Guest Night returned to the Houston Museum of Natural Science this year and was a fantastic event for HGS members and their families and friends. After dining with the dinosaurs and minerals inside the Museum, the capacity crowd learned about the geology of Big Bend National Park from Dr. Patricia Wood Dickerson, of the Jackson School of Geosciences, UT Austin. Her talk was entitled, “Big Bend -- Where the Rockies Meet the Appalachians -- Discoveries and Enigmas.” She described the geology of Big Bend, which includes Paleozoic to Tertiary rocks, as basically unexplored in many areas, with few landing sites, much like the Apollo exploration of the moon. She talked about the oldest rocks, the Ordovician, and described how reconstruction of plate tectonics reunited Big Bend with South America during the Ordovician. She showed satellite and outcrop photos of puzzling volcanic features known to have deformed the landscape of Big Bend during the Tertiary, 30 million years ago.
Don Cormick, Big Bend geologist, usually stationed in Big Bend National park, was on hand in person at Guest Night, handing out park information. Big Bend Park, run by the Department of the Interior, has a website for interested people at www.nps.gov/bibe. The park phone number is 432-477-2251 for people planning to visiting.
The audience packed the HMNS IMAX theatre for Dr. Dickerson’s talk, and stayed for a special IMAX movie called “3D Arabia” which showed a young film maker from Saudi Arabia’s documentation of present day Bedouins and the trade of frankincense spice in the Middle Ages. The movie showed present-day Muslim worship in Mecca, Riyadh and sites and towns inside Saudi Arabia.
IMAX Theater audience
Bill Osten (event organiser) and Charles Sternbach (pictures captioned left to right)
Bonnie Milne-Andrews and Robert Killian
Dan Tearpock and Diana Poon
Dave and Janet Meaux
Dave Reynolds
Don Cormick, Geologist at Big Bend
Donna and Tom Riley
Erna and Charles Revilla
Jim Ragsdale and Sandi Barber
Joseph (c) and Sandra Babcock
Kelley and Mike Deming
Selim Shaker and George Klein
Steve Earle and Pat Dickerson (Guest Night Speaker)
Beth Beall and company
Mastodon skeletons in the HMNS hall