Brienna Geology Blog

The climate changes. It's what it does. We just learned this week about how the Earth has gone through many hot and cold shifts. Through ice cores, fossil pollen, tree rings, and other proxy data, scientists have concluded this much and the evidence for it is increasing.This graph to the right illustrates their findings. It shows the estimated average global temperature differences over the last 8 million years. You can see there has been times where the average temperature was much lower, and times where it is much higher. For us, we are in a time where the average global temperature is rising. While human processes may be causing this process to quicken, it is part of a natural cycle of heating and cooling. I can't say that I've seen noticeable changes in my lifetime as far as heat go, but this was a really cool website where you can look up temperature trends in your country, state, or even region. https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cag/time-series/us/10/9/tavg/ytd/12/1967-

Goldbug Hot Springs, Elk Bend, Idaho This past Saturday, I went to Goldbug Hot Springs with my boyfriend and a few friends. There is a lot of water movement and sediment is being deposited. In the picture above, you can see one of the hot pools in the upper righthand corner. This pool is also pictured to the left. While the sediment in here is smaller, it is still gravel sized because it is bigger than 2 mm. There are quite a few big rocks in the pool as well that are well bigger than 2 mm. In the mountain stream, pictured to the left, the rocks are a lot bigger, but still would be classified as gravel. The grains in here are poorly sorted. There were many different sizes of rock in the pool and the stream, ranging from maybe a centimeter or 2 across to massive boulders. There was also some smaller clasts floating in the actual water that were sand sized. Most of the rocks here were fairly rounded, most likely due to the flow of water over them. You could easily be barefoot in t