Ok. So Google is apparently never going to upload the high-res NAIP
imagery of the Owyhee River study area. Here is a work-around. Draping
the LiDAR on the bad imagery. Looks pretty damn good. Now we are very
proficient at doing this. On our way to developing some more elaborate
geologic projects in Google Earth. Should probably start with adding the hi-res imagery ourselves....
Worth a look. Gives a good impression of what the flight was like. Certainly quicker than a raft.
Tomorrow I get a chance to fly over the field area in a small plane
fitted with an underwing camera. This was part of the deal that got me
to agree to teach field camp this last summer...and it is finally
coming through. Greg Arehart, my UNR colleague, has offered to fly me
over the area and snap many, many photos with his spiffy camera. These
will be ideal for creating large scale stereopairs of key areas
(failed blockages, landslide dams, etc) and also many great oblique
shots.
Just happened upon a sweet and simple geobrowser called Flash Earth...very smooth and easy to understand. Added bonus for me is that it links to high-res images of my favorite field area that are available only in Yahoo and Bing Maps:
An excellent view of the landslide...nicely done.
Check out the great photoset of the recent landslide near Naches, Washington.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/wsdot/sets/72157622438776353/
Kathy C. turned me on to this example yesterday. I had no idea. Lava flow is only about 250 yrs old. It is in the Stikine Volcanic Field. There is a related, somewhat brief, paper:
This underwater picture shows a lone submerged tree in Clear Lake, OR.
There are many more than this. One (maybe most) date to about 2700 yrs
bp when a lava dam blocked the McKenzie River. Freezing water,
exceptionally clear.
Finally devised a way to confidently and easily extract profile data from the LiDAR data set in GlobalMapper. Surface profiles are simple. Basal profiles shown here are estimates based on some point measurements. Will vastly improve the basal profiles when GSA is over. Needed this figure, however, so spent too much time devising the method.
Preparing for my GSA lava talk and came up with these new versions of
the map of the Owyhee River study area. The second one is just the lava.
This one supports the tenet:
'Intracanyon lava flows, the gifts that keep on giving'.
A garishly colored map that underscores the tight linkage between
An obvious, but overlooked addition to the Oywhee River lava-dammed lake story. This is the approximate extent of the early Pleistocene lake caused by a Bogus Rim lava dam crest of 1210 m at Iron Point.
This upstream-looking 3-D block rendition of the Ryegrass Creek area on the Owyhee is intriguing. The color ramp works well here because the strata are flat-lying. Note the boulder-covered and very flat surface below the Qbsy and above Ryegrass Creek...I suspect it relates to the pre-Saddle Butte lava Owyhee or Ryegrass Ck channel in some way, but I have never actually stood on it. Also, look at the morphology of the eastern edge of the Qbsy where the lacustrine seds sit...distinct linear trace there was map as fault by Ferns et al., but isn't it just the contact between the paleovalley wall and the lava? What about that abrupt wall in the Qbsy flow just beyond there? Looks like it is heading down a narrow valley.
Screenshot that shows the current status of my mapping in a key area. Landslides are green and broken into three relative ages (brighter=younger). Red lines have not been attributed yet. Map is coming along nicely.
Ok, so maybe I spent enough time out there in 2007, 2008, and 2009. Yikes. As expected, the parts of the map that are the hardest to compile in the office are those areas I never hit on the ground.
Yes. I am a little late on getting my NSF annual report done...why these are due 3 months before the end of the year in question is beyond me. Most annual reports are due within 3 months of the end of the contract year. I suspect that someone made a mistake in the original paperwork and simply won't own up to it.
Sure, I have gone on and on about the amazing visualizations you can get with some tweaking of LiDAR data; however, it turns out that a pretty basic representation is also quite useful...contours. Yes, contours. Sometimes smaller scale features remain somewhat ambiguous in hillshades or slopeshades, but high-res, short interval contours from the LiDAR data can eliminate most of the ambiguity. In this case, it is a tiny area that I have struggled with on the Owyhee River. Here, a large landslide entered from the north, shoved the river channel to the south, and the river eventually worked its way back to the north to some extent. The array of surficial deposits in the void that comprises the right hand side of the image south of the river record this sequence of events as well as subsequent sedimentation by tributary fans. The contours really highlight the fans, and in conjunction with discernible drainage patterns evident in the LiDAR, it is clear what is fan and what is river, right?
I created this lake by generating a contour from the LiDAR dataset at an elevation of 1046 m. GlobalMapper does this in about 1.5 minutes. Then, exported the vector as a shapefile, cut out the parts of the line that occur downstream from the dam, stitch the remaining loose ends, build a poly from the line and there it is.
