Carolina Liechtenstein Visits Active Volcano - Salton Buttes

Carolina Liechtenstein at Amboy Volcano

This is a trip I took out to Amboy volcano this last Sunday. I drove first to Palm Springs, CA to pick up a friend of mine, and then we drove along the old Route 66, which much of it is the Hwy 62 until you reach the town of Twenty Nine Palms. You then pick up the Amboy Road, and continue another fifty miles east and north. Once over Sheep Pass, there are no houses, ranches, gas stations....nothing.

If you go, you must carry a lot of water, a bit of non-parishable food, sat communications such as Spot, a first aid kit - and tell someone you love where are are going and for how long. I tell you, unless it's a weekend, there is nothing out there until you reach a town with two or three people in it! Oh yes and a chloride mine with a few people there.

In June, there were some European tourists on rented Harleys, for this is a favorite route for Europeans wanting to see the wildest of the wild west. Indeed.

The Amboy volcano is a part of the Mojave Young Volcano System, and is a part of the 7000 mile long Mid-Oceanic ridge that in theory extends from Vancover Island on down through the Sea of Cortez and beyond. This is within an area where the tectonic plates are pulling apart from one another, and this is a rifting zone.

In this blog, several times I have mentioned this rifting zone in the eastern part of California, and this video shows you what is very typical of rifting zones. You'll see plenty of basalt lava rock and signs of basalt magmas, just like in this video within rifting zones through out the world. Iceland has landscape like this, as does the Great Rift Valley of Africa.

So enjoy the video! I make it trippy and strange during the first minute or so, then dive into science. The music is mine and that of the Navajo band Lunar Drive.

http://youtu.be/btWM80_fAjA

New Quake Swarm at Salton Buttes Volcano in Southern Californa

Today, there has been a renewed series of small earthquakes at Salton Buttes Volcano, on the south end of the Salton Sea, in Imperial County near Niland,  in Southern California. There is also a slight flurry of scattered micro-quakes though out the southern California desert region, included a pair of small EQ events at Covington Flats Volcano, just south of the Black Rock Canyon camp ground, near Yucca Valley, CA.

On another note: Just the other day, I had hiked up White Water Creek, near Palm Springs, CA, and discovered a narrow line of talc. A ranger and others confirmed that this line is indeed at the line where the San Andreas Fault passes. Talc is a soft slippery rock that is often found along strike slip and transform faults, and it is believed to serve a kind of lubricant for the tectonic plate bounderies. (sp). Pardon my English. It isn't my first language. Anyways, this talc indicated to me even before conformation by experts and local rangers on the exact location of the San Andreas Fault. It's cool to actually see the seam between two, quite enormous thousands of square miles large, tectonic plates of rock! Look for talc, and you just might see such!

Here is the link to the current swarm at Salton Buttes Volcano, as well as a pair of EQ events at Covington Flat Volcano.

http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/recenteqscanv/http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/recenteqscanv/