ESCONI Earth Science Club of Northern Illinois

What Are Your Memories of ESCONI?

On this anniversary year, it would be fun to have people share their memories of ESCONI.

You can send your thoughts to the email of the ESCONI web administrator, who will post to the web site -  diannal20@yahoo.com You can send photographs too!

Read Any Good Earth Science Books Lately?

I just finished Snowball Earth and would recommend it. The book is about the "... controversial hypothesis asserts that about 600 million years ago, the entire planet was encased in ice that was thicker and lasted millennia longer than in any previously recognized ice age. Instantaneously in geologic time, the hypothesis continues, the planet moved from temperatures averaging minus 40 degrees centigrade to sweltering heat unlike anything seen since..."

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Musings on 60 Years Of ESCONI by Karen Nordquist

As I try to put together a slide show for the 60 year anniversary party, I marvel at what this club has been through over the years.  I myself have only been here for about the last ten years having found ESCONI late in my life unfortunately.  I seem to have missed the really great years when there was a larger membership with a very active bunch of people running all the groups including not just one Juniors group but several.  Those were the good old days.  I see that membership was over 600 back in the sixties.  What has happened today that has shrunk our club and not just our club but all the clubs?  There used to be a large number of very active clubs all over the Chicago area that were running shows and field trips every year.

Times are changing and people must be doing other things with their time rather than spending it outside looking for fossils or minerals or archaeological sites or making jewelry.  It’s true that it is becoming harder to do some of these things – quarries are becoming more restrictive and sites are harder to find, but it can be done.  But it is still fun to sort through these fossils and minerals and identify them and organize them and share them with others who are interested in them. 

Congratulations ESCONI - 60 Years!

60 years ago today, the thirteen founding members came together for the first ESCONI meeting. You can read the minutes of their first meeting.

As part of the celebrations, ESCONI will have a special 60th anniversary meeting and a special presentation on Friday, December 4th at College of Dupage, Room K-131, 8:00 pm.

Before this special meeting, everyone is invited to attend the annual ESCONI holiday celebration, 5:30-7:30 pm, Greek Islands West, 300 East 22nd Street, Lombard, Illinois, (630) 932-4545. The party is dutch - that is, you will pay your own check. Secret Santa grab bag (optional).  Please RSVP by December 1st to Rob Sula,(630) 236-9695, sulasaurus@comcast.net.

The new banner at the top of the web page was created to recognize ESCONI's 60 year celebration. Many thanks go Andrew Young and Marie Angkuw for working with me and sharing their collaborative ideas and feedback on the numerous iterations of the banner design.

Crowdsourcing Science

I'm fascinated by crowd sourcing in technology and science.The most well-known example of crowd sourcing is Wikipedia, which defines crowd sourcing as:

... the act of taking tasks traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing it to a group (crowd) of people or community in the form of an open call.For example, the public may be invited to develop a new technology, carry out a design task (also known as community-based design^[1] and distributed participatory design), refine or carry out the steps of an algorithm (see Human-based computation), or help capture, systematize or analyze large amounts of data (see also citizen science).

The term has become popular with business authors and journalists as shorthand for the trend of leveraging the mass collaboration enabled by Web 2.0 technologies to achieve business goals. However, both the term and its underlying business models have attracted controversy and criticisms.

I like the idea of crowd sourcing because it appeals to my hope for our world.'

I've seen it work for Wikipedia, where an ESCONI member, Karen Nordquist, added material.

But I've also heard recent criticisms that crowd sourcing is usually the hard work of a small number of people.

So I was heartened to see how well Galaxy Zoo is doing:

The original Galaxy Zoo was launched in July 2007, with a data set made up of a million galaxies imaged with the robotic telescope of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. With so many galaxies, the team thought that it might take at least two years for visitors to the site to work through them all. Within 24 hours of launch, the site was receiving 70,000 classifications an hour, and more than 50 million classifications were received by the project during its first year, from almost 150,000 people.

I wish The Open Dinosaur Project  much success.

Can You Identify?

A reader writes in,

"... I have been doing countless web searches in hopes to find someone in IL who can help me out with a rather interesting find (and it looks like I might have found the right people).While I was vacationing down in Northern Florida (around the Jacksonville Area), I came across an large interesting rock washed up on the shore....

I searched online and I couldn’t find anything that matched its size nor its weight (around 30lbs). It has various ‘leaf’ looking things inside it as well as a few different colorations varying from the orange to a greenish blue color. All in all, it is absolutely amazing looking for whatever it is....

I was hoping either someone in ESCONI could help me out or at least point me in the direction of someone who might be able to tell me what exactly this rock is. I would love to know just for my sake and also to learn how to best preserve this beautiful piece of whatever it is..."

Sincerely, B.N.

The reader, B.N. who gave permission to print her letter and photograph, has been invited to bring her find to an ESCONI Minerology meeting or the ESCONI Gem Mineral Fossil Show because that is the best way to get an informed identification.

But this time, I thought the photograph and her description was good enough to make it possible to make a plausible guess...

Can you help out this reader/rock hound? What do you think it is?

African Rockhounds

Betsy and I have been members of our local rock club since 1977. The Earth Science Club Of Northern Illinois, ESCONI, played a large role in our family’s lives as the older members shared their finds and their knowledge with Becky and Lisa as they grew into young ladies. So it should come as no surprise that we joined a club in Cape Town this year.

The Cape Town Gem and Mineral Club has a narrower scope than ESCONI, focusing on minerals and lapidary. They are quite active, holding monthly sales, swaps, programs and barbeques as well as the occasional field trip. The field trip opportunity was the final straw on our decision to join as it was a “members only” event.

Vredendal is a medium-sized town about a three hour drive north of Cape Town. We were to meet the other members of the club at nine in the morning at the mine. Since we had to drive some narrow roads through mountains to get there, we went up the night before.

You can see our Volvo wagon parked in the middle of the line of cars waiting for the signal to move into the mine.

First, of course, is the mandatory lecture covering safe practices and what we might expect to find in this quarry. Notice the small quartz crystal that the club president is holding. Perhaps that specimen established a level of expectation within the prospectors?

So we went in to the Vredendal dolomite quarry.

“The Cape Lime Company dolomite quarry is really a series of quarries excavated into the rocky bluffs on either side of a shallow gorge cut by the Wiedo River as it approaches the town of Vredendal. These hillsides have been terraced in various places by the mining activity, exposing the blue-grey dolomite rock, which is extracted and crushed for use in high temperature resistant refractory ceramics.”

 

“In one particular location there are at least two parallel quartz veins which host all the interesting mineralization. The veins in the “quartz” quarry are about 1m apart, undulate somewhat, and vary in thickness from a few centimeters to pockets up to 0.4m in diameter. The pockets contain the well-crystallized mineral specimens, while the intervening vein material is often very sheared, with the appearance of being crushed. When they have been excavated, it is clear that the pockets are elongated pod-shaped features within the veins. The quartz veins also underwent both shearing and tension, to create the voids, which subsequently formed the crystal pockets. The pockets themselves are filled with orange sandy clay into which crystals project from the walls, with some “floaters” or loose doubly terminated crystals in the clay itself.”

 “Excavation of the pockets is hazardous because the rock above the veins is severely fractured by explosives used to break open the face. In some places the vertical quarry walls are several tens of meters high, so the risk of falling rocks is considerable, especially with people working on the face at various levels. It is mandatory that anyone working on the quarry face must wear a hard hat. The pockets may be narrow, but some of them reach at least 2m in length and diggers sometimes can only be identified by their shoes. The soft sandy clay is dug out using a variety of tools, including discarded pieces of iron found around the quarry. Loose crystals are recovered from the clay itself, while crystal clusters must be pried off the pocket walls.”

Some of the clearer quartz crystals include red, golden, or black rutile (TiO2) needles. We found one but needed some bright sunlight and imagination to really see the needle.

There are many other collectible minerals along with the quartz crystals. Crystals of dolomite, calcite, and adularia feldspar (shown) are also found both in the pockets and scattered on the ground as a result of the mining operations.

We also enjoyed the base rock with frequent displays of the dendrites you find in limestone formations. They look so much like actual moss growing on the rock.

We had a great time, made some new friends, got scraped up a bit – altogether terrific.

The quotes in this journal entry are from an article in the March 2006 edition of the South African Lapidary Magazine, used with permission of the editor (Allan Fraser) and the article author (and our good friend, Duncan Miller).

Floyd

Jack Wittry Presents at the General Meeting on 9-11-09, by Andrew Young

                   

     There was certainly a back-to-school atmosphere at the General Meeting last Friday, with attending members full of stories and finds after the club’s summer recess. As people paraded into the classroom, many had cardboard trays, specimen cases or plastic bags carrying carefully split fossil concretions pertaining to that evening’s lecture topic. After some special announcements, Jack Wittry, author of the beautiful and informative book entitled, The Mason Creek Fossil Flora, presented a standing-room only talk on his specialty. Not only was his delivery and organization clear – making sense of the, often time, fragmented evidence of the fossil record – but he cleverly introduced his hypothesis of events in the area with published material from over 150 year ago.

     Edmund Tyrell Artis titled his first printed and illustrated treatment of prehistoric flora, Antediluvian Phytology, with an obvious Biblical reference meaning, “before the flood.” As all Mazon Creek enthusiasts know, it is the classic scenario of rapid burial that has brought us the splendid phenomenon and preservations within siderite concretions. It has been supposed from early on that nodules existing under many layers of chemically consistent sediment – in places, 60 feet of it – indicate a dramatic, one might say, cataclysmic event.

                 

     Reconstruction of prehistoric plants and ecosystems is a puzzle game of many pieces. Mr. Wittry methodically and comprehensibly brought the captive audience through the six general groups of plant life found in the fossil record of Mazon Creek, a Pennsylvanian Period landscape. Sometimes disparate parts of a single plant species can be assigned to entirely different genera by form, and some remain in basket categories with no biologically-specific assignment at all. It took Mr. Wittry to help this student of fossil flora to fully understand the leaf-(seed)-bark-root relationships, establishing a more certain diversity in each of the “form-taxa,” as well as the relative distribution of these plants and their heights, in wetter or drier climes.

                 

     North central Illinois was nearly equatorial 300 million-years ago, plus or minus about ten degrees. Bordered by shallow brackish bays and river systems, the swamps and forests lived in longer years and over shorter days, with an oxygen content nearly 50% greater than it is today. By the evidence of deeply laid silt (now shale), and the preservation of sometimes complete vertical trunks of scale trees, we can begin to comprehend the enormity of the flooding event of that time. For the fact that some true fern species were represented in the fossil record almost entirely in a fertile form, and others were not at all, seems to indicate a relatively thin slice of time in the course of the plants’ destruction, redistribution and burial. Mr. Wittry theorized that it must have been a matter of weeks, not months or years, and the fossil record a virtual “snapshot” of life at that time.  And, just as remarkably, we now know that the age of this momentous occurrence is 307 million years.

  After the lecture, the audience had numerous questions to which Mr. Wittry gave careful attention. Many of the visitors brought their own Mazon Creek discoveries, seeking expert identification for the species, as well as validation, I suppose, as a true participant in this bounty of information and beautiful preservations. I felt a sense of privilege among the exhibitors and storytellers, those of us who jockey and lift ourselves to gaze into that window of Illinois so many years ago, and the consequence of a flood in that time of near-biblical proportions.

                 

     To see more images from the General Meeting, or new pictures from Lonestar Quarry (2008), go to Photo Albums in the left column.

Got Mazon Creek Fossils?

Do you have 1-2 Mazon Creek fossils that you would be willing to part with?

I'm asking on behalf of a geology teacher in LaCross Wis. who wants to teach her kids about Mazon Creek and to show her class some example fossils. Ms. Frisby is also the president of the Coulee Region Rock Club in LaCrosse, Wisconsin.

So, if you have a one or two Mazon fossils that you would like to part with, you can bring it to the Friday, Sept. 11th General Meeting and I'll collect and  send on in the following week.

Book Recommendations Wanted

What are your favorite earth science books?

Tell us... by sending an email to "diannal20@yahoo.com" or by leaving a comment on this post.  Books will be added to a new feature of the web site - a list of ESCONI member favorite earth science books...

How You Can Post to ESCONI Site

All ESCONI members can post to this site.  Currently four members are set up to post.

If you would like to post to the site, send me an e-mail at "diannal20@yahoo.com" (remove the quotations) and I'll send you information on how to get setup to post to the site.

So far, members have posted on trips, meetings and finds. Select the Member Posts option from the menu on the left to see member posts.

Want to Be Notified of ESCONI Web Posts?

If you would like to be notified by email of new ESCONI web posts, look at the bottom right of the screen for the Notifixious button. Click the button and follow the instructions to sign up for automatic updates.

Copper Country Mineral Retreat

Last week, Garrison Keillor said Lutherans go on vacation to become better people - not for pleasure. It is so for me - I was brought up Lutheran.

So I'm back from our family vacation from Houghton, Michigan and the Copper Country Mineral Retreat and I've came back vowing to be a better person - e.g., train my dog (another story), inventory new rocks (instead of letting them sit in the garage) and move to Houghton, MI to work at Fiber Whims. It was a bonus that the vacation in Keweenaw was a pleasure.

I fell in love with the beauty of the area and the kind people.

Ooops... I'm off topic. Rocks.

Notes on the Braceville field trip of 5-16-09, by Andrew Young.

          

     Anyone who’s traveled I-55 toward St. Louis, say, an hour or so outside of Chicago, has likely spotted a number of large, anomalous, volcano-like piles spread out on private property along old Rt. 66. Almost without vegetation, they are other-worldly and towering above the grain fields around them. The “spoil heap” of Braceville, Illinois, is no exception; in fact, it may be the most distinctive and alluring of these remnants from the shaft mining days over a hundred years ago.

     Braceville was a burgeoning coal mining settlement of the late 19th century, and once claimed 3,500 residents at its height in the 1870’s. High quality coal was discovered not far below the ground which supplied many localities in northeastern Illinois, including a rapidly growing (and energy needy) Chicago. Longwall mining systems employed in England were replicated in Will and Grundy counties, using an intricate lattice of wood-supported shafts, rail cars and mule teams to extract the coal. According to the records, the town sported six general merchandise stores, two banks, a hotel, two restaurants and 18 other retailers that thrived until the summer of 1910 when the miners of the Braceville Coal Company went on strike. Instead of negotiating with its employees, the ownership simply closed the operation and, within months, the town was all but abandoned, leaving behind an opera house, a large-frame school and many empty businesses.

         

     A by-product of extracting anything from the earth is usually a disproportionate amount of waste material: usually stone, sometimes toxic. The undesirable rock – in this case, Francis Creek Shale – was conveyed into giant cone-shaped heaps and left to dissolve back to the earth. Aside from the unusual scale and placement of these “gob piles,” one would have little notion today that they were industrial at all, much less part of an important economic shift in the Midwest. Save for a few shards of wooden plank, rusted metal rings and spikes, and, of course, weathered-out chunks of coal, there is virtually no evidence of the great structures and process that transformed the region. 

    

     For all of the coal mining days past and beyond, it’s been known that concretions containing fossils were a residue of the operation. More often a hazard to the miners (indicating weaker shaft ceilings), they were once harvested for the iron they contained. Imagine railroad cars full of concretions heading for smelting in the blast furnaces of Indiana and Missouri...Today, we scour these heaps looking for nodules and the treasures they might contain. It’s not only an inversion of value, but a race against time; a hundred years or more of exposure to the elements grants access both to the collector and to the acids of rain and decaying sulfurous coal, even lightning, in this case. Red, ochre, and black seams in the eroded sides of the pile indicate the presence of nodules, but also of oxidation – the enemy to any fair fossil preservation. On the discovery side, it’s a matter of who will get to the center of a stone first: the eager collector – who will employ the patience-testing freeze/thaw technique, or render an expedient, if not more risky, hammer blow – or Nature herself, with winter and water reducing a once-hard concretion to silt and sand, thus erasing any evidence of prehistoric life.   

                                                

     A visit to the Braceville spoil pile last year through ESCONI granted me a couple of buckets full of rocks in various shapes and sizes. To be honest, I had no real idea of what I was looking for, save that a concretion, I knew, is harder than its surrounding matrix. Most were encrusted, and some even corrupted by oxidation all the way through. I heard that the more classically round or ovoid nodules typically contained jellies, and that very much proved to be the case. More spherical or flattened stones could yield other sorts of animals, or even a fern, but most of those were frustratingly blank and have been since relegated to the status of garden decoration.

    

     It is fascinating to consider the intensity with which we fossil “hunters” search for these elusive concretions. Some of us come equipped with picks and shovels similar to the very tools used when the material was moved the first time. Boots and hammers allow us to scramble up the slippery gullies; bags and buckets harbor the coveted finds for later investigation. Though fossiling appears in so many ways to be a solitary activity – competitive, almost protective – I heard many whispers among the muddied visitors this year as to high-value insects being found at Braceville: last year, a Tully Monster. People showed off their prizes to one another, even raised unopened stones for the power they must have. I truly understand this latter impulse, for I have a few large and “perfect” unopened concretions that I’ve decided will remain this way. Knowing that we must practically destroy the stone to get inside it and, in all likelihood, it is blank or “only” a jelly, I have thought to stay in that zone of mystery in the process:  the historic unearthing and casting as “waste,” the assault of the elements and reburial, the new value we place on the object, its discovery and removal. With all due respect to scholarship and the unrivaled specimens the concretions of Mazon Creek provide, the point of highest potential, intention, enigma and magic for me is the surviving concretion discovered, complete and in hand…300 million years in the waiting.  Some will have to hold their secrets just a little longer.

        

     Note: The Braceville spoil pile is on private property and the owners have been generous to grant us limited group access for fossil collecting. Please respect this privilege and stay tuned for future field trips organized by ESCONI posted on this website.

     To see more pictures from the Braceville field trip, click on the Mazon Creek Collecting title in Photo Albums.

Snow Rollers on the Prairie

From NOAA: "... They form with light but sticky snow and strong (but not too strong) winds. Some snow rollers are formed by gravity (i.e. rolling down a hill), but in this case, the snow rollers were generated by the wind..."

Local Native Americans Buried in Blue Wing Cemetery

Recently, through the kindness of part-time Lake Delton resident and neighbor Mary Fairchild, my wife and I were able to revisit the Blue Wing Cemetery near Tomah.  Mary is interested in Indian mounds and is rapidly becoming an authority on the subject.

 

The entrance to the Blue Wing Cemetery with spirit houses in the background.

We also visited the Decorah – Red Cloud Cemetery near Black River Falls. 

Ho-Chunk Cemeteries that are exclusively Indian still have mounds in them which if properly covered with soil and seeded with grass lends charm to the cemetery.  If not they look like just another pile of dirt.  But the mounds are evidence that the local Indians are descended from the mound builders such as we have at Kingsley Bend as burial practices are among the last to change. 

There are also spirit houses on many older graves.  These resemble little dog houses in the size of a coffin that are placed on top of graves.  We do not see them in the Spring Grove Indian Cemetery because the practice is not permitted there.

These spirit houses provided a place for the deceased person’s spirit to dwell until he/she returned to Manitou.  I did not see any new ones since we were there 20 years ago and all of them still present were mostly in a state of disrepair, but the building of mounds on graves continued unabated. 

Blue Wing Cemetery is named for Ah-Who-Chloe-Ga which is Ho-Chunk for Blue Wing.  He used to live south of Reedsburg in Narrows Prairie where he was known to the white people as Artichoker.  His stone says he lived 149 years and died sometime after 1877.  Other reports by relatives say he lived to be 114.

My grandmother’s cousin, whose father used to live there as a boy in 1846, wrote me years ago that her father, George Barringer, used to play with him as a boy.  Since George was born in 1840 these dates do not reconcile very well with either of these advanced ages.

Blue Wing, like Old Decorah, got along well with both whites and Indians.  His stone calls him the last true Chief of his band.  After his death the band ceased as an organized group.

The cemetery seemed to have deteriorated somewhat since the last time we were there.  This is partly because spring cleanup had not yet been done.  Also, the lot next door was an unsightly collection of implements and old cars.

Here in Blue Wing Cemetery lies the final resting place of Roger (Little Eagle) Tallmadge who died in Saudi Arabia while on a goodwill tour in 1979.  He was well known in the Dells/Delton area as a prominent speaker.  He is buried only a stride from the Blue Wing marker.  Nearby is his son Randy who died a couple years ago.

 

Ross Curry kneels by the grave of Roger (Little Eagle) Tallmadge.

Also well known to Dells area residents is Richard Day who is buried near his parents and Howard Windlowe who often visited my parents house. 

Nathan Bird who I met several times years ago is also interred here.  Many of the other names in the cemetery are families that I heard of but I did not personally know.  There are numerous mounds and old spirit houses in the cemetery.

Next week we hope to have more detailed life of Blue Wing and after that one on the Old Decorah/Red Cloud Cemetery.

 

 

This article was published in the “Wisconsin Dells Events,” Wednesday, April 22, 2009, http://www.wiscnews.com/wde/ , and was posted  by Mary Fairchild with permission by it’s author Ross M. curry.  Ross Curry is a local Dells historian and author.  Contact him at rcurrysr@verizon.net .

  

Reflections on the Paleo Group Meeting of 4-18-09, by Andrew Young

                           

Having been born on the East Coast and schooled in the West, I always lived in some proximity to oceans or mountains. Once I moved to the Midwest, the nature activities I knew as a child – mainly shell collecting – seemed absent. Our region has its huge lakes and evident glacial features in the north, but little did I know that we inhabitants of the center of this continent are also standing on millions of years of accumulated marine sediments. “Shell collecting,” as I knew it, that impulse to discover, sort and identify elements of our surroundings, is actually very apparent, here, just shifted somewhat by age. And the “beaches” are less active boundaries between water and earth, rather fossil preservations of ancient aquatic landscapes.

On the evening of April 18th, Dave Dolak, ESCONI member and professor at Columbia College, delivered a fascinating lecture on the paleontological history of Northeastern Illinois. Just in the last three years, I have had the privilege to venture into some of the rock quarries of our state and collect just as I did as a child on Cape Cod. Of course, fossils become apparent to us more often in areas of disturbance:  quarries, mines and road cuts. It’s somewhat ironic, actually, that a variably destructive action on the environment can bring as an indirect effect the most interesting evidence of prehistoric ecology. We fossilers are in constant lookout for the newest construction site, the next access to a giant hole in the ground, or permission to explore a gully or river bed on private property. The prizes, I suppose, are the specimens, of which there were many for show-and-tell at this gathering, but to contextualize the individual pieces in the larger environment makes it all the more rich.

                                     

Mr. Dolak did an excellent job of presenting not only compelling aerial and ground level images of the canyons and quarries themselves – the finds from these sources now in cotton-white boxes with accompanying labels – but provided chart geologic reconstructions of the sites as they once were, oh, 400 plus million years ago. My favorite of all, and I think a project that takes most people’s breath away, is the Thorton Quarry south of Chicago, bisected by highway 80. Driving over the middle of the crater, who can’t help but think of fossils, or at least the set of a science fiction movie. Having scuba dived over my lifetime on reefs and pinnacles, I was mesmerized by the scale of what had been discovered and diagramed to be an enormous, mountainous coral head, the frequency of fossils indicating exactly its orientation to rougher waters. My only thought from that point on was to imagine standing inside the place, staring at the blasted walls.

Glaciers, I’m learning, did us a favor in a way to scrape off some layers of sedimentary stone and reveal others of varying ages throughout Illinois. I have lived in the city of Chicago for some years, but never fully grasped that just below the surface is this quiet, patient ocean tomb so ancient we can hardly fathom it. We reconstruct its biology, its geology, its evolution. And, we take small treasures from its edges. Mines and quarries are like wounds in the landscape, but - like Nature herself – they deliver to our curiosity and imagination. Saturday’s meeting was a wonderful collection of specimens of the Silurian Period, rejoined after dislocation, but also a cluster of enthusiasts, a community whose members each must ponder what is, both, almost inconceivably old and right under our feet.

                
To see more pictures from the Paleontology meeting, click on the Group Meeting title in Photo Albums.

Stone Age Tool Find

Acheulean is the name given to an archaeological industry of stone tool manufacture associated with prehistoric hominins during the Lower Paleolithic era across Africa and much of West Asia and Europe.  Acheulean tools are typically found with Homo erectus remains.

 

I picked this particular handaxe up on a public beach in Cape Town.  One of the local experts said that the find had no particular scientific value because the origin of the artifact could never be determined.  Despite this expert opinion, removing it from South Africa would be illegal (subject to imprisonment).  So, it will make a nice paperweight.  The length is approximately 18cm and the handaxe is water-worn and smooth.

 

It was the dominant technology for the vast majority of human history and