You are invited to attend the Weminuche Audubon Society chapter meeting  on Wednesday, September 15 at 6:30 PM on Zoom. This month’s talk will be a geologically speculative/fun talk about geology.  Specifically addressed will be the 2 huge volcanoes located close to Pagosa Springs, both to its north and south sides. Don’t worry, these volcanoes are no longer active. 

To the north, La Garita’s “Mega-Colossal”  is located all around the Creede Colorado area.  The La Garita explosion, which occurred around 27 million years ago, is the world’s largest eruption and “would have killed everything for at least 100 miles in every direction and would have seriously affected everything much further than that” (according to Paul Lipman, USGS scientist emeritus).    The Wheeler Geologic Area near Creede is located within the La Garita Caldera and is a spectacular place to see, with weird erosional exposures of rock spires, and knobs.  

To the south of Pagosa Springs, between Los Alamos and Cuba, New Mexico, is the large “Valles Caldera”.  The Valles eruption also exploded a large amount of material which would have covered New Mexico and surrounding states and has been identified as far east as Kansas.  The Valles caldera is dormant, but not extinct, and still displays signs of volcanic life with hot springs and boiling sulphuric acid fumaroles. 

Our presenter for the evening will be Ted Godo, a part time Pagosa resident and  geological consultant working in the oil and gas industry. Godo originally began his geologic studies at the age of 9 and continued his studies through his master’s degree in Geology from Ohio State University in 1979.  Upon graduation, Shell recruited him to join their exploration department.  At Shell, he gradually rose to a position of chief geologist, where he was responsible to the VP of exploration, providing advice and ranking of the exploration portfolio in the western hemisphere.

He has begun to expand his geologic interests into igneous rocks, such as  volcanoes, which is the subject of this talk. He has published articles, book chapters and books on Mississippian aged turbidites and on chert/novaculite formations in Arkansas; Tertiary turbidite stratigraphic traps in the Gulf of Mexico and most recently, on the Jurassic Norphlet formation which are ancient sand dune deposits or desert areas.

Following is the link to join the meeting on Zoom.Time: Sep 15, 2021 06:30 PM Mountain Time (US and Canada)

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