Mount Edziza Provincial Park in north-central British Columbia is a magnificent, unspoiled wilderness. It is also a geological wonder, containing a superb record of volcanic rocks that are, geologically speaking, young – ranging from only 2000 years to 7.5 million years old.
The park has an array of well-exposed basaltic shields, composite volcanoes, domes, and small calderas that have been glacially modified into an assemblage of sub-glacial and sub-aerial volcanic landforms. In other words, it was a geological puzzle in need of highly trained eyes to be pieced together. Geological Survey of Canada volcanologist Jack Souther provided those eyes, and the result was his acclaimed report The Late Cenozoic Mount Edziza Volcanic Complex, British Columbia.
Through years of dedicated fieldwork in this remote locale, Souther unravelled its complex geology. He defined the sequence of events that had occurred, including five phases of eruptions, by recognizing and mapping individual volcanic flows, their age, position in space, and relationships to each other, and by determining precisely how individual events/flows were related to particular features. Souther brought order to apparent chaos.
Category: Science Advances
Decade: 1990s
References
Volcano Discovery. http://www.volcanodiscovery.com/edziza.html
Mount Edziza Provincial Park. http://www.env.gov.bc.ca/bcparks/explore/parkpgs/mt_edziza/
