POTENTIAL BINARY WORKSHOP PARTICIPANTS: We apologize for the delay in sending out registration and abstract information, but expect something within the next few days. Here is some information for those wishing to attend the field trip to the K-T boundary layer after the August meeting: GENERAL LOCATION OF FIELD SITE We will be going to Trinidad Lake State Park. This is going to be somewhere between a 5- and 7-hour drive from the location of the meeting. Here is a map of Colorado, showing the likely location of your destination/departure airport (Denver International Airport [DIA], about 20 miles northeast of Denver), the location of the meeting (Steamboat Springs, northwest of Denver) and the field site (Trinidad, near the very bottom of the map, about 10 miles north of the New Mexico border [dashed line]). http://www.boulder.swri.edu/binary-mtg/field-trip/trinidad5s.map.pdf TRIP SCHEDULE The scientific meeting on binaries will end by about 12:00 noon on Thursday August 23. Participants will then make the 5- to 7- hour drive to Trinidad in the afternoon/evening of Thursday, August 23. There will be an overnight camp or overnight hotel stay on Thursday, August 23, so that we are prepared to arrive at the field site by mid-Friday morning, August 24. No formal activities for Thursday night are currently planned, but we may arrange a group dinner or late-night drinks as the trip date approaches. Instructions will be given later as to how, specifically, to get to the site within the park, as well as the start time. PLEASE be aware that there will only be a short time at the K-T site itself, despite the long drives to/from the location. The on-site duration itself will probably *not be longer than about 2 hours*. Dan Durda will give some background and information on the K-T event and this particular exposure to the impact ejecta layer. Then people will have time to look around themselves. That's a lot of travel overhead for just a few hours, but this may be the only chance for some participants to see a clear exposure of the boundary clay in person. Participants may then depart for the airport or for other destinations. The drive to DIA from here can be expected to be about 3.5 hours. However, it should be noted that late Friday afternoon traffic in Denver and surrounding areas, particularly to the south, can be brutal. The airport can be accessed without encountering the heart of Denver traffic by using roads that skirt Denver. LOGISTICS All participants will need to arrange their own transportation from the meeting site to the field site, either by carpooling with those having their own personal cars or with those having rental cars, or by renting a vehicle. If you plan to stay in Colorado the following weekend, it might be most convenient to have your own vehicle before the field trip. Please consider your plans for the field trip when planning your meeting travel. If you will be attending the field trip, you probably will find it more convenient to depart from Denver airport than from the Steamboat-area airport. Travelers could also depart from Colorado Springs airport, if that is more convenient. The field trip site is about 4 miles from Trinidad, about 205 miles from Denver, about 135 miles from Colorado Springs, and about 256 miles from Albuquerque. It is about 265 miles from Steamboat Springs, although much of the drive not along freeways. LODGING We have reserved a block of rooms at a rate of USD 85 per night at the Best Western hotel in Trinidad for the night of August 23. You may call anytime to reserved your room at 719-846-2215, and indicate that the block is held under the name "Southwest Research Institute". Total cost of room, including tax, should be USD 93.42. Their web site: http://www.bestwesterncolorado.com/hotels/best-western-trinidad-inn/ Participants may also wish to camp at Trinidad Lake State Park. This site allows booking of a campsite, which we recommend to do as soon as possible. We do not have reserved spaces in the campground. http://parks.state.co.us/Parks/TrinidadLake/Camping/ Fees are given below. COSTS Entrance to the park itself will be USD 5 per vehicle per day. Those camping probably will be required to pay for 2 days. Camping fees, in addition, will be: Regular site $14/night Site with electricity: $18/night Hotel costs are given above. BACKGROUND ON K/T IMPACT & EJECTA LAYER From Wikipedia: The Cretaceous-Tertiary event was the catastrophic mass extinction of extant animal species in a comparatively short period of time. The event occurred approximately 65.5 million years ago. It is widely known as the K-T extinction event, and its geological signature is called the K-T boundary (K is the traditional abbreviation for the Cretaceous Period, to avoid confusion with the Carboniferous Period, abbreviated as C, and the Cambrian period, denoted C). With a few possible exceptions, there are no non-avian dinosaur fossils that are found later than the K-T boundary, and it appears that all went extinct during or shortly after the event. Many other groups of animals and plants, including mosasaurs, plesiosaurs, pterosaurs, and invertebrates, also became extinct at the K-T boundary. The event marks the end of the Mesozoic Era, and the beginning of the Cenozoic Era. In 1980, a team of researchers led by Nobel-prize-winning physicist Luis Alvarez, his son geologist Walter Alvarez and chemists Frank Asaro and Helen Michels discovered that sedimentary layers found all over the world at the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary contain a concentration of iridium hundreds of times greater than normal. Iridium is extremely rare in the earth's crust because it is very dense, and therefore most of it sank into the earth's core while the earth was still molten. The Alvarez team suggested that an asteroid struck the earth at the time of the K-T boundary. There were other earlier speculations on the possibility of an impact event, but no evidence had been uncovered at that time. The evidence for the Alvarez impact theory is supported by chondritic meteorites and asteroids which contain a much higher iridium concentration than the earth's crust. The isotopic ratio of iridium in asteroids is similar to that of the K-T boundary layer but significantly different from the ratio in the earth's crust. Chromium isotopic anomalies found in Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary sediments are similar to that of an asteroid or a comet composed of carbonaceous chondrites. Shocked quartz granules, glass spherules and tektites, indicative of an impact event, are common in the K-T boundary, especially in deposits from around the Caribbean. All of these constituents are embedded in a layer of clay, which the Alvarez team interpreted as the debris spread all over the world by the impact. BACKGROUND ON TRINIDAD EXPOSURE We will be visiting one of the rather rare exposures of the K-T impact layer, in Trinidad Lake State Park, in southern Colorado: http://parks.state.co.us/Parks/TrinidadLake/ Specifically, we will visit the Long's Canyon area of the park, where there is a very good exposure of the K/T boundary. There is an entry for it in Wikipedia, with pictures of the Long's Canyon area and the boundary specifically: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinidad_Lake_State_Park Here's another image of the boundary itself that Dan Durda took when he and Dave Kring were there for field work in 2002: http://www.boulder.swri.edu/~durda/kring/Jul30_07.jpg This is a nice exposure of a continental K/T boundary site that at the time of the impact was near the shore of the Cretaceous seaway that cut up through much of North America at the time. The boundary site itself is about a 15-20 minute drive from downtown Trinidad, with paved and easy dirt road all the way. About a 1/2 mile walk from the parking area will take us to the boundary exposure. We are not able to organize a true geological field trip. It will be more of a guided tour to the site. We expect to put together some sort of one- or two-page handout trying to describe a bit of the geology and boundary processes, but it'll be nothing like a true fieldtrip guidebook. OTHER ATTRACTIONS Participants may also wish to consider a big blues music festival for the following day (August 25) in Trinidad: http://www.trinidaddio.com/index.html Currently, no rooms are available at the Best Western for August 24 and 25 for those wishing to stay longer. But we are on a waiting list and there is some chance that some will open up in the next several weeks.