100 Geological Things You've Done In North America (And A Few Other Places Too)

Okay, I'll bite. Geotripper started it, the Geologists' 100 Things meme. I'm with Chris - it does seem very Ameri-centric. Stuff I've done is in bold, commentaries in brackets afterwards.

1. See an erupting volcano.
   
2. See a glacier.
   
3. See an active geyser such as those in Yellowstone, New Zealand or the type locality of Iceland. [Saw Old Faithful in Yellowstone.]
   
4. Visit the Cretaceous/Tertiary (KT) Boundary. Possible locations include Gubbio, Italy, Stevns Klint, Denmark, the Red Deer River Valley near Drumheller, Alberta.
   
5. Observe (from a safe distance) a river whose discharge is above bankful stage. [I lived overlooking the River Cam in Cambridge, and that burst its banks at least once a year.]
   
6. Explore a limestone cave. Try Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico, Lehman Caves in Great Basin National Park, or the caves of Kentucky or TAG (Tennessee, Alabama, and Georgia). [Carlsbad Caverns twice and most of the caverns in the Peak District of the UK.]
   
7. Tour an open pit mine, such as those in Butte, Montana, Bingham Canyon, Utah, Summitville, Colorado, Globe or Morenci, Arizona, or Chuquicamata, Chile.
   
8. Explore a subsurface mine. [Coal mine in Nottinghamshire and mineral mine in Cumbria.]
   
9. See an ophiolite, such as the ophiolite complex in Oman or the Troodos complex on the Island Cyprus (if on a budget, try the Coast Ranges or Klamath Mountains of California). [I'm going to count the one in Evvia, Greece, and in fact the section at the Lizard, Cornwall.]
   
10. An anorthosite complex, such as those in Labrador, the Adirondacks, and Niger (there's some anorthosite in southern California too).
    
11. A slot canyon. Many of these amazing canyons are less than 3 feet wide and over 100 feet deep. They reside on the Colorado Plateau. Among the best are Antelope Canyon, Brimstone Canyon, Spooky Gulch and the Round Valley Draw.
    
12. Varves, whether you see the type section in Sweden or examples elsewhere. [I'm reasonably confident that the layers of sediment in the sinkhole at the Mammoth Site, SD, are varves.]
    
13. An exfoliation dome, such as those in the Sierra Nevada. [I'm sure someone will correct me but I think the Red Cuillins are exfoliation domes.]
    
14. A layered igneous intrusion, such as the Stillwater complex in Montana or the Skaergaard Complex in Eastern Greenland.
    
15. Coastlines along the leading and trailing edge of a tectonic plate (check out The Dynamic Earth - The Story of Plate Tectonics - an excellent website). [Like Chris, is this just posh speak for active and passive margins? If so, I've been to the west and east coasts of the US which I think fulfil the requirements.]
    
16. A gingko tree, which is the lone survivor of an ancient group of softwoods that covered much of the Northern Hemisphere in the Mesozoic. [Ahem. And I have a teeny tiny one in my garden.]
    
17. Living and fossilized stromatolites (Glacier National Park is a great place to see fossil stromatolites, while Shark Bay in Australia is the place to see living ones). [Half point for fossilised ones?]
    
18. A field of glacial erratics. [Most of my mapping area.]
    
19. A caldera. [Played around in a couple in the Betics, and still have a film cannister full of garnets from that hour or so. And does the Yellowstone caldera count?]
    
20. A sand dune more than 200 feet high.
    
21. A fjord.
    
22. A recently formed fault scarp. [It is a well-known fact that, in Greece, rubbish dumps are an indication of a fault scarp. It's quite kind of the Greek people to fly-tip - it shows us where to pull over in the minibuses.]
    
23. A megabreccia.
    
24. An actively accreting river delta. [Saw some beautiful ones flying over the Eastern Seaboard en route to New York this autumn.]
    
25. A natural bridge.
    
26. A large sinkhole. [How large is large? Large enough to drown a couple of dozen mammoths?]
    
27. A glacial outwash plain. [Somewhere in darkest Massachusetts.]
    
28. A sea stack. [The Needles, off the western tip of the Isle of Wight.]
    
29. A house-sized glacial erratic. [There's a massive one somewhere on Cape Cod. I forget where.]
    
30. An underground lake or river. [I'm going to cheat on this one and count Speedwell Cavern, although there is a lake down the bottom somewhere.]
    
    
    
31. The continental divide. [Seen it? My husband's peed on it!]
    
32. Fluorescent and phosphorescent minerals. [Not in situ.]
    
33. Petrified trees. [Petrified Forest National Park and Lulworth Fossil Forest, the latter of which contains a downed tree trunk with large algal mounds either side which provided hours of amusement to a second-year undergrad field trip...]
    
34. Lava tubes.
    
35. The Grand Canyon. All the way down. And back. [Half point for getting halfway down one of the less touristy trails?]
    
36. Meteor Crater, Arizona, also known as the Barringer Crater, to see an impact crater on a scale that is comprehensible. [Oh yeah...]
    
37. The Great Barrier Reef, northeastern Australia, to see the largest coral reef in the world.
    
38. The Bay of Fundy, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, Canada, to see the highest tides in the world (up to 16m).
    
39. The Waterpocket Fold, Utah, to see well exposed folds on a massive scale.
    
40. The Banded Iron Formation, Michigan, to better appreciate the air you breathe.
    
41. The Snows of Kilimanjaro, Tanzania.
    
42. Lake Baikal, Siberia, to see the deepest lake in the world (1,620 m) with 20 percent of the Earth's fresh water.
    
43. Ayers Rock (known now by the Aboriginal name of Uluru), Australia. This inselberg of nearly vertical Precambrian strata is about 2.5 kilometers long and more than 350 meters high.
    
44. Devil's Tower, northeastern Wyoming, to see a classic example of columnar jointing. [And very pretty it looked too.]
    
45. The Alps.
    
46. Telescope Peak, in Death Valley National Park. From this spectacular summit you can look down onto the floor of Death Valley - 11,330 feet below.
    
47. The Li River, China, to see the fantastic tower karst that appears in much Chinese art.
    
48. The Dalmation Coast of Croatia, to see the original Karst.
    
49. The Gorge of Bhagirathi, one of the sacred headwaters of the Ganges, in the Indian Himalayas, where the river flows from an ice tunnel beneath the Gangatori Glacier into a deep gorge.
    
50. The Goosenecks of the San Juan River, Utah, an impressive series of entrenched meanders.
    
51. Shiprock, New Mexico, to see a large volcanic neck.
    
52. Land's End, Cornwall, Great Britain, for fractured granites that have feldspar crystals bigger than your fist. [I made it as far as the Lizard, but I plan to get to Land's End in May 2009.]
    
53. Tierra del Fuego, Chile and Argentina, to see the Straights of Magellan and the southernmost tip of South America.
    
54. Mount St. Helens, Washington, to see the results of recent explosive volcanism.
    
55. The Giant's Causeway and the Antrim Plateau, Northern Ireland, to see polygonally fractured basaltic flows. [There are polygonally fractured basaltic flows on the Spanish Mediterranean coast.]
    
56. The Great Rift Valley in Africa.
    
57. The Matterhorn, along the Swiss/Italian border, to see the classic "horn".
    
58. The Carolina Bays, along the Carolinian and Georgian coastal plain.
    
59. The Mima Mounds near Olympia, Washington.
    
60. Siccar Point, Berwickshire, Scotland, where James Hutton (the "father" of modern geology) observed the classic unconformity. [As Chris does, I accept full credit for seeing Hutton's unconformity on the Isle of Arran.]
    
61. The moving rocks of Racetrack Playa in Death Valley.
    
62. Yosemite Valley.
    
63. Landscape Arch (or Delicate Arch) in Utah.
    
64. The Burgess Shale in British Columbia.
    
65. The Channeled Scablands of central Washington.
    
66. Bryce Canyon.
    
67. Grand Prismatic Spring at Yellowstone.
    
68. Monument Valley.
    
69. The San Andreas fault.
    
70. The dinosaur footprints in La Rioja, Spain.
    
71. The volcanic landscapes of the Canary Islands.
    
72. The Pyrennees Mountains.
    
73. The Lime Caves at Karamea on the West Coast of New Zealand.
    
74. Denali (an orogeny in progress).
    
75. A catastrophic mass wasting event.
    
    
    
76. The giant crossbeds visible at Zion National Park. [And Paul even pretended to be interested in them!]
    
77. The black sand beaches in Hawaii (or the green sand-olivine beaches).
    Barton Springs in Texas.
    
78. Hells Canyon in Idaho.
    
79. The Black Canyon of the Gunnison in Colorado.
    
80. The Tunguska Impact site in Siberia.
    
81. Feel an earthquake with a magnitude greater than 5.0.
    
82. Find dinosaur footprints in situ. [Arizona, Utah, Colorado, Massachusetts.]
    
83. Find a trilobite (or a dinosaur bone or any other fossil). [Dinosaur, ammonites, belemnites, bivalves, brachiopods, crinoids, bryozoa, etc.]
    
84. Find gold, however small the flake.
    
85. Find a meteorite fragment.
    
86. Experience a volcanic ashfall.
    
87. Experience a sandstorm.
    
88. See a tsunami.
    
89. Witness a total solar eclipse.
    
90. Witness a tornado firsthand.
    
91. Witness a meteor storm, a term used to describe a particularly intense (1000+ per minute) meteor shower.
    
92. View Saturn and its moons through a respectable telescope.
    
93. See the Aurora borealis, otherwise known as the northern lights. [I was flying back home after the shitstorm that was Wash U, and the French bloke next to me on the plane woke me up to show me the Aurora through the window.]
    
94. View a great naked-eye comet, an opportunity which occurs only a few times per century. [Most of us Brits at least are quite fortunate to have seen Hale-Bopp over a decade ago. There was another one that only appeared for a couple of days a year or two ago.]
    
95. See a lunar eclipse. [A couple actually. The moon looks freaky when it's all red like that.]
    
96. View a distant galaxy through a large telescope.
    
97. Experience a hurricane.
    
98. See noctilucent clouds.
    
99. See the green flash.

Well I got 33, if my arithmetic is still vaguely functional. Silver Fox commented that she got about one item ticked off for every year. That means I'm about five years ahead of schedule...