Rocky Cuba Picture Show

Twelve hundred miles might seem like a long distance to travel for a field trip, but the Rice students who took the Department of Earth Science’s eight-day trip to Cuba in January were particularly pleased.

“Everybody loved it because the trip was such a unique experience,” said Julia Morgan, assistant professor of earth science, who led the trip with Hans Avé Lallemant, professor of earth science. “Cuba is very interesting geologically, with so many different types of rock that there’s something there for everyone,” she said. “We wanted to expose our students to geologic locations that have heavily influenced geologists’ thinking in the past.”

The island of Cuba was once part of a volcanic island chain that rims the Caribbean. More than 58 million years ago, that chain collided with the Bahama platform, fusing Cuba to North America.

The island offers a unique variety of rocks, some of which were once buried at depths exceeding 40 miles and have since come back to the surface. Also found on the island are rocks interpreted to be chaotic landslide and tsunami deposits resulting from an asteroid that smashed into Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula and, some theorize, wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.

Seeing a 400-meter-thick rock deposit that formed within a month after the asteroid impact was a highlight of the field trip for first-year doctoral student Alastair John. “That’s beyond our concept of geological processes,” he said.

Because the field trip included visits to different parts of the island, students were introduced to many geologic features, including dramatic mogotes, which are steep-walled limestone mountains riddled with caves; ancient and modern-day reefs; and ophiolite complexes, which are slices of the oceanic crust now found on land.

“I had never seen so many geologic terrains juxtaposed,” said Patrick Taha, also a first-year doctoral student.

The nine graduate students and four undergraduate students who went on the field trip had taken a seminar on the geology of Cuba taught last fall by Avé Lallemant and André Droxler, associate professor of earth science, so they arrived in Cuba well-prepared to read and interpret the geological and tectonic records of the overall Caribbean evolution. They also benefited from the expertise of Manuel Iturralde-Vinent, the world’s leading expert on Cuban geology, who served as their guide.

In addition to having geological value, the trip was educational from a social perspective, introducing students to the people of Cuba, their food, music, dance, and history.

“Culturally, it was a great experience,” said Deanna Borchers, a first-year master’s student. She added that it also was “interesting to see how communism works.”

Borchers and several other students agreed that the time spent in Cuba, where the beef ration is one kilogram per month and many of the few cars that are used were manufactured in the 1950s, made them appreciate the standard of living in the United States.

The visit to Cuba was the second in the Department of Earth Science’s Type Locale Field Trip Program. The travel expenses of the Rice participants were largely subsidized by the department. The program showcases earth science at Rice to colleagues at other universities and also to prospective graduate students, two of whom accompanied the group to Cuba.

The first trip in the series took place last year in Hawaii, where students had a chance to walk on recently hardened and still-hot lava, study coastal processes in action, and examine remnants of volcanoes destroyed by giant landslides. According to Avé Lallemant, the third annual departmental field trip will take place during the summer of 2003 and will include a transect across the Alps in Switzerland, Italy, and Austria.

—B. J. Almond