923 10th St
Golden, CO 80401
USA
Time Traveling through Golden: A Geologic Journey through Deep Time!
Join us in traveling through Deep Geologic Time across the Golden area. You will learn about landscape changes over the last 300+ million years, as continents came together and split apart several times while moving from the tropics at sea level to today’s middle latitude and mountain elevations. Each landscape hosted incredibly different and now-extinct plants and animals, leaving behind a rich fossil record, including those in Golden. Mountains rose and then eroded away several times in Colorado. The Front Range we see today is the last remnant of those ancestral mountain ranges. It has been sculpted by several glacial episodes in the geologically recent past as climate changed from warm to cool and back several times.
How do we “read” rock layers? Why are some rocks red or green? Were there really camels in the Golden area? What about dinosaurs, like at Dinosaur Ridge and Triceratops Trail, tropical forests, and the asteroid extinction event (“K-T” boundary)? What does Apex Gulch and Lamb Springs tell us about animals of the last Ice Age and human interactions? What does past climate tell us about the future?
About the Presenter
Retired from the oil and gas industry after 40+ years, Donna Anderson continues to indulge her geologic passion at the Colorado School of Mines, where she has been a faculty member in the Department of Geology and Geological Engineering since 2000. A native of southern California, Donna earned a B.A. in Earth Science and Geography (double majors) at California State University at Fullerton (1974), an M.S. in Geology at UCLA (1980), and a Ph.D. in Geology at Colorado School of Mines (1997). Donna has never met a rock she didn’t like, with the possible exception of those in the Spearfish Formation of Canada and North Dakota.
Tickets
$5 members, $12 non-members