For this week’s Monday Geology Picture post, I thought I would share a few more pictures from my class field trip to Barbados back in 2009. One day we visited a well-known coral outcrop located adjacent to the University of the West Indies. You could tell that geologists had been there before by all the drill holes!

 

When I was back in Barbados for a student field trip back in 2009, I caught sight of a beautiful sea turtle one day. I didn’t have a very good camera back then, so I didn’t take a great picture of the turtle. The picture may not do the moment justice, but I still recall how magical it felt to observe a beautiful green sea turtle in a turquoise sea. Of course, being geologists we were at the beach to look at some rocks, which were pretty beautiful as well.

If you live in Barbados, don’t be surprised if one day a group of geologists shows up in your backyard… especially if there are coral rocks in your backyard, which is likely considering how much coral, both modern and fossil, is found on Barbados.

Back in June 2009 I visited the lovely tropical island of Barbados for a week for a paleoclimate field trip as part of one of my graduate school courses. I never blogged about this trip (I only started Georneys in late 2010), so I thought that I would share some pictures from this Barbados trip over the next few weeks. Hope you enjoy!

From the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution website, here is an explanation of why Barbados is such an important and interesting location for the study of paleoclimate:

The study tour this year [2009] will to the Caribbean island of Barbados, a classic field area for Quaternary sea level study. Barbados is an actively rising island at the crest of the Barbados Ridge, an accretionary prism of the Lesser Antilles forearc. Strongly folded Eocene sedimentary rocks are capped by a sequence of Quaternary coral terraces that grew during sea level changes over the last 700,000 years or so.

A large fraction of what is known today about the rates and magnitudes of Quaternary sea level change comes from studies of the uplifted reef tracts of Barbados and cores recovered from the drowned deglacial coral reefs offshore. The first strong support for the Milankovitch theory of climate change came from the dating of the Last Interglacial terrace; locally know as First High Cliff. This date was key to establishing a timescale for the oxygen isotope record that remains our primary way of establising a stratigraphy and a timescale for all ocean cores.

This week, I am sharing some pictures of some coral boulders along a Barbadian beach. I also shared some pictures of a similar coral boulder from the same beach back in 2011. Eroded by waves, the coral boulders weather into some fantastical, beautiful shapes.