Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
remains of rock lobsters and tropical snail shells, feeling the glow of salty air
and a warm lapping sea—in a geological setting made up of rocks and fossils
so familiar as to be bizarre in this near-tropical context. The rocks were old
friends from my earnest boyhood days on Orcas and Sucia Islands. And it
wasn't just the rocks. Far more telling were the
fossils,
old ftiends too, am-
monites and snails familiar from the Vancouver Island region, yet sitting
here entombed in this gray green matrix on a Mexican not Canadian coast,
announcing their names with a Spanish accent:
Baculites, Hoplitoplacen-
ticeras, Desmophyllites, Inoceramus.
Perhaps it was coincidence that these
rocks and those of Sucia and Vancouver Islands shared fossils as well as
lithology. But perhaps not.
Joe Kirschvink had studied the paleomagnetic signals of these rocks
over the years to ascertain their ancient latitude. His questions were thus
fundamentally different from the research questions I had been examining
via paleomagnetics. Joe was interested in ancient continental positions; my
work, up to this point, had been concerned only with time as calibrated by
the geomagnetic polarity time scale—the record of geomagnetic reversals.
Joe's work on this beach demonstrated that the paleolatitude of Baja Cali-
fornia some 75
to
80 million years ago was nearly the same as it is now: be-
tween 20 and 25 degrees north latitude. But what of Vancouver Island? Was
the Baja British Columbia hypothesis correct?
We spent several days touring various outcrops along the coast, spend-
ing little time on any given outcrop. Nights were filled with food, Corona,
nips of Tequila, and much conversation. On this trip, Joe and I launched a
friendship and a scientific collaboration as well. Neithet of us much liked the
possibility that the Vancouver Island rocks were completely reheated, and
we discussed areas that had not yet been sampled, regions that might contain
an original, Cretaceous-aged paleomagnetic record that could give reliable
paleolatitude for the Vancouver Island region at a time when dinosaurs still
ruled the earth. It was on this first Baja trip that we began to make plans to
mount yet another assault on the paleomagnetics of Vancouvet Island, this
time armed with better sampling techniques and a far better paleomagnetic
laboratory to analyze the cores. It took several years and a grant from the
