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Museum Public Lecture: Everest
(Seminar/Conference)
Geology of the Mt. Everest massif: a tour of the world's highest rocks
Dr. Rick Law, VT Geosciences
Thursday, November 3, 2016 7:00-8:30pm.
4069 Derring Hall
Join us for this free public lecture followed by a hands-on, meet the scientists session in the Museum, 2062 Derring.
Dr. Law is a structural geologist who has worked in present day and ancient mountain belts around the world, ranging from Alaska to Argentina and from Europe to SE Asia. One of the most spectacular places he studies is Mt. Everest in the Himalayan mountain belt between Tibet and Nepal. The summit of Mt. Everest is the highest elevation above sea level on Earth, at 8848 m, almost 5.5 miles. The Himalaya formed when the Indian plate collided with the Asian plate about 50 million years ago, pushing up above sea level sedimentary rocks originally deposited in the ancient Tethys sea between India and Asia. The collision between the Indian and Asian plates is still ongoing, as most recently highlighted by the April 2015 earthquakes in Nepal that killed nearly 9000 people. Dr. Law's studies have taken him in the footsteps of some of the great 20th century explorers, including Lawrence Wager and Sir Edmund Hillary. Wager's rock samples collected from the NE Ridge of Mt Everest in 1933 are curated at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History in England, while Hillary's samples collected from the summit of Everest during the first successful ascent in 1953 are kept in the Harker Collection at Cambridge University. Law's collections from Mount Everest reside at VT!
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