVENCE

INTENSE LIGHT AND DARK

A`LA CARTE: ICY COLD SCIENCE

Summer is coming. The time of camping and icy cold drinks. I've been working on developing a freeze dried beer that comes in a small pack and rehydrates fully carbonated with all its alcohol intact. Once it goes to market you can say you knew me when. In the meantime, I can help with getting that warm six pack or vodka cooler cold in minutes. Geeky, yes, and yet you'll be so much more popular at summer parties.

Understanding how salt and ice interact will save you from many a warm bevvie this summer. Water freezes at 32 degrees F. (0 degrees C ) When the compound salt is added to water and ice, a new solution with a lower freezing temperature is formed. As the salt and ice molecules mix, the melting ice takes up heat energy from its surroundings and the surrounding water cools down fast.

Why should you care? Well, this little scientific nugget can keep you from ever having to drink warm drinks again. Instead of dropping your warm beverages into a cooler with ice, try adding water and a healthy dose of salt. And, there's no need to worry if some of that salt spills over into your drink. A little salt is good for you. Balances the electrolytes and makes tequila go down easier.

If you are in North America, you will likey be using iodized salt, which is table salt mixed with a minute amount of potassium iodide, sodium iodide, or sodium iodate. Iodized salt is used to bump up the amount of iodine in our systems and protect us from endemic goiter, a thyroid condition that arises from lack of iodine. In Europe, sodium fluoride or potassium fluoride is the more common additive, especially if they do not add fluoride to their drinking water. You may notice this in France. You'll also notice a slight yellowish tinge to the salt. Don't panic. Different culprit than yellow snow. They add a wee bit of Vitamin B9, hence the discoloration.

No matter which salt you choose, bada bing... icy cold bevvies in minutes.

ROMANIA: 35,000 YEAR-OLD HUMAN REMAINS

If Van Helsing were poking around Transylvania these days, chances are he'd be more likely to be looking for the decaying remains of 35,000 year old humans than blood drinking vampires. Romania's dark history extends back way past the days of Vlad.

It seems vampires and ghouls aside, something darker and much more interesting lurks in that eastern belly. I travelled to Transylvania last year and spent some time in Cluj, the newly minted anthro-capital of Romania. I was lucky enough to brush shoulders and prep tools with paleoanthropologists working on a new find that changes what we know about early human activity in Eastern Europe.

The remains of a man, woman and teenage boy -- the first Romanian family if you will... tell the most complete picture of what our ancestors were like some 35,000 years ago, shedding a bit of light on a black box in history. International scientists have been carrying out further analysis to get a clearer picture on the find, said anthropologist Erik Trinkaus, of Washington University in St. Louis.

It is clear that, "this is the most complete collection of modern humans in Europe older than 28,000 years," he told The Associated Press. "We are very excited about it," And they have reason to be. The find is changing perceptions about modern humans. Romanian recreational cavers unearthed the remains of three facial bones last year, and gave them to Romanian scientists. Romanian scientists asked Trinkaus to analyze the fossils, and he traveled to the Romanian city of Cluj this week with Portuguese scientist Joao Zilhao , a fossil specialist.

They also found a jawbone that belonged to a man who could have been around 35. Silhao also found part of a skull and teeth belonging to a teenage male, and female temporal bone.

"This was 25,000 years before agriculture. Certainly they were hunters," said Trinkaus . He said the bones were discovered in the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains . Trinkaus said the humans would have had religious beliefs, used stone tools, and a well-defined social system and lived in a period in during which early modern humans overlapped with late surviving Neanderthals in Europe.

Humans survived because the area was ecologically variable being close the Banat plain and close to the mountains. A team of international scientists from the United States , Norway , Portugal and Britain will return to the cave to continue their field work next year. Look out Van Helsing, there are new kids in town and they look to be very, very interesting.

DINOSAUR DISCOVERY IN TUMBLER RIDGE

Today is the First Annual Peace Region Palaeontology Symposium in Tumbler Ridge, an an important milestone for Tumbler Ridge and the Peace Region. Daniel Helm's find of dinosaur tracks along a river near the town of Tumbler Ridge sparked a new paleo craze in the town. I met with Daniel and Charles Helm back in 2005 at the British Columbia Paleontological Symposium. The photo above is from their original workshop that has now blossomed into a fully operation paleontological centre.

Congrats to the Peace Region Palaeontological Society! I'm sure this symposium marks the first of many great educational events.

GODS & CEPHALOPODS

A great temple to the god Amon was built at Karnak in Upper Egypt around c. 1785. It is from Amon that we get his cephalopod namesake, the ammonites and also the name origin for the compound ammonia or NH3.

Ammonites were a group of hugely successful complex molluscs that looked like the still extant Nautilus, a coiled shellfish that lives off the southern coast of Asia. While the Nautilus lived on, ammonites graced our waters from around 400 million years ago until the end of the Cretaceous, 65 million years ago.

Varying in size from millimeters to meters across, ammonites are prized as both works of art and index fossils, geological time markers, helping us date rock. They have proven especially useful for proving time markers for the strata of the Cretaceous System along the west coast of North America.

The ammonites with their hard exoskeleton, chambers and soft interior, were kissing cousins in the Class Cephalopoda, meaning "head-footed," closely related to modern squid, cuttlefish and octopus. Cephalopods have a complex eye structure and were excellent swimmers. Ammonites used these evolutionary benefits to their advantage, making them one of the most successful marine predators of ancient Cretaceous seas.

MUSEO DI STORIA NATURALE DI FIRENZE

MISTY EVENING: BOWRON LAKES

TASEKO LAKE FOSSILS

PADDLING WIDGEON ESTUARY

Interested in getting out on the water? Head out for a relaxing day paddle or overnight to Widgeon Estuary. The paddling is easy. You can do the trip via kayak or canoe and can stay for the night or do it as a day trip. I like to to camp near the base of the trail to the falls.

There is nothing better than to cruise flat water with rippling reflections of big snowy mountains cascading off your bow. The estuary of Widgeon Creek at the south end of Pitt Lake at Grant Narrows is the perfect place to enjoy this sensation.

If you like quiet peaceful waterways teaming with bird life this is the place to go for the whole estuary is a protected bird sanctuary. After making the 300m crossing of Grant Narrows, expect to see tons of waterfowl and other species from herons to harlequins that make this area their habitat. You might even see a fleeting glimpse of muskrat or beaver if you are lucky.

If Widgeon Creek is high in the spring or early summer you can paddle quite a distance up under lazy overhanging branches draped in moss and lichen. Huge lush ferns and skunk cabbage line the shoreline in the marshy areas and neat little gravel bars are gathered in the bends of the creek. When you are there you will be amazed that you can be so close to the city yet so far away.

A campsite is located near the west end of the estuary if you want to stay longer. This is probably best to do in the shoulder season when it isn't so busy. If the water is high more secluded sites are located up the river.

EIGHTH BC PALEONTOLOGICAL SYMPOSIUM

KWAK'WAKA'WAKW MATRILINE AND PATRILINE

The Kwakwaka’wakw are characterized by a particular iconographic promiscuity, a tendency to mobilize a diverse set of visual, material, or performative signs that index their individual standings. There may be various explanations for this. 

The Kwakwaka’wakw are geographically and culturally at the point on the central coast where the strictly matrilineal groups of the north (e.g., Tlingit, Haida, Tsimshian) give way to more patrilineal and less clan/crest-based patterns of descent in the south (Nuu-Chah-Nulth and Coast Salish), and they have long been known as the grand synthesizers of the region. 

Bilateral reckoning of Kwakwaka’wakw descent entails the claiming of crest images and personal prerogatives from both the matriline and patriline, increasing the number of images an individual might legitimately display. 

They developed and maintained through the assimilationist period the most elaborate system of restricted ceremonial performance of the famous ‘‘secret’’ or ‘‘dance’’ societies described by Franz Boas (1897) and Philip Drucker (1940) which is predicated on rather flexible and negotiated hereditary rights to (often multiple) ritual dramas and the accompanying regalia (see Roth 2002:144). 

The Kwakwaka’wakw have long proved remarkably amenable to participating in their own ethnographic representation, from adapting their visual motifs and performances to intercultural contexts of display, to applying the technologies and institutions of modernity to their own modes of cultural production (Glass 2004, 2006)

AMMONITE COQUINA

CASTLE PEAK: CANADIAN ROCKIES

PALEO FIELD TRIP :: TASEKO LAKES

GOAT: CAPRA AEGAGRUS HIRCUS

 

ALBERTASAURUS

PAIX ET TRANQUILITÉ

SOLAR PERFECTION: ENGLISH BAY