Natural Resources, School of

 

Date of this Version

2017

Citation

Deposits Magazine (2017) 5: 43-46

Comments

Published by and copyrights owned by UKGE Ltd.

Abstract

From graduate school in 1962 to now, I achieved my goals and became a geologist and professor, travelling and doing research in the Great Plains and western Central Lowland physiographic provinces, and looking at geology in exotic places like the UK, China, Australia and New Zealand. Fast forward to 2013. I had enough experience and expertise on Great Plains geology by then that I was asked to write a short book of about 35,000 words on the geology of the Great Plains by the director of the Center for Great Plains Studies at the University of Nebraska, Dr. Richard Edwards. After visiting and studying sites in Alberta and Saskatchewan in Canada, and in south-western Texas that I had not previously studied, I started working on the book now titled Great Plains Geology that is reviewed in this issue of Deposits on the page opposite. I may be wrong, but I think that few people from the UK have much of a mental image of the Great Plains or know its boundaries. Certainly, that is true of most of our citizens in the USA. The area of land included in the Great Plains has been much debated since the late 1800s, when the physiographic region was defined and its area probably drawn for the first time on a map by the second director of the United States Geological Survey, John Wesley Powell (1895). Powell only included the part of the Great Plains in the United States on his map, but wrote that the place extended north into the Canadian prairie provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan, and south into a small part of northern Mexico. I have included descriptions of some sites in those areas of the Great Plains in my book.

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