Friday, January 25, 2008
While many KU students and faculty spent their last week of winter break shivering through the Kansas cold, Mike Taylor, assistant professor of geology, was sleeping under the stars in the Andes Mountains.
Taylor, who arrived back at KU on January 15th, was in Mendoza, Argentina studying the mountains of the Andes and looking at deformed rocks and fault lines along the range’s eastern edge.
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Taylor spent his week in South America trying to determine characteristics of the Andes that might shed light on the real subject of his geologic devotion: Tibet.
Sweating out the 100-degree heat of the southern hemisphere summer, Taylor spent his week in South America trying to determine characteristics of the Andes that might shed light on the real subject of his geologic devotion: Tibet.
“My bread and butter and deep passion is Asian tectonics,” Taylor said. “It’s the best place in the world to study mountain building.”
Mountain building, or the process of chunks of Earth’s crust ramming together to form mountain ranges, has been Taylor’s focus for years. He has studied the Himalayas in Tibet to better understand not just mountain building, but earthquakes and other earth processes as well.
Taylor chose to conduct fieldwork in Argentina, he said, because the Andes and the Himalayas share a considerable link.
“South America is what Tibet looked like 50 million years ago,” he said. “That was before India slammed into southern Asia and made the Tibetan Plateau.”
Taylor said fertile land like that that surrounds Mendoza once thrived where Tibet’s often cold and craggy mountain plateau now sits.
That trait has made the Andes a place of interest for Taylor.
Clues in the faults and rock deformation of the Andes and Himalayas could also help answer fundamental questions about the nature of the two ranges, namely the slip rate, or rate at which two sides of a fault are moving, Taylor said. Finding the slip rate would help scientists determine how often earthquakes occur along any one fault.
But the Andes and Himalayas are not entirely similar, Taylor said, because the formation of the mountain ranges involved different types of continental drift.
Daniel Stockli, associate professor of geology, said the Andes formed as the result of an oceanic plate sliding under the western edge of the South America. The Himalayas were formed by the direct collision of two continental plates.
“The Andes were like a one-car accident as opposed to a two-car accident in the Himalayas,” Stockli said.
That head-on collision helped make the Himalayas as large and rugged as they are. It’s a feature that contributes to another of Taylor’s interests in Tibet, which has less to do with mountains and more to do with who lives among them.
“The distribution of nomads has been determined by the spacing of mountain ranges,” he said. “The dialect each group speaks evolved independently of other groups because they’re separated by mountains.”
In other words, he said, tectonics are controlling the language and lifestyle of Tibetan nomads.
Having spent six trips of 60 to 100 days each mapping rocks in Tibet, Taylor has developed an appreciation for the people who make their lives there.
“You come across people so isolated they’ve never seen blonde hair or hazel eyes,” Taylor said. “They’re living the same as they did 100 to 200 years ago. It’s magical.”
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