The document files listed below are the texts of either public talks by Dr. Roed or descriptions of field trips conducted, for example, during the Penticton Meadow Lark Festival and a similar trip with the Association of Professional Engineers and Geoscientists of British Columbia.
Antiquity of the Okanagan
These days many of us spend time contemplating what disaster is going to impact our beautiful planet next, and where it is going to hit? Earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, wild fires, hurricanes, tornadoes, tsunamis, landslides and floods, and even debris falling from space are seemingly daily occurrences, and front-page news. This is all the stuff of geologists but touch the lives of everyone on Earth at one time or another.
Mission Creek Greenway
The Greenway offers a great variety of geologic points of interest, all of which could be developed for visitor interest. The glacial and bedrock deposits have never been studied in detail and are poorly mapped; this should be a priority for future development.
Origins of Okanagan Lake
Information provided is primarily from a book entitled “Okanagan Geology, British Columbia” published in 2004 by the Kelowna Geology Committee.
Post-Glacial and Geomorphological History of the South Okanagan Valley
Post-glacial loosely refers to an interval of time when all glacial ice disappeared to the present moment. This encompasses about 13,000 years or so, but nobody knows when all the ice actually melted. Clearly, remnant giant blocks of ice, now occupied by the major lakes of the valley, persisted for many years and were contemporaneous with the existence of Glacial Lake Penticton. The latter is a lake that formed in the valley stretching from a morainal dam near Okanagan Falls north to at least Enderby. A similar lake formed in the Thompson River Valley. If geomorphic development of the valley was that simple, and could be explained by events occurring in a mere 13,000 years, then this would be a short field trip indeed!
Geology as a Career
Geology used to be introduced as “the study of the earth”, however, in the 21st Century, it is far more than that. Geologists are now called upon, for instance, to advise and interpret the spectacular discoveries on the moon, the features in the amazing photographs of the planets in outer space that are being explored, and to analyze the samples collected by remote robots like the Mars Lander.
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