NWT, Canada
- No roads exist in the far north, so the favored mode of transport in the Western Canadian Arctic is the float plane - here a Twin Otter, with a range of ~1500 km and room aboard for 6-8 people and gear. When the float plane gets out of site, the silence of the North is amazing!
- Discussing undergraduate Bryn McInnish's field notes at camp in the Dismal Lakes Group. The hillside beyond the camp is composed of peritidal carbonates of the lower Greenhorn Formation, with the prominent bench marking a karst horizon developed during low sealevel. Above the bench, oolitic and stromatolitic carbonates of the upper Greenhorn are abruptly overlain by tholeiitic flood basalts of the Coppermine River Group.
- Colleague Tracy Frank (University of Nebraska) points out an erosional unconformity above intertidal carbonates of the Kendall River Formation, marking initiation of deep-water stromatolitic carbonates of the Sulky Formation.
- Conical stromatolites, termed conophyton, in the Sulky Formation (then undergraduate Burt Thomas for scale). These unusual stromatolites are common only in the Mesoproterozoic and early Neoproterozoic and likely reflect a particular combination of biological activity and early lithification. The delicate structure of cone tops and absence of interstromatolite debris suggests deep-water deposition, with cone tops beneath storm wave base.
- Giant coated grains, nucleated on flat-clasts of a rip-up breccia, mark shallow water deposition of the upper Sulky and lower Greenhorn formations.
- Large clasts of a cave collapse breccia in the Dismal Lakes karst, Greenhorn Formation - one of the oldest well-developed karst horizons known. In the Dismal Lakes karst, there are grikes that penetrate up to 12 meters beneath the karst surface, speleothem deposits, and cave collapse breccias up to 20 meters thick.
- Linda and colleague Tracy Frank enjoying some before-breakfast fishing. When the ice first breaks on Arctic lakes, it isn't much effort to catch lake-trout that exceed 90 cm in length (a fish that can easily feed a field party of 5).
Linda Kah
Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences
1412 Circle Drive
Knoxville, TN 37996-1410
Phone: (865) 974-6399
Email: lckah@utk.edu