Twelve geologists from the UW-Madison Department of Geoscience, including professors, post docs and graduate students, traveled to northern Minnesota and Thunder Bay, Ontario from May 19-24, 2008 for a terrestrial field trip.

The over-arching goal of astrobiology is to understand the origin and evolution of life in the universe, and therefore many disciplines and sub-disciplines fit under its umbrella. The earth sciences play a major role because some of our best laboratories include Earth and Earth-like planets such as Mars. While Mars is outside of our travel budget, we did bring along a suitcase XRD (X-ray diffractometer) that is being field tested for NASA's 2009 Mars Science Lab mission.

The purpose of the field trip was to observe the rocks of the Gunflint Iron Formation in Ontario and the correlative Biwabik Iron Formation in Minnesota. We were expertly guided by Dick Ojakangas in Minnesota and Philip Fralick and Pier Pufahl in Ontario. The group camped in Kakabeka Falls Provincial Park outside of Thunder Bay where the falls have eroded through 40 meters of the upper member of the Gunflint Iron Formation. We traveled up section over several days and ended up at a spectacular outcrop of a tsunami deposit caused by the Sudbury Impact. We saw the Rove Formation, a black shale overlying the Gunflint, before returning to the U.S. and making our way to the Soudan Mine for an underground tour of the mine workings and the physics lab. Finally, we toured several large open pit taconite mines in northeastern Minnesota and observed the effects of the Duluth Gabbro on the Biwabik Iron Formation. Along the way, we also observed pillowed Ely greenstone, mid-continent rift lavas, pahoehoe, anorthosite and the Gunflint microorganisms discovery outcrop.

Thanks to the the following for making this trip possible...

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