Drama Llamas and Mantle Mystery

Drama Llamas and Mantle Mystery

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John Boyd

Instilled with wanderlust and thirst for adventure from a young age, John was born and raised in one of the flattest places on the planet with the highest relief in the county being only about 10m difference from its lowest point. From as early as the age of 6, he dreamed of expeditions to the Andes and some 20 odd years later, while working on his Masters of Geology at the University of Wyoming, that dream finally became a reality. Graduating in 2010, he moved to Alaska to work in the petroleum fields where he worked for a handful of years before moving on to other endeavors such as using geophysical surveys to investigate long-lived plutonic systems, teaching continuing education courses of the geology underfoot in the Bitterroot valley and surrounding areas of Montana, and most recently LiDAR processing for a mapping company that primarily produces high-definition 3D maps for the autonomous and semi-autonomous vehicle industry.  In his free time, he continues to tell stories and look at interesting rocks and geologic features, while planning adventures with his wife and teenage daughter in the playground that is the Pacific Northwest.

Mysteries teach us that if one wants to understand what has happened, one needs to find a record of it. Just as in those mysteries, the record one finds is often a series of clues one must use to reconstruct the event rather than a complete record of it. In geology, if one wishes to understand what occurred during a particular orogen, one needs to go to the associated basins where those records or clues are stored. The sedimentary basins of the Altiplano-Puna Plateau in South America contain the record of retro-arc foreland basin evolution during the Cenozoic. The deformation of these basins is characterized by high angle reverse faults and thrusts deforming crystalline basement and sedimentary covers. While the mechanisms responsible for deformation within the region are not fully understood in detail, the relative abundance of intercalated tuffs within these basins and those within the bounding Eastern Cordillera enables the timing and pattern of deformation across the orogen to be constrained. As one of the largest intermontane basins within the Altiplano-Puna plateau, the Arizaro Basin is well suited to investigations of basin deformation in response to lithospheric processes. Here we present some of the data gathered to test a few of the models that have been used to explain the patterns of deformation, such as the taper of the orogenic wedge and lithospheric foundering or drips, as well as some of the adventures encountered in the pursuit of these clues. Finally, a brief overview of some of the recent work that has been published since the initial thesis that provides a bit of vindication and a current understanding of the processes responsible for the clues left behind.

Please join us at:

Worthy Brewing (eastside location)

In the Hop Mahal Room

5:30 pm social hour

7:00 pm presentation

COGS talk are free and open to the public -- all are welcome! Please join us for the social hour before the presentation.

All presentations are also live-streamed through Zoom. There will be a registration link at the top of this page as we get closer to the date of this presentation.