Field Trip to Kelleys Island

Monday we took a trip to Kelleys Island, which is about 20-30 minutes by boat from Gibraltar, depending on lake conditions. The primary reason was to hunt for fossils at the abandoned quarry on the island, but I wasn't complaining about getting to have lecture someplace new. This is one of the advantages of Stone Lab; you don't really spend a lot of time in the classroom, even in a classroom-oriented course such as EEOB 400. We may not be out there taking samples of lake water to study like the people in Limnology, but we still have opportunities to get our hands dirty (literally and figuratively).

Aside from fossil-hunting, we also examined and identified individual fossils and made an attempt at dating the quarry we were digging around in (probably not original research). Afterwards we visited grooves left behind when the glaciers receeded after the last ice age, and had a fine lecture by the beach.

You can see photos from the key points of the trip at my Picasa album for this field trip, located here. Each photo contains a small caption. I wanted to include more pictures from the trip back, but the weather was against us and as the winds picked up the lake grew progressively choppy. This made it too difficult to take any quality photos (I was too busy hanging on to keep from getting bucked off the boat).