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Cure the Winter Blues - Badlands National Park (ReRelease) · PlanetGeo: The Geology Podcast

• 0:03
  SPEAKER_01: Welcome to Planet Geo, the podcast where we talk about our amazing planet, how it works, and why it matters to you.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_01: You ready?
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_01: Chris.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_01: Chris, I have to tell you something, my friend.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_01: When you clo when you clapped right there, we always clap in to put an audio spike for easy editing.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_01: When you clapped in, I saw some salsa fly out of your beard.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_00: I know.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_00: All right.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_00: Clue everybody in about what's going on because this is.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_00: Chris, man.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_01: Chris got on Chris got on Zoom and he's got a new colored beard today.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_01: It's called salsa red.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_01: I did not know this.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_01: It's got you know, it it reminds me of rocks actually.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_01: Chris, you know, uh when you when you find like a a nice like quartz or granite or feldspar or something, it has that red iron stain to it.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's what your beard looks like.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_01: It looks like you have this white gray beard that has iron staining in it.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, so I I do.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_00: I have this massive, I didn't see it until I looked at myself on Zoom.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_00: And I have a massive stain on my silver gray pelt laying across my face.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_00: And I, you know, I've had it there for probably an hour, Jesse.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_00: And Chris, what you know, I had I was I was oblivious, and now I feel like I have to go to the bathroom and clean myself off.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_01: Chris, I hate to bring it to you.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_01: You do have to go to the bathroom and clean yourself off, my friend.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_01: But quick question what is it?
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_01: Is it is it chili?
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_01: Is it salsa?
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_01: Is it red wine?
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_01: What's going on?
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_00: So actually, um, I made a Cajun chicken dinner, and so it's Cajun sauce on my on my beard.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_00: What a needle to start out the podcast with.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, amazing.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_01: Our listeners are just thrilled to be picturing you with your gray pelt across your face that's Cajun chicken stained.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, amazing.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_00: Well, now that I'm this close to the microphone too, I can smell.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, okay.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_01: We could wrap this up quick because Chris needs to shower.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I did I gotta go.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_01: So the uh the the title here, so we're in vacation mode, which is in part why we're sort of a little giddy maybe or something.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_01: But we're on our holiday break, which we usually take from sort of Thanksgiving to uh right around the new year.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_01: So we take episodes that we've released before, we kind of package them up into a theme, and we re-release them over the holidays here.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_01: So this Chris is a I think this is a special one.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_01: I'm particularly we kind of we talked about this for a while.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_01: We went back and forth about like we've got a lot of themes here.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_01: What do we pull together for this you know 2023 holiday season?
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm excited about this one.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_01: This one, we're calling it Cure for the Winter Blues, and it's a bit of like a geo travel log or something, right?
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_00: But you know, it has a lot of truth to it too, Jesse, because this is it's time right now to start planning your summer trips.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_00: If you're gonna go to busy places or you're gonna try to go get permits that are difficult to get and that kind of thing, like you you really have to be on it, and so I'm gearing up right now.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_00: I'm keeping a calendar of exactly who I have to contact, when I have to contact.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_00: I'm planning my summer right now.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_00: I'm planning the trips that I'm gonna lead my students on, I'm planning the trips that Jenny and I are gonna go on, and so it's in my frontal lobe right now.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, this is what I'm thinking about.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_00: So, and it does cure the winter blues for sure.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_01: It does.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, um my summer's looking a little bit more stressful, unfortunately, than I'd like it to be.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, between there's a lot of life stuff going on, and then there's potential really cool field work I could go on, but anyway, it's stressing me out a little bit, I'll be honest.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_01: But and also, you know what?
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_01: People are getting their holiday gifts together and a Christmas gifts list, and you know, maybe there's some cool sleeping bags or new tent or you know, outdoor gear, hiking boots, whatever, maybe a rock hammer, some very exciting stuff coming down the chimney.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_00: It's time to start getting in shape.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_01: No, Chris, whoa, whoa, whoa.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_01: That's a it's a New Year's thing, man.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_01: Like we we don't focus on getting in shape over Christmas, do we?
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_00: We like we do, because if we're starting to plan for our summer, we're gonna do things, we're gonna get off the couch and go be adventurous, we're gonna be our best self.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_00: So you you need to get in shape.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_01: I I sort of am a eat, drink, and be merry person over the holidays, and then getting getting in shape, that's like a February project, but I guess.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_00: Uh but I don't know.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_00: It's a process, it's a long process.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_01: This theme, Chris, is uh a good one, particularly because it's quite personal to both of us.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_01: The first six episodes that we're going to re-release here, they're in order of the trip that you lead, the Summer Science Institute camping trip and and outdoors and geology trip for high schoolers that you lead now.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_01: You've led for years, decades now.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_01: I went on as a student, you taught me geology through this course.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_01: I actually went on it as a kid, as did you.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_01: Your dad started it as a sort of a biology themed trip a little bit more.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_01: So my dad led it for a bit, and it was my dad was a biologist, so you know, also kind of biology focused.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_01: You took it over when I was in middle school or early high school, maybe, and then middle school, I think, yeah.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and you've led it for decades.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_01: And really, I mean, you're Chris Bullis, so it's become more of a geology trip, let's be honest, right?
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_01: Like you, I mean, there's some biology, like there are squirrels, so you do see some squirrels when you're going out there and you see some elk, but you mostly look at the rocks.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_01: Is that right?
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_00: We do I like some of the biology, actually, Jesse.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_00: This is maybe the only time you're gonna hear me say this, but some of it is really cool.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_00: When you get into these trophic cascade situations that places like Yellowstone have found themselves in with the the non-native uh lake trout species or the reintroduction of the wolves and these like cascades of life that have happened as a result of it is really a fascinating thing to talk about.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_00: So we do that too.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_01: Fair enough.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_01: Biology is sort of interesting.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_01: So back to the thing here, Chris.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_01: We're gonna lead off here with the Badlands.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_01: Badlands National Park.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_01: This is a re-release of an episode that we we did uh a year and a half ago, maybe.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_01: But the Badlands, uh, Chris, what what's special to you about the Badlands National Park?
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it's kind of the first stop on this trip, at least if I if I remember correctly.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_01: Like there is a I think when we went, we stopped somewhere for just an overnight, but Badlands was like the first geology learning stop.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_00: That's right.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_00: And what's special to the Badlands for me is that's the first experience.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_00: It's the first time you get to see the students look at it and they're in absolute awe because the Badlands just look so strange.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_00: It's a very odd thing, right?
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_00: And to see them look at it and just be astounded by what's going on, and they're they're full of wonderment.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_00: And I love that about it.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_00: It's their first like field geology exposure, and it to me that's a really cool thing.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_00: What about you, Jesse?
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_00: What's your favorite thing?
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I the the Badlands, I don't know, they hold a special spot.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_01: I think mostly from when I was a kid, actually, because it was you know, we were always very excited to go on this trip as kids.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_01: I'm sure like you were as a kid, and your kids, your children were probably the same way.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I forget how old they were both walking when I went.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_01: It was really fun to have them when I was a student that your your kids were like very fun to have on the on the trip because they're like super excitable, everything's super interesting.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_01: And I was that the Badlands was always like the most exciting because it was the first hike you get to go on.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_01: And there's actually topography, like there's some decent topography that is very different from anywhere you see in Michigan for sure, but different from many parts of the world too.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_01: So it's really pretty, it's really unique, the landscape's totally cool.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_01: You get to sleep in a tent.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_01: It was all that like childhood excitement.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_01: That's kind of what it evokes for me, the the Badlands here.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_01: But the geology is really awesome too, and really kind of unique.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_01: And Badlands is a general geologic term and also a national park.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_01: And so we we in this episode we kind of talk about what it takes to make a Badland area, and it's super interesting geology, too.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_00: It absolutely is.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_00: So anyway, yeah, let's Badlands coming your way.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_01: Let's get to it.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_01: The Badlands here.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_01: Uh part one of eight in our Cure the Winter Blues.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_00: Hey, Professor Remick.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_01: Hey, Chris.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_01: You're looking particularly enthusiastic today.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_00: Well, why wouldn't I be?
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_00: We're talking of the Badlands today, you know, so that's true.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_01: You have every reason to be enthusiastic.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_01: Let's do some quick introductions here, because maybe it's been a little bit.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_01: You're Chris Bullheis, high school teacher extraordinaire, nationally recognized, regionally recognized, won a bunch, a bunch, a bunch of teaching awards, have taught earth science, college-level geology, field geology, astronomy, loads of stuff.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_01: You're my former high school teacher.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_01: And right now, you're probably on the trip that really cemented me wanting to go into geology.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I am.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_00: And as you said, you're Dr.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_00: Jesse Remink, and you're one of my former students.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_00: You went on to get your PhD actually in geoscience at the University of Alberta, and you now work at one of the most prestigious geology programs in the country, actually.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_00: And uh that's impressive.
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_00: Um, that you you know, you work at Penn State University as a geoscience professor, and that's awesome.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_00: I love that.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_01: It's I am a key SOB to be working at Penn State.
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_01: Uh they have not realized their mistake yet.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_01: So you're a pretty trip.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I wanna I want to like sort of double click on this because we're releasing this at the time we're releasing it right now with meaning because you are on this trip right now, and this trip was really fundamental to me getting into geology, and I think maybe even you getting into geology because your dad used to teach this trip back in the day when it was a little bit more biology focused, right?
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_00: And you went along as a kid, and yeah, yeah, that had nothing to do though with me getting into geology, that had more to do with a a gifted professor that I had in college that just made our planet come to life.
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_00: Description of earthquakes and and volcanoes and the po and and tectonics and you know what makes this planet work, that was what really did it to me.
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_00: And he was just so gifted, you know, and it's the power of that.
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_01: And you were that professor for me at the high school level, so I was really very lucky to have someone like you.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_01: But this trip, you're on it right now.
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_01: Let me just paint a picture here.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_01: You take, I think, 26 students now from Michigan, you get in a big yellow bus and you drive out to the western United States, and you hit all the big national parks in the sort of eastern part of the western United States.
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_01: So that's Grand Teton National Park, Yellowstone National Park, Glacier National Park, all of which we have covered in Planet Geo before and talked about the geoscience of those parks.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_01: So go listen to those.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_01: But we're gonna talk about the Badlands today because this is a stop in in South Dakota on the way to what I'm gonna call here the real mountains.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_01: But the Badlands are kind of like the warm-up to the mountains, or they at least were for me on this trip because you're driving from Michigan across the prairies, you know, Nebraska, cornfields, nothing against cornfields, but like it's pretty flat.
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_01: There's a lot of them, and then you hit the Badland, and it's like, oh, topography and rocks and fossils and like some actually interesting geology there as a sort of a warm-up till you hit the real stuff in the Rockies.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_01: So we're releasing this while you were on this trip so that you know people who are listening can kind of kind of follow along a little bit, right?
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_00: That's right.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, you described it very well, and in terms of also my approach to this.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_00: First of all, I think geology as a field is so easy to sell because all you gotta do is go out and see our planet, go see things.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_00: We live in an amazing world.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_00: That's what geology is for you and I, uh is it just makes it come to life.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_00: It just it's just ah it's awesome, anyway.
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_00: So yeah, we go to the Badlands, it's a day two, you know, and we get there around noon on day two, and it's their first exposure.
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_00: And if you've never been to the Badlands, the way I think of it is I'm this little tiny speck.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_00: I'm a like an ant.
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm in a gigantic sand castle.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, yeah.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_00: And that's how the Badlands feels to me.
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_01: That is very apt, Chris.
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_01: That's very apt right there.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's like it's like beach, you know, you're at the beach and you're digging sand castles and making little sand pits, and you know, all this stuff is going on, and it's kind of muddy, and it's that's a perfect description.
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_01: Uh so what we're talking about specifically here is Badlands National Park, which is in South Dakota, but that's Capital B, Badlands, the national park, the location.
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_01: Badlands, lowercase B, is a geologic feature, actually, a landscape feature.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_01: And these are pretty common, or at least let's say they're not uncommon around the world.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_01: These things occur.
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_01: Like most people probably live within driving distance of some badlands somewhere.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_01: And there's a few famous ones, some pinnacles in New Zealand, Kaushan, Taiwan.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_01: One of my favorites is called Toadstool Geologic Park in Nebraska, which is a great one.
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_01: And then there's a big series in Alberta in Red Deer, near the Red Deer River, near where I lived in um in Edmonton, Alberta.
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_01: And Chris, I guess what does it take?
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_01: Well, could you paint a quick, really quick picture of what badlands look like and then lead us into a discussion about what the key components we need to form Badlands are, what the key geologic features are.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, the only problem with your lead into that is quick.
• 13:43
  SPEAKER_00: I have a hard time doing that.
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, because I'm passionate about this shit.
• 13:47
  SPEAKER_00: It's like this is so good.
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_00: I love the Badlands.
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_00: You said it.
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_00: Badlands National Park in South Dakota, but you know, when we come back on our way back home out of the trip, we we don't travel through South Dakota, we travel through North Dakota and we go to Theater Roosevelt National Park in North Dakota.
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_00: Those are Badlands also.
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_00: And you get them in eastern Montana.
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_00: We cross Badlands once we leave the Black Hills heading toward the Bighorn Mountains.
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_00: We cross over these massive mountains, and we are in Badlands again, in between the Bighorns and Yellowstone.
• 14:23
  SPEAKER_00: It's like they're all over the place.
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_00: And so that begs the question well, what does it take, right?
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_00: Well, we can boil it down, I think, to four things that geologically you gotta have.
• 14:35
  SPEAKER_00: And the first thing is we gotta have an area that is well above sea level.
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_00: We gotta have you know erodible materials, and and in order to have that, you have to be well be well above sea level.
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_00: Two, you gotta have softer sedimentary rocks that are juxtaposed to really harder and more resistant sedimentary rocks.
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_00: And then we need to have this arid uh climate, and that's important for really two reasons.
• 15:07
  SPEAKER_00: Because in an arid climate, you have a lack of vegetation, and vegetation holds things down and anchors things down and really like minimizes weather and erosion.
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_00: And the other thing with an arid climate is the kind of precipitation you get.
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_00: You know, you you don't get tropical rain kind of precipitation, you get cloudburst, violent events.
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_00: You know, it's short, but it's extremely intense.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_00: And when you get that, then that those are the the ingredients for like rapid, harsh erosion.
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_01: And Chris, we sat, I remember this cloudburst type thing, just so we can paint a picture of this.
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_01: We sat, I think we're at the top of Pikes Peak Batholith.
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_01: We were on a rock collecting trip in Colorado, and we were up near Pikes Peak, overlooking Colorado Springs, and we were watching this amazing anvil-shaped thunderhead move across the prairies to the east.
• 16:03
  SPEAKER_01: And this is exactly what we're talking about.
• 16:05
  SPEAKER_01: Like, if you've lived, if you've traveled across any kind of prairie land in North America especially, you get this all the time, where you get these huge thunderheads that pile up and they move across the landscape, and they just dump torrents of rain for about 15 minutes onto the land, and then they go away.
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_01: And that's that's what we're talking about with this cloud burst.
• 16:25
  SPEAKER_01: Like really intense, really short-lived rain.
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_01: And I just remember sitting there, Chris, we're looking back east, the sun is setting behind us, and it's just lighting up this huge anvil-shaped thunderhead miles and miles away to the east, just dumping torrents of rain onto the prairies, and we're sitting on this mountain overlooking it.
• 16:43
  SPEAKER_01: It was a beautiful, beautiful view.
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_00: Ah, you and I have so many memories together that are just they they warm the heart.
• 16:50
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, I love that.
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_00: I remember exactly what you're talking about.
• 16:54
  SPEAKER_00: One of the things about this cloudburst thing in the Badlands, it is so dry that when you get these storms, it often is rocking and rolling above you.
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_00: You can smell it, you can hear it, but it's not hitting you because it's evaporating before it hits the ground.
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_00: And that's a common occurrence in a place like this where this all this stuff is going on, but it's not making its way to the ground.
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_00: And obviously, the longer this goes on, the closer it gets to hitting the ground, but that's a really cool experience to see a storm above you and still stay dry.
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_01: And that brings us to the fourth point of what you really need to create Badlands, lowercase B, this geographic feature, is that you typically need something like shale or clay at the surface, and that is a rock that is very impermeable, so meaning water can't flow through it very quickly at all.
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_01: That is really essential for badland formation because what it means is that when you get this really heavy downpour of rain, it doesn't seep into the ground, it flows across it.
• 17:56
  SPEAKER_01: Think concrete compared to grass.
• 17:58
  SPEAKER_01: It'll flow across the surface, and when it flows across the surface, it starts to erode stuff physically, meaning taking grains and moving them downstream.
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_01: Like you think of a gravel road that has those little rivulets that form in the heavy rain and it's washing material downstream as opposed to percolating through it.
• 18:17
  SPEAKER_01: That's really important for forming Badlands because Badlands have some of the highest erosion rates out there in the world, meaning the most amount of sediment being removed per unit time out there.
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_01: And what is it in the Badlands National Park?
• 18:31
  SPEAKER_01: It's like one inch per year or something like that.
• 18:32
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it's crazy.
• 18:33
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's over that.
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_00: It's almost in some areas it's over eight inches a year.
• 18:37
  SPEAKER_01: Oh my goodness, eight inches per year.
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_01: And that that really highlights the fact that actually we can form these anthropogenically.
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_01: There are human-induced badlands in the world, some famous ones in northern Spain from Roman mining activity, and also some pretty famous ones in Ontario, Canada from overgrazing and uh sort of poor farming practices, which removed all the vegetation.
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_01: The rocks underneath it were right performing badlands.
• 19:01
  SPEAKER_01: And once the vegetation is gone, erosion starts to take over, and boom, the system's done.
• 19:06
  SPEAKER_01: Like it's in a bad land formation.
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_01: You're gonna have rapid erosion until you kind of either replant some trees or stabilize the landscape.
• 19:13
  SPEAKER_01: So, all right, that's what we need to have badlands, those four things.
• 19:17
  SPEAKER_01: We need to have land above sea level, we need to have soft sedimentary rocks, we need to have arid climate with this cloudburst rain, and we need to have some impermeable sediment layer at the top like shale or clay.
• 19:28
  SPEAKER_01: Chris, let's work through the geologic story of Badlands National Park, now Capital B, Badlands National Park, in South Dakota.
• 19:38
  SPEAKER_01: Where do we start with these rocks?
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_00: Well, geologically, we always start at the bottom, especially when we're talking about sedimentary rocks, because the bottom is the first page of the book.
• 19:49
  SPEAKER_00: The bottom is the oldest, and we gotta start at the beginning.
• 19:53
  SPEAKER_00: In the Badlands, and it's really in the Badlands only, because there are older rocks that are in other areas of that part of the country, but in the Badlands, we start with a layer of rock that is roughly 80 million years old, and it's deposited by the Western Interior Seaway.
• 20:14
  SPEAKER_00: And this is uh a seaway that it's a shallow sea, you know, it transgressed and regressed, it got deeper and shallower, and you know, the biology kind of went with the shifting shorelines that was going on, but it extended from the Gulf of Mexico to the Arctic Ocean in the western part of what is now North America.
• 20:36
  SPEAKER_00: It it also extended like from an east-west standpoint, it extended from Wyoming from the Wyoming-Idaho boundary to the Mississippi River basin there.
• 20:47
  SPEAKER_00: So like it was really like long and skinny.
• 20:51
  SPEAKER_00: That was depositing this layer of rock that is known as the pure shale.
• 20:58
  SPEAKER_01: And that's pier, but it's spelled like pier.
• 21:00
  SPEAKER_01: I always think of it.
• 21:08
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, right.
• 21:09
  SPEAKER_00: It does.
• 21:10
  SPEAKER_00: And they're very, they're very funny about that.
• 21:12
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's so this is the bottom.
• 21:14
  SPEAKER_01: What does the rock look like?
• 21:16
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, how would you identify it when you're out there hiking in the Badlands?
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_00: So the pure shale is in the Badlands, the top part of it is this like bright yellow, lavender kind of color.
• 21:30
  SPEAKER_00: We'll get into that in a second and to why that is the case.
• 21:33
  SPEAKER_00: But everywhere else, it's this dark gray, it's almost this bluish gray to black, like organic rich, weak, soft, wimpy, crumbly shale, typical shale rock.
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_00: But the cool part about it is that it it has fossils.
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_00: Now remember what we're talking about, right?
• 21:52
  SPEAKER_00: We're talking about South Dakota, right?
• 21:54
  SPEAKER_00: And it has fossils in it that are amazing.
• 21:56
  SPEAKER_00: Fossils like plesiosaurs, these things are.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: You know, they were patrolling this sea.
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_00: These were 80 feet long, shallow marine salt water organisms, and uh you know, just like incredible things.
• 22:11
  SPEAKER_00: There were turtles, there were sharks, just this amazing diversity of fossils that lived in this sea at this time, which is like to me, I look at that, I'm like, oh, that's amazing because it looks nothing like what it does today.
• 22:24
  SPEAKER_00: We're talking about a landscape that is well above sea level and about as dry and opposite of the conditions as you can get, right?
• 22:32
  SPEAKER_00: So there's the pure shale.
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_00: That's the bottom most layer that you're gonna find in the Badlands.
• 22:38
  SPEAKER_00: So what's next?
• 22:39
  SPEAKER_00: What happens?
• 22:40
  SPEAKER_01: So we got to touch on the top of the pure shale, which you kind of talked about as this yellow layer, right?
• 22:45
  SPEAKER_01: And this represents erosion, chemical erosion now at the surface.
• 22:51
  SPEAKER_01: So think of this black shale layer, which is being deposited in this shallow sea.
• 22:55
  SPEAKER_01: Now all of a sudden that land is uplifted, and that shale is now exposed to the surface, meaning the atmospheric conditions.
• 23:03
  SPEAKER_01: And that causes That's right.
• 23:05
  SPEAKER_00: So, Jesse, what exposed this shale?
• 23:09
  SPEAKER_00: Because you said that it's this, you know, yellow, it's it's chemically altered, but that happens when it's exposed to the elements.
• 23:15
  SPEAKER_00: What did this?
• 23:16
  SPEAKER_00: What's next?
• 23:17
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so this is the Laramide orogeny, and we've talked about this before.
• 23:20
  SPEAKER_01: We've talked about this with the Tetons, we've talked a little bit about it with Yellowstone, but the Laramite orogeny is this mountain building event that took place all across the western United States.
• 23:30
  SPEAKER_01: And this had a lot to do with oceanic plates subducting underneath the North American continent, moving from west to east, underneath North America.
• 23:39
  SPEAKER_01: Most people think it probably had a flat subduction regime.
• 23:42
  SPEAKER_01: So this is an oceanic plate that kind of slid underneath.
• 23:46
  SPEAKER_00: We're using big words right now, I see.
• 23:49
  SPEAKER_00: A flat subduction regime.
• 23:51
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 23:52
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 23:52
  SPEAKER_00: This is getting professory on us right now.
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_00: I can I can feel it.
• 23:56
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, all right, all right.
• 23:57
  SPEAKER_01: I'll let it put it down.
• 23:58
  SPEAKER_01: Put it down, Jesse.
• 23:59
  SPEAKER_01: Calm down, calm down, Jesse.
• 24:01
  SPEAKER_01: So we're thinking, I don't know, what's a good analogy, Chris?
• 24:05
  SPEAKER_01: You probably have a great analogy to this, but it's one oceanic plate sliding underneath the continent and pushing the continent up.
• 24:11
  SPEAKER_01: A sliver.
• 24:12
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, a sliver underneath your fingernail.
• 24:14
  SPEAKER_01: That's a great one.
• 24:15
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, perfect.
• 24:15
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 24:16
  SPEAKER_01: That's a very painful analogy to go for, but it works.
• 24:19
  SPEAKER_01: I don't like thinking about it.
• 24:20
  SPEAKER_01: You're right.
• 24:21
  SPEAKER_01: You're right, exactly.
• 24:22
  SPEAKER_01: It's taking a piece of oceanic crust, shoving it underneath of the continental crust, which pushes up the continental crust.
• 24:28
  SPEAKER_01: So this uplift across a very broad region was going on, and this was, you know, started around 65 to 70 million years ago, continued for a few tens of millions of years, and created this uplift which exposed these rocks and created the potential for chemical erosion that you referenced.
• 24:47
  SPEAKER_00: That's right.
• 24:48
  SPEAKER_00: However, a massive event happened sixty-five million years ago.
• 24:56
  SPEAKER_00: Our planet was uh met with a massive catastrophe, and that was the meteor, the asteroid impact that caused the extinction of the dinosaurs.
• 25:05
  SPEAKER_00: So at this time, 65 million years ago, we had a lot going on, right?
• 25:10
  SPEAKER_00: This is a lot that's happening.
• 25:13
  SPEAKER_00: We have this uh mountain building event that really uh shaped the western part of the United States as we know it today.
• 25:21
  SPEAKER_00: We have this sea that is being drained by this uplift because you uplift the land, the sea goes away.
• 25:27
  SPEAKER_00: And then a meteor uh hits that is just game-changing.
• 25:33
  SPEAKER_00: It's a bad day to be alive on the planet during this time.
• 25:37
  SPEAKER_00: And at this time, then all dinosaurs, all flying reptiles just essentially vanished in a very short period of time.
• 25:46
  SPEAKER_00: In the sea, life was dramatically changed.
• 25:50
  SPEAKER_00: Ammonites, mossosaurs, which are these large swimming reptiles that were like kind of important in terms of Wegener's you know, continental drift theory.
• 26:01
  SPEAKER_00: We talked about that earlier.
• 26:04
  SPEAKER_00: The diversity of this hugely diverse marine organisms just went to much, much, much smaller, and just a few species remained after this impact.
• 26:15
  SPEAKER_00: So this was a massive deal.
• 26:18
  SPEAKER_00: So the seaway, as this was going on, eventually entirely disappeared from the region, and an entirely new ecosystem gained traction.
• 26:30
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 26:31
  SPEAKER_01: And so this is a catastrophe for the dinosaurs, and the mammals would consider it a great opportunity because the mammals have ended up taking over the niche, all the biological niches, right?
• 26:43
  SPEAKER_01: And this was the expansion of the mammals.
• 26:45
  SPEAKER_01: So back to the rock record here, how we see this massive catastrophic event represented in the rock record is first of all, there's a bunch of fossils in this entire region that represent this episode.
• 26:57
  SPEAKER_00: Hold on, I'm gonna interject here, Jesse.
• 26:59
  SPEAKER_00: You're right.
• 27:00
  SPEAKER_00: The Badlands are one of the most prolific fossil troves anywhere in the country.
• 27:06
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, in the Badlands proper, the fossils you're gonna find are mostly mammals, not dinosaurs.
• 27:12
  SPEAKER_00: You have to go elsewhere to find the dinosaur fossils, but it is so incredibly rich in fossils.
• 27:18
  SPEAKER_00: So sorry, I had to interject that.
• 27:20
  SPEAKER_01: No, that's absolutely true.
• 27:21
  SPEAKER_01: We're gonna come back to that in just a minute or two.
• 27:24
  SPEAKER_01: So the sediment, this pure shale, was exposed above sea level, exposed to the atmosphere, which induced chemical weathering, which turned this black rock into the yellow rock.
• 27:32
  SPEAKER_01: And this is a really, really beautiful rock that you can see at the base or the mid-level of most of the cliffs that you can see.
• 27:40
  SPEAKER_01: It's still the pure shale, but it's weathered.
• 27:43
  SPEAKER_01: It's chemically weathered, and what happens is it makes these beautiful yellow lavender colors, and it's an iron hydroxide mineral.
• 27:50
  SPEAKER_01: So it's taking iron, which was in a reduced state in the black shales, and it's turning into an oxidized version, which creates these yellow minerals like goatite.
• 27:57
  SPEAKER_01: It's basically rusting, except it's not red, it's yellow, of the rock layers.
• 28:02
  SPEAKER_00: Look at you dropping weird mineral names like goatite.
• 28:05
  SPEAKER_00: They're very fun for them.
• 28:06
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody knows what goatite is.
• 28:07
  SPEAKER_00: Hey, nobody knows what goatite is.
• 28:09
  SPEAKER_00: It's the yellow one.
• 28:10
  SPEAKER_00: Hold on.
• 28:10
  SPEAKER_01: It's the yellow one in these rocks.
• 28:11
  SPEAKER_00: It's great.
• 28:12
  SPEAKER_00: Of our many thousands of listeners, some of them probably know what goatite is, but yeah, yeah.
• 28:16
  SPEAKER_01: Don't disrespect people.
• 28:18
  SPEAKER_01: People know what goatite is, Chris.
• 28:20
  SPEAKER_00: I'm actually I appreciate it.
• 28:20
  SPEAKER_01: I'm gonna get some hate mail for that one.
• 28:23
  SPEAKER_00: Please don't.
• 28:24
  SPEAKER_00: Please don't.
• 28:25
  SPEAKER_00: I respect all of you.
• 28:26
  SPEAKER_00: You know, the pure shale also had pyrite in it, and the pyrite is when it chemically weathers, it turns it into this beautiful lavender and bright yellow colors.
• 28:38
  SPEAKER_00: The best place to see this, because like hopefully people are gonna go there, is Kanada Pass.
• 28:44
  SPEAKER_00: Kanada Pass, you can see it all.
• 28:47
  SPEAKER_00: You can see the pier shale in its beautifully weathered colors, and then you can see the the White River group above that, which we're gonna talk about here in a couple minutes.
• 28:58
  SPEAKER_00: You can see all of the formation of the Badlands really at Kanada Pass.
• 29:02
  SPEAKER_00: It's an it's an amazing place.
• 29:04
  SPEAKER_00: I love that.
• 29:04
  SPEAKER_00: That's my favorite place.
• 29:05
  SPEAKER_01: At the top of the pier shale, now we transition into a different type of deposit, a different type of sedimentary rock, and it represents a different type of environment, right?
• 29:14
  SPEAKER_01: And the the uplift of the Black Hills, which is just to the west of this region at this time, and still is to this day, but the Black Hills uplifting allowed rivers to deposit sediment.
• 29:27
  SPEAKER_01: So we have this pure shale that's exposed to the atmosphere, it's chemically weathered.
• 29:31
  SPEAKER_01: Now we have sediment being deposited in this region because the black hills were uplifted, and so then we pushed rivers that flowed from the black hills east and deposited all the sediment.
• 29:41
  SPEAKER_01: And I don't know, Chris, the landscape I kind of always envision with this is uh you know those scenes in Jurassic Park where the helicopter's like flying over the river valley, and there's like all sorts of animals, they just chuck all the dinosaurs all into one image, one shot in the movie.
• 30:01
  SPEAKER_01: All the dinosaurs you've got like all the different herds of dinosaurs migrating around, there's birds flying everywhere.
• 30:05
  SPEAKER_01: That's kind of what I envisioned, except instead of dinosaurs.
• 30:08
  SPEAKER_01: Remember, dinosaurs got knocked out by this meteorite impact.
• 30:11
  SPEAKER_01: Now it's mammals, and so we have things like deer, giant pigs, small horses, like it, but this really kind of fertile floodplain region, right?
• 30:20
  SPEAKER_01: Is that kind of an apt description of this?
• 30:23
  SPEAKER_00: It's a very apt, but I think you shortchanged the biodiversity.
• 30:28
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, you said we had these giant pigs and small horses, we had saber-toothed cats.
• 30:32
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, are you kidding me?
• 30:34
  SPEAKER_00: Like, what?
• 30:35
  SPEAKER_00: That's totally cool.
• 30:37
  SPEAKER_01: So cool.
• 30:38
  SPEAKER_00: We had rhinoceros, hippopotamus, we had alligators, squirrels, uh burrowing organisms.
• 30:46
  SPEAKER_00: The biodiversity tells us a ton about the climate, right?
• 30:53
  SPEAKER_00: Like this was a warm tropical climate that existed during this time, and the biology, let alone I mean, we're not we haven't talked about fauna at all, you know, in terms of like the plant diversity that we had too that's preserved as pollen and spores in the sedimentary rocks.
• 31:10
  SPEAKER_00: Also, like this was a much, much, much warmer climate than what we have today, and and wetter too.
• 31:16
  SPEAKER_01: So, Chris, what are the names of the sedimentary units that represent this environment we're discussing right now?
• 31:23
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I think that's important to talk about.
• 31:25
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, you said that we have the uplift of the Black Hills now that has begun due to the lair meterogeny.
• 31:31
  SPEAKER_00: And go back to our Black Hills episode a few weeks prior, which talks really in detail about how the Black Hills formed.
• 31:39
  SPEAKER_00: But the Black Hills are integral to the formation of Badlands, so about like 60 miles west of the Badlands, and when you you're sitting at Canada Pass looking down on the Pier Shale and all these other layers of rock that you can see, on a clear day, on a dry day, you can see the outline of the Black Hills, and it is so cool.
• 32:03
  SPEAKER_00: So they're uplifting.
• 32:04
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, the the extent of the uplift was in excess of 15,000 feet.
• 32:09
  SPEAKER_00: So as they were uplifting the granite that was exposed there with these rocks was getting shed off by these mountain streams and they were flowing towards what is now the Badlands.
• 32:23
  SPEAKER_00: And so what did this look like at the time, right?
• 32:25
  SPEAKER_00: We talked about this shallow sea that existed here.
• 32:29
  SPEAKER_00: That's easy to envision.
• 32:32
  SPEAKER_00: We'll now envision mountains rising to the west, streams coming off, and slowing in what are now the badlands.
• 32:40
  SPEAKER_00: So that makes this a floodplain deposit.
• 32:42
  SPEAKER_00: And so you have these rivers that are slowing down, depositing clay, silt, and sometimes even sand, which is higher energy.
• 32:51
  SPEAKER_00: And they formed these layers that are called the shadron and the brule.
• 32:56
  SPEAKER_00: The shadron is right on top of the pure shale, and the brule is on top of the shadron.
• 33:01
  SPEAKER_00: They have slightly different characteristics.
• 33:03
  SPEAKER_00: This is where rivers were slowing down and depositing sediment in a typical floodplain, which is also why, Jesse, why we have so many fossils here.
• 33:13
  SPEAKER_00: So, Jesse, I want I'm gonna defer to you on this.
• 33:16
  SPEAKER_00: Why do fossils equate to a floodplain?
• 33:21
  SPEAKER_01: Well, floodplains are very actually sort of fairly dynamic environments for biological diversity.
• 33:27
  SPEAKER_01: There's just loads of animal life there, but they're also kind of traumatic environments, too.
• 33:31
  SPEAKER_01: You have floods in a floodplain, and floods can very easily come through and take out a bunch of animals and deposit them all in one spot.
• 33:41
  SPEAKER_01: So you could have, you know, floods are really treacherous things that happen, right?
• 33:46
  SPEAKER_01: And so it's easy to kill a herd of stuff and dump all the bodies in one location, bury them under a bunch of sediments so it's anoxic and those bodies don't decompose quickly, eventually that gets turned to rock.
• 33:58
  SPEAKER_01: And that's one way to form a lot of fossils in a floodplain region.
• 34:03
  SPEAKER_01: But Chris, you talked about this, and this is a rock feature that we often see.
• 34:07
  SPEAKER_01: It's what's called paleo soils, and that's just paleo soil, ancient soil.
• 34:12
  SPEAKER_01: And you you touched on this that in this floodplain region you have a bunch of different stuff deposited, but in a floodplain, you also have soil exposed at the surface and rock exposed to again atmospheric chemical weathering, which creates an ancient soil environment.
• 34:25
  SPEAKER_01: And there are loads of these preserved, along with lots of other classic geological features, which maybe we can go through those really quickly, Chris.
• 34:34
  SPEAKER_01: Like, what are some other classic features that we see?
• 34:37
  SPEAKER_00: Well, first of all, I just want to talk about the paleosols.
• 34:40
  SPEAKER_00: I envision a rhinoceros walking up to the river, dipping his head down to get a little sip of water, and then just getting demolished by this flood that comes ripping down the you know the valley and you know just kills the rhinoceros and and buries the rhinoceros because that's usually how fossils are preserved is they need to be killed and buried and cleared.
• 35:06
  SPEAKER_00: Well, let me discuss.
• 35:07
  SPEAKER_01: Let me say that something about that.
• 35:08
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, um I remember see the fossils are everywhere.
• 35:11
  SPEAKER_01: We didn't really you know harp on this point, but we need to harp on this point because fossils are everywhere in the badlands.
• 35:16
  SPEAKER_01: We I remember walking along in on a hike with you uh, you know, as part of the class, and you just see pig fossils laying there right next to you.
• 35:26
  SPEAKER_01: You're walking along with the city, jawbones all over the place, yeah, everywhere, and they're just all over the place.
• 35:31
  SPEAKER_01: It's really just an unbelievable place.
• 35:34
  SPEAKER_01: If you just go for anything more, well, just go for a mile hike anywhere, and you're basically always going to see a fossil, and they always kind of erode positively out.
• 35:43
  SPEAKER_01: So they kind of are on the top of little mounds, but they're still in place, and it's just that they're a little bit more resistant to weathering than the clayy rock around them, and so they weather out a little bit positively, but they're just all over the place.
• 35:55
  SPEAKER_01: It's spectacular.
• 35:56
  SPEAKER_01: And there's a really famous one called the pig dig.
• 35:59
  SPEAKER_01: I remember that because it's like a whole herd of pigs that were like buried and fossilized, they call it the pig dig.
• 36:04
  SPEAKER_00: It's great, massive flood wiped out a whole herd of pigs.
• 36:07
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's right.
• 36:08
  SPEAKER_00: I do want to say though that you know, get out and explore the badlands, you're gonna see fossils galore, right?
• 36:15
  SPEAKER_00: Don't collect them.
• 36:16
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, absolutely not.
• 36:17
  SPEAKER_01: No, no, no.
• 36:18
  SPEAKER_00: You never you don't do that.
• 36:21
  SPEAKER_00: It's it's so tempting, but one, it's wrong, like really wrong, and don't do that.
• 36:28
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and two is you can pay a massive fine.
• 36:30
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, they really, really monitor for this.
• 36:34
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, so the shadron on top of the pier.
• 36:37
  SPEAKER_00: The shadron is like this shaley sandy mixture.
• 36:41
  SPEAKER_00: Uh the sand that's in the shale allows water to percolate more, and so the weathering is different there.
• 36:49
  SPEAKER_00: On top of the shadron is the brule.
• 36:52
  SPEAKER_00: And the brule has very little sand in it, actually, and more clay, which makes it shed water like a roof.
• 36:59
  SPEAKER_00: And so this is the stuff that tends to form the peaks, and the shadron below it forms like these hummocky, like swell and swale kind of thing.
• 37:11
  SPEAKER_00: But here's what happens when the bruel falls on top of the shadron, it forms a toadstool or a mushroom rock.
• 37:22
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, where you get this the bruel, which is much tougher and more resistant, doesn't allow water to percolate through it, sits on, lands like a thud on top of the chadron, then it forms this like really narrow pedestal and forms really cool formations.
• 37:37
  SPEAKER_00: You alluded to it because it's one of your favorite in Nebraska, I think, right?
• 37:40
  SPEAKER_00: Toadstool badlands.
• 37:41
  SPEAKER_01: That's right.
• 37:42
  SPEAKER_01: That's right.
• 37:43
  SPEAKER_01: And there's several other features, but most interesting, I think, is clastic dikes.
• 37:47
  SPEAKER_01: So we've talked about fossils, we've talked about paleo soils, we've talked about mushroom rocks.
• 37:51
  SPEAKER_01: Clastic dikes are this really interesting phenomenon.
• 37:54
  SPEAKER_01: We often think in geology of dikes as being igneous rocks.
• 37:58
  SPEAKER_01: So think of an igneous rock intrudes across the sedimentary layer, so it pumps a bunch of magma through a sediment, it forms a vein, basically, of magma, which we call a dike if it's big enough, that crystallizes and sits there.
• 38:12
  SPEAKER_01: And then we have this igneous rock cross-cutting a sedimentary rock.
• 38:15
  SPEAKER_01: Now, clastic dikes are sedimentary rocks cross-cutting other sedimentary rocks.
• 38:20
  SPEAKER_01: And there's two different ways that they can form.
• 38:23
  SPEAKER_01: Both of them are realistic.
• 38:24
  SPEAKER_01: One is if you have a water-packed sediment sitting down underneath a lot of things.
• 38:30
  SPEAKER_00: That's a funny way of putting it, by the way.
• 38:32
  SPEAKER_00: What's that?
• 38:32
  SPEAKER_00: I'm just gonna say both of these are realistic.
• 38:36
  SPEAKER_00: And here I go.
• 38:37
  SPEAKER_00: Here I go.
• 38:38
  SPEAKER_01: It's just funny.
• 38:39
  SPEAKER_01: Sit down, shut up, listen to me, Chris.
• 38:40
  SPEAKER_01: I'm going to lecture to you.
• 38:46
  SPEAKER_01: And I don't want to hear any interruptions out of you either.
• 38:50
  SPEAKER_00: You uh I love interrupting you, and you hate it when I interrupt you.
• 38:54
  SPEAKER_01: Like I here's the thing.
• 38:57
  SPEAKER_01: I have a relatively simple mind that no, you do not.
• 39:02
  SPEAKER_01: That is a bold-faced lie right there.
• 39:05
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, well, if I distracted, it's very hard for me to recover to what I was thinking about beforehand.
• 39:10
  SPEAKER_01: So I don't know.
• 39:11
  SPEAKER_00: You have a one-track mind.
• 39:12
  SPEAKER_00: That is not a simple mind.
• 39:14
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 39:15
  SPEAKER_01: Those are two different things.
• 39:16
  SPEAKER_01: I have a very one-track mind.
• 39:19
  SPEAKER_01: So where was I?
• 39:20
  SPEAKER_01: Anyways, I was onto something really important.
• 39:22
  SPEAKER_01: I had something important to say, and you distracted me from it.
• 39:26
  SPEAKER_00: Well, sorry, I fell asleep, so it can help you.
• 39:29
  SPEAKER_01: We're talking about what are we talking about?
• 39:30
  SPEAKER_01: The bad legs.
• 39:31
  SPEAKER_01: You were an interval.
• 39:32
  SPEAKER_01: Wait, what I don't actually I honestly don't remember.
• 39:34
  SPEAKER_01: What was I talking about?
• 39:36
  unknown: Oh my gosh.
• 39:38
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know, Jesse, because I was thinking about how rambly you were getting.
• 39:42
  SPEAKER_00: And I thought interrupt him.
• 39:44
  SPEAKER_01: Pale paleosos or something.
• 39:46
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, classic dykes.
• 39:47
  SPEAKER_01: That's it.
• 39:47
  SPEAKER_01: Classic dicks.
• 39:48
  SPEAKER_01: Classic dice.
• 39:48
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, classic dicks.
• 39:49
  SPEAKER_00: How they're they're both reasonable.
• 39:51
  SPEAKER_00: That's where they're both reasonable.
• 39:52
  SPEAKER_00: They're both reasonable.
• 39:53
  SPEAKER_01: Both reasonable things to see.
• 39:55
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 39:55
  SPEAKER_01: So clastic dike.
• 39:57
  SPEAKER_01: These are sedimentary rocks cross-cutting other sedimentary rocks.
• 39:59
  SPEAKER_01: Two ways to form them.
• 40:01
  SPEAKER_01: One way to have a water-rich sediment that's buried under other sediments.
• 40:06
  SPEAKER_01: So think of something that's packed full of water, really kind of a squishy.
• 40:10
  SPEAKER_01: Think of a waterbed, really.
• 40:12
  SPEAKER_01: If you pack enough stuff, layer up enough stuff on top of a waterbed, eventually that water layer is going to rupture and it's going to squirt water up, right?
• 40:20
  SPEAKER_01: The pressure releases upward.
• 40:21
  SPEAKER_01: And basically, if you have a sediment filled with water down deep and you layer on top stuff, that pressure's going to build up, you layer more on, pressure's going to build up, eventually that'll break the seal, and the sediment and water will flow up into a crack.
• 40:35
  SPEAKER_01: And you can kind of get that, it's this sort of diking type of thing.
• 40:38
  SPEAKER_01: This number two, if you have a sediment layer sitting there, a bunch of sedimentary rocks, if you pull them apart with some extensional force, they create cracks and joints in the rock.
• 40:49
  SPEAKER_01: And then if wind or sand blows into those cracks, it'll fill up the cracks with sand or wind or other sediment.
• 40:56
  SPEAKER_01: And those will form eventually sedimentary rock that is cross-cutting other ones.
• 41:00
  SPEAKER_01: So there's this sort of bottom-up or top-down formation for clastic dikes.
• 41:04
  SPEAKER_01: And there's some great examples in the Badlands because the clastic dikes weather out positively, Chris.
• 41:10
  SPEAKER_01: And so I remember these hikes where you can kind of see there's this little cliff or ridge running along, and then you get to the end of the ridge and you look at it, and it's a clastic dike.
• 41:19
  SPEAKER_01: The ridge is there because there's a different rock type that's more resistant that you are walking along the whole way, and you only see it when you see the end of it.
• 41:27
  SPEAKER_01: Do you remember what color they are?
• 41:29
  SPEAKER_01: Are they are they like a bluish or or sort of grayish?
• 41:33
  SPEAKER_01: Is that what the green?
• 41:34
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know.
• 41:34
  SPEAKER_01: Something like that.
• 41:35
  SPEAKER_01: They're more green.
• 41:36
  SPEAKER_01: They're more green.
• 41:36
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, all right, okay.
• 41:38
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, like a greenish gray.
• 41:39
  SPEAKER_00: Um, yeah, I think so.
• 41:41
  SPEAKER_00: I remember your group actually.
• 41:44
  SPEAKER_00: Um we go on this little hike.
• 41:47
  SPEAKER_00: It's like our first introductory.
• 41:48
  SPEAKER_00: It's not I I can't even call it a hike, it's like a walk.
• 41:51
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, um, it's pretty a mile.
• 41:54
  SPEAKER_00: It is really tame, but it's kind of cool because uh, you know, we're walking through the Brule formation, which sits on top of the Shadron, so it's got more resistant nature anyway.
• 42:04
  SPEAKER_00: And then this is where the classic dikes are, which you said are more resistant, so they form the peaks and pinnacles and so on.
• 42:11
  SPEAKER_00: So it's it's a pretty spectacular, like geologically differentially weathered feature.
• 42:17
  SPEAKER_01: Totally cool.
• 42:19
  SPEAKER_00: And we get there to the end of it.
• 42:21
  SPEAKER_00: I'm like, all right, what have you guys seen?
• 42:23
  SPEAKER_00: And you guys are like, uh what'd we see, Mr.
• 42:29
  SPEAKER_00: Boys?
• 42:30
  SPEAKER_00: And I was pissed.
• 42:31
  SPEAKER_00: I'm like, son of a bitch.
• 42:33
  SPEAKER_00: Guys, we just walked through an area that is uh like you're walking through gigantic sand castles and you didn't notice a thing.
• 42:42
  SPEAKER_00: So I called you guys accidental tourists, and I think I berated you a little bit.
• 42:46
  SPEAKER_00: Did I is that right?
• 42:48
  SPEAKER_00: I think so.
• 42:48
  SPEAKER_01: You you you gave us a pretty good speech, if I remember correctly, and I'm sure you've given that speech to many groups before and after ours.
• 42:54
  SPEAKER_01: It seemed like that.
• 42:55
  SPEAKER_00: No, I was just yours.
• 42:56
  SPEAKER_00: You guys were the worst.
• 42:57
  SPEAKER_00: So worst.
• 42:59
  SPEAKER_01: Anyway, okay.
• 43:00
  SPEAKER_01: There are so many things to see in the Badlands.
• 43:03
  SPEAKER_01: And the thing about the Badlands is you can see almost all of them with like a couple hikes.
• 43:08
  SPEAKER_01: You don't need to go on massive, huge day-long treks to see this stuff.
• 43:13
  SPEAKER_01: It's everywhere because this floodplain area that deposited all this stuff, it's so vast, but it kind of forms these little areas where you know the riverbend will deposit one type and then the other, the inside of and the outside of riverbend will deposit different types of sediments.
• 43:28
  SPEAKER_01: So basically, as you're walking down here, you see all different types of stuff on all the hikes, and so it's kind of a place you don't need to spend a week in the Badlands to see all the geology.
• 43:38
  SPEAKER_01: You can see all the different types of geology in a day or two, probably.
• 43:42
  SPEAKER_01: And there's very cool stuff.
• 43:43
  SPEAKER_01: So you got to spend some time.
• 43:45
  SPEAKER_00: Easily a easily a day.
• 43:47
  SPEAKER_00: And I would recommend, especially if you can drop a car or spot a car, is to do the castle trail.
• 43:54
  SPEAKER_00: It walks you right through the heart of the Badlands.
• 43:57
  SPEAKER_00: It's a five mile one way, so that's why I said spot a Car if because then it's just a five-mile hike, it's relatively flat, it's pretty well marked.
• 44:06
  SPEAKER_00: But if you can't, it's worth the 10-mile because you're gonna see things in reverse then because it's just an out and back, then it's awesome.
• 44:13
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so look it up.
• 44:15
  SPEAKER_00: One other thing I want to say the popcorn weathering is a pretty cool feature that you can see, especially in the shadron formation, which is where the water percolates down through the shale, sandy shale a little bit, and then it dries, so the shale expands and then dries and cracks, and so you can literally bend down and scoop it up with your hands, and it it literally you'll have a wad full of this shaley clay sandstone in your hands that looks like popcorn, and it just sheds like crazy.
• 44:53
  SPEAKER_00: And so, this is one of the reasons why the Badlands erode so fast is because of the popcorn weathering kind of nature too.
• 45:00
  SPEAKER_00: So that's that's another pretty cool feature that you can see there.
• 45:03
  SPEAKER_01: So, Chris, we've covered a lot of the rocks, we've covered a lot of the features.
• 45:07
  SPEAKER_00: We have one last event to get us to where we are today, and so Jesse, one other thing though that's on top of the brool and these clastic dikes is related to volcanic activity in actually what is now Nevada.
• 45:24
  SPEAKER_00: So you had these volcanoes that were erupting that were depositing thick layers of ash, and then also the streams from you know, because remember, this is still a floodplain.
• 45:35
  SPEAKER_00: Streams are depositing this ashy layer which formed this like brilliantly white ashy cap on top of the brule.
• 45:47
  SPEAKER_00: So that's the most recent uh sedimentary rock layer that you're gonna find in the Badlands.
• 45:54
  SPEAKER_00: So we have again the Pier Shale, the Chadron, the Bruel, and you have this volcanic ash layer on top that is uh like it's bright white, you can't miss it.
• 46:08
  SPEAKER_00: And those are the rocks that we typically see in the Badlands National Park.
• 46:13
  SPEAKER_01: And there's one final geologic step to get us to where we are today.
• 46:18
  SPEAKER_01: We have these rocks being deposited, this ancient floodplain environment with some ash being deposited on top of that.
• 46:24
  SPEAKER_01: You know, that's not what we see today.
• 46:25
  SPEAKER_01: So what we need is uplift.
• 46:27
  SPEAKER_01: We need more uplift to get these rocks exposed above.
• 46:30
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, we need to get these rocks lifted up so that they can be eroded.
• 46:34
  SPEAKER_01: And this is what's called stream rejuvenation.
• 46:37
  SPEAKER_01: And this is basically reactivating the stream's down cutting force.
• 46:43
  SPEAKER_01: So a stream, if it has a lot of elevation loss, if it's a steep gradient, it wants to cut down, and you sort of reactivate that to make the stream cut down more.
• 46:52
  SPEAKER_01: And that's what really drives this really rapid erosion.
• 46:55
  SPEAKER_01: I what did you say, Chris?
• 46:56
  SPEAKER_01: Eight, eight, was it eight inches per year?
• 46:59
  SPEAKER_01: Up to eight inches.
• 47:00
  SPEAKER_00: It depends on where you are.
• 47:02
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 47:02
  SPEAKER_01: So that's that is such a fast erosion rate.
• 47:06
  SPEAKER_01: You know, that's not going on in a floodplain environment that you have to have uplift to do that.
• 47:10
  SPEAKER_01: And so the climate has shifted gradually in the last 500,000 years, the last half a million years, and regional uplift has rejuvenated these streams such that you can have such a rapid erosion rate going on to form badlands.
• 47:25
  SPEAKER_01: Because remember, that erosion rate is part of what defines badlands, lowercase B badlands.
• 47:31
  SPEAKER_00: That's right.
• 47:32
  SPEAKER_00: The streams had to shift from a depositional personality to an erosional personality, and they did that through uplift that changed the slope or the grading of the rivers, it changed the velocity of it, and it turned it into down cutting, which turned into erosion.
• 47:52
  SPEAKER_01: So that's the story of the Badlands.
• 47:54
  SPEAKER_01: And if you're, you know, envisioning this and thinking, wow, I really got to go there, Chris Bullheis is your guy.
• 48:00
  SPEAKER_01: And you can just envision Chris is out there right now, right?
• 48:03
  SPEAKER_01: Chris, you're out there hanging out with 26 high schoolers, teaching them all this stuff over the next couple days.
• 48:08
  SPEAKER_00: Ripping on them for being accidental tourists.
• 48:10
  SPEAKER_01: Probably even giving them a really good lecture about that right at the moment as we're uh releasing this episode.
• 48:16
  SPEAKER_01: So go to the Badlands.
• 48:17
  SPEAKER_01: It's great, it's a great warm-up for you know the real hard rock geology stuff that we get out of the sediments as soon as you hit the Rocky Mountains.
• 48:26
  SPEAKER_00: You and I are hard rock guys for sure.
• 48:28
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, we really like that stuff.
• 48:29
  SPEAKER_01: So, but the Badlands are amazing, amazing place.
• 48:32
  SPEAKER_01: You can see so much interesting geology in a one mile hike.
• 48:35
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's probably you know one of the more geologically dense uh places to see stuff.
• 48:41
  SPEAKER_01: So go to the Badlands, it's beautiful, excellent place.
• 48:44
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• 48:45
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• 48:56
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• 48:59
  SPEAKER_01: We appreciate that great.
• 49:01
  SPEAKER_00: And share our podcast with other people that may or may not like our planet.
• 49:07
  SPEAKER_01: That's right.
• 49:08
  SPEAKER_01: And people who like to just travel around our planet.
• 49:10
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• 49:15
  SPEAKER_01: So that's right, that's right.
• 49:17
  SPEAKER_01: And that's right.
• 49:18
  SPEAKER_01: Next week, we're gonna have an episode on Devil's Tower.
• 49:20
  SPEAKER_01: We're gonna keep in this theme of following Chris along the Summer Science Institute field geology course, and uh, we're gonna talk about Devil's Tower next week.
• 49:28
  SPEAKER_01: So tune in for that.
• 49:29
  SPEAKER_01: Take care.
• 49:30
  SPEAKER_01: Cheers, I'm gonna go.