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In Search of Ancient Oregon: A Geological and Natural History
Geology is an extremely visual subject, and In Search of Ancient Oregon is a beautifully photographed, expertly written account of Oregon's fascinating geological story. Written by a passionate and professional geologist who has spent countless hours in the field exploring and photographing the state, In Search of Ancient Oregon is a book for all those interested in Oregon's landscapes and environments. It presents fine-art-quality color photographs of well-known features such as Mount Hood, Crater Lake, Smith Rock, Steens Mountain, the Columbia River Gorge, and Cannon Beach, and scenic, not so well known places such as Jordan Craters, Leslie Gulch, Abert Rim, Hells Canyon, Elkhorn Mountains, and Three Fingered Jack. Each of the more than 220 stunning photographs is accompanied by readable text, presenting the story of how Oregon's diverse landscapes evolved — and what we may expect in the future. Until now, no book has presented this dynamic story in a way that everyone interested in Oregon's natural history can easily understand. The combination of extraordinary photographs and the author's lucid explanations make this book both unique and essential for those curious about our own contemporary landscape.
288 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2003
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
June 19, 2020
My most frequently browsed book.
Ellen Morris Bishop provides excellent array of photos ... suggest you visit her linked site
https://ellenmorrisbishop.smugmug.com...
***
Expanded my world-view wonderfully ... geology with friendly vocabulary. Appreciate 'seeing' Oregon in "Terranes" context ... combined with quality photography.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrane
***
Quoting from the inside front cover :
"Until about 110 million years ago, the land we know as Oregon simply did not exist. The development of the state's distinctive and beautiful landscapes is a classic and dramatic tale, 400 million years in the making and greatly affected by global events. In the beginning, Oregon's foundations lay far off the Idaho seacoast as tropical volcanic islands. Collision with these exotic terranes produced the first land that was truly Oregon. Subsequent eruptions of volcanoes in central and eastern Oregon--where bananas grew and tiny horses browsed on figs and lotus leaves--built the coastline westward. As the climate cooled, Columbia River basalts and collision with a chain of offshore seamounts built Oregon's coast to today's position, while faulting uplifted the now-familiar mountain ranges. When mastodons and dire wolves prowled the Willamette Valley at the end of the Ice Age, great floods from Montana transformed the valley into a 100-mile-long lake. ..."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missoul...
"Geology is an extremely visual subject ..." (Timber Press : Portland and London ... produced high quality books, their catalog was a favorite to receive in my years developing the public library's book collection. Good source for books that people wanted to buy for the library, those"Dedicated to ..." titles.)
***
"Chapter 1 - In the Beginning
"Once upon a time, when dinosaurs roamed Montana and pterosaurs ruled the skies, there was no Oregon. In those days, more than 100 millions years ago, Pacific waves broke on Idaho shores. ... Boise a coastal town. The oldest rocks of Oregon lay far offshore, gathering as coral-fringed islands in a shallow tropical sea.
"Oregon's most ancient rocks are almost 400 million years old. They developed in a Devonian world where armored fish patrolled the waters and amphibians pioneered the land. If we had flown past the Devonian Earth in a spacecraft we might not have recognized our blue planet as home. The Earth's continents clustered in the Southern Hemisphere. ... There was no Atlantic Ocean, and the ancestral Pacific ... stretched two-thirds of the way around the globe.
"Oregon's most ancient bedrock ... once was ocean bottom, shallow-water coral reefs, and a variety of volcanic islands far from North America's abbreviated coastline. There was no Oregon until plate tectonics cleaved North America from Europe and northern Africa,and moved the continent westward to collide with these reefs and islands, and the disheveled seafloor that held them.
"The fragmented islands, coral reefs, and volcanoes now sequestered in Oregon's remote mountains once resembled the modern cluttered seas of Indonesia. They were added to the main landmass from 150 million to 90 million years ago by collisions with an opportunistic continent that gathered orphaned landscapes from an island-dimpled sea ... North America's western coast, Oregon included, is a collage of exotic geology swept onto the prow of a westward-moving continent like pond scum on the bow of a giant canoe." ...
... "There is a specific geologic name for a group of rocks that formed in one place and were tacked onto another by plate tectonics. These immigrant landscapes are called terranes, or sometimes, if the rocks have traveled great distances, exotic terranes, a play on the more familiar word terrain. Terranes are fragments of ancient landscapes that have been moved about like plate tectonic chess pieces ... A terrane is not the landscape before our eyes, but one that requires a deeper vision, it is a geologic landscape. The original mountains, lakes, and rivers are long gone. But their record in the rocks remains.
"The Aleutian Islands will one day collide with mainland Alaska ... like a bug on the continental windshield, become a new North American geologic terrane. The Hawaiian Islands are well on their way to becoming a terrane as their extinct volcanoes are carried toward Russia on the back of the Pacific plate. One day, 100 million years in the future, when Hawaii is scaped off the Pacific plate and added to Russia, its rocks will be deformed. Its flora and fauna will be fossils. It will be part of Asia, but its rocks will be recognizable as a former seamount by their chemical composition ..."
***
Quoting from the epilogue:
"For most of us, a century seems a long time, and a million years stretches forever. But geology, with timescales that calibrate years by the million, provides another perspective, a longer gauge. In the next 100 years, Oregon is likely to experience a severe earthquake and may see an eruption sprout from South Sister or Mount Hood. These are events within sight of a few generations, well within our mental grasp.
"These same generations will experience global climate changes and extinctions that are truly geologic in scope. We are witnesses to, and in large part the cause of, Earth's sixth great extinction ... Conservation efforts have staved off the certainty of extinction for condors ... and other charismatic animals ... But for many less-appealing species whose functions are foundational to natural ecosystems, there is no second chance. Like Oregon's woolly mammoths and sockeye salmon, many other animals and plants are already gone."
" ... Unfortunately, trees cannot pick up their roots and migrate--they die where the climate is no longer suitable. And seedling survive only in locations where conditions are more salubrious. The rate that a forest can migrate by this process of die-off and dispersal is no more than a few miles per decade--global climate change moves much faster." ...
... "From the depths of the most remote wilderness we can look skyward to find contrails instead of clouds (a constant challenge when shooting photographs for the book)."
... In his book Future Evolution, University of Washington paleontologist Peter Ward calls these actions by human 'the functional reuniting of Gondwanaland.'" ... Evolution, Ward assures us, will not stop. But based on the inability of larger animals to flourish in a human-dominated world, he expects that we will halt the natural evolution of larger animals. It will be the smaller animals, better adapted to survive on their own in human-determined circumstance, that will continue to evovle: rats, crows, opossum, raccoon. Insects should do well, facilely evolving new strategies to cope with us." ...
"And what of Oregon's landscapes, its rocks and mountains ... What will Oregon's geology be like 10 million to 100 million years in the future? North America should over-run the Juan de Fuca Ridge (rising from the seafloor of the Pacific Ocean about 300 miles west of Newport and extending north-northeast toward Vancouver Island) in about 10 million years, accreting it as yet another exotic terrane and moving the coast westward once again.
***
Ellen Morris Bishop provides excellent array of photos ... suggest you visit her linked site
https://ellenmorrisbishop.smugmug.com...
***
Expanded my world-view wonderfully ... geology with friendly vocabulary. Appreciate 'seeing' Oregon in "Terranes" context ... combined with quality photography.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrane
***
Quoting from the inside front cover :
"Until about 110 million years ago, the land we know as Oregon simply did not exist. The development of the state's distinctive and beautiful landscapes is a classic and dramatic tale, 400 million years in the making and greatly affected by global events. In the beginning, Oregon's foundations lay far off the Idaho seacoast as tropical volcanic islands. Collision with these exotic terranes produced the first land that was truly Oregon. Subsequent eruptions of volcanoes in central and eastern Oregon--where bananas grew and tiny horses browsed on figs and lotus leaves--built the coastline westward. As the climate cooled, Columbia River basalts and collision with a chain of offshore seamounts built Oregon's coast to today's position, while faulting uplifted the now-familiar mountain ranges. When mastodons and dire wolves prowled the Willamette Valley at the end of the Ice Age, great floods from Montana transformed the valley into a 100-mile-long lake. ..."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missoul...
"Geology is an extremely visual subject ..." (Timber Press : Portland and London ... produced high quality books, their catalog was a favorite to receive in my years developing the public library's book collection. Good source for books that people wanted to buy for the library, those"Dedicated to ..." titles.)
***
"Chapter 1 - In the Beginning
"Once upon a time, when dinosaurs roamed Montana and pterosaurs ruled the skies, there was no Oregon. In those days, more than 100 millions years ago, Pacific waves broke on Idaho shores. ... Boise a coastal town. The oldest rocks of Oregon lay far offshore, gathering as coral-fringed islands in a shallow tropical sea.
"Oregon's most ancient rocks are almost 400 million years old. They developed in a Devonian world where armored fish patrolled the waters and amphibians pioneered the land. If we had flown past the Devonian Earth in a spacecraft we might not have recognized our blue planet as home. The Earth's continents clustered in the Southern Hemisphere. ... There was no Atlantic Ocean, and the ancestral Pacific ... stretched two-thirds of the way around the globe.
"Oregon's most ancient bedrock ... once was ocean bottom, shallow-water coral reefs, and a variety of volcanic islands far from North America's abbreviated coastline. There was no Oregon until plate tectonics cleaved North America from Europe and northern Africa,and moved the continent westward to collide with these reefs and islands, and the disheveled seafloor that held them.
"The fragmented islands, coral reefs, and volcanoes now sequestered in Oregon's remote mountains once resembled the modern cluttered seas of Indonesia. They were added to the main landmass from 150 million to 90 million years ago by collisions with an opportunistic continent that gathered orphaned landscapes from an island-dimpled sea ... North America's western coast, Oregon included, is a collage of exotic geology swept onto the prow of a westward-moving continent like pond scum on the bow of a giant canoe." ...
... "There is a specific geologic name for a group of rocks that formed in one place and were tacked onto another by plate tectonics. These immigrant landscapes are called terranes, or sometimes, if the rocks have traveled great distances, exotic terranes, a play on the more familiar word terrain. Terranes are fragments of ancient landscapes that have been moved about like plate tectonic chess pieces ... A terrane is not the landscape before our eyes, but one that requires a deeper vision, it is a geologic landscape. The original mountains, lakes, and rivers are long gone. But their record in the rocks remains.
"The Aleutian Islands will one day collide with mainland Alaska ... like a bug on the continental windshield, become a new North American geologic terrane. The Hawaiian Islands are well on their way to becoming a terrane as their extinct volcanoes are carried toward Russia on the back of the Pacific plate. One day, 100 million years in the future, when Hawaii is scaped off the Pacific plate and added to Russia, its rocks will be deformed. Its flora and fauna will be fossils. It will be part of Asia, but its rocks will be recognizable as a former seamount by their chemical composition ..."
***
Quoting from the epilogue:
"For most of us, a century seems a long time, and a million years stretches forever. But geology, with timescales that calibrate years by the million, provides another perspective, a longer gauge. In the next 100 years, Oregon is likely to experience a severe earthquake and may see an eruption sprout from South Sister or Mount Hood. These are events within sight of a few generations, well within our mental grasp.
"These same generations will experience global climate changes and extinctions that are truly geologic in scope. We are witnesses to, and in large part the cause of, Earth's sixth great extinction ... Conservation efforts have staved off the certainty of extinction for condors ... and other charismatic animals ... But for many less-appealing species whose functions are foundational to natural ecosystems, there is no second chance. Like Oregon's woolly mammoths and sockeye salmon, many other animals and plants are already gone."
" ... Unfortunately, trees cannot pick up their roots and migrate--they die where the climate is no longer suitable. And seedling survive only in locations where conditions are more salubrious. The rate that a forest can migrate by this process of die-off and dispersal is no more than a few miles per decade--global climate change moves much faster." ...
... "From the depths of the most remote wilderness we can look skyward to find contrails instead of clouds (a constant challenge when shooting photographs for the book)."
... In his book Future Evolution, University of Washington paleontologist Peter Ward calls these actions by human 'the functional reuniting of Gondwanaland.'" ... Evolution, Ward assures us, will not stop. But based on the inability of larger animals to flourish in a human-dominated world, he expects that we will halt the natural evolution of larger animals. It will be the smaller animals, better adapted to survive on their own in human-determined circumstance, that will continue to evovle: rats, crows, opossum, raccoon. Insects should do well, facilely evolving new strategies to cope with us." ...
"And what of Oregon's landscapes, its rocks and mountains ... What will Oregon's geology be like 10 million to 100 million years in the future? North America should over-run the Juan de Fuca Ridge (rising from the seafloor of the Pacific Ocean about 300 miles west of Newport and extending north-northeast toward Vancouver Island) in about 10 million years, accreting it as yet another exotic terrane and moving the coast westward once again.
***
December 28, 2015
Amazing and hugely comprehensive. I purposefully read it slow to absorb the times and geologic terms fully. Wow. If you need a coffee table book that doubles as a text of Oregon geology, this is the only book you will need. We've had quite the happening past here. Read this book! The pictures are awesome, too!
December 31, 2021
That was a really great way to finish my reading for 2021. While I may have found some bits a tad mind-glaze-y, overall I found it very readable, very informative. In fact, sometimes the author got downright quippy - I think I may have actually laughed out loud at the Fork Rock sandals/Nike footwear bit, "So uniform is the style throughout the Great Basin that it is called the Fort Rock sandal, Oregon's first successful footgear design and export." [p. 232] My inner business librarian was very, very amused.
And for sure the book has a lavish amount of photographs showing how all the geologic things are looking in these modern times. Which, lovely! But sometimes I wept for a nice graph or chart or something to pull all these geologic activities together for me. For example, one thing that was all new to me was the fact that back in the supercontinent era, Idaho was the west coast of this part of North America. And while the author very ably described many, many details for how various "Pacific" island bits were accreted into exotic terranes and how oceanic plate subduction did its thing for mountain-growth and such, I don't really have a clear visualization of the progression of how North American went from Idaho as west coast to Oregon as west coast.
Honestly, those "buts" are just minor quibbles. Overall, I was just thrilled to learn about all these various geologic forces in such an understandable way. And I really, really enjoyed how at a certain point my brain started to perceive 20 - 16 million years ago as so young and recent. LOL! And maybe, just maybe, this pandemic will dial down before I forget all the tidbits I learned about the 300-mile basalt lava flow from eastern Oregon to the Pacific coast. For sure my peeps want to hear about that!
Probably more in the 4-star range for me, but as I'm weak to all the delights included I'm just gonna go ahead and give it 5 stars. And, yes, I've already looked for more on California and/or other western North America ancient geologic history books.
And for sure the book has a lavish amount of photographs showing how all the geologic things are looking in these modern times. Which, lovely! But sometimes I wept for a nice graph or chart or something to pull all these geologic activities together for me. For example, one thing that was all new to me was the fact that back in the supercontinent era, Idaho was the west coast of this part of North America. And while the author very ably described many, many details for how various "Pacific" island bits were accreted into exotic terranes and how oceanic plate subduction did its thing for mountain-growth and such, I don't really have a clear visualization of the progression of how North American went from Idaho as west coast to Oregon as west coast.
Honestly, those "buts" are just minor quibbles. Overall, I was just thrilled to learn about all these various geologic forces in such an understandable way. And I really, really enjoyed how at a certain point my brain started to perceive 20 - 16 million years ago as so young and recent. LOL! And maybe, just maybe, this pandemic will dial down before I forget all the tidbits I learned about the 300-mile basalt lava flow from eastern Oregon to the Pacific coast. For sure my peeps want to hear about that!
Probably more in the 4-star range for me, but as I'm weak to all the delights included I'm just gonna go ahead and give it 5 stars. And, yes, I've already looked for more on California and/or other western North America ancient geologic history books.
August 22, 2021
It was fascinating, wonderfully written, and filled with beautiful photos. It also fills in a lot of gaps of my knowledge of Oregon geology and paleontology. I was a little surprised that the author didn't include the Neskowin Ghost Forest in the discussion of subduction quakes.
February 1, 2011
If you are interested in Oregon's geology and how the state came to look so awesome, this is a fantastic book. The tone is intelligent without being too dense for the lay reader, and there are huge numbers of gorgeous photos that serve both as eye candy and as great visual examples of the geological processes being described. HIGHLY recommended!
My only disappointment is that there is not as much about the area I live (the Central Coast) as I'd hoped, but that's a small quibble.
My only disappointment is that there is not as much about the area I live (the Central Coast) as I'd hoped, but that's a small quibble.
November 3, 2008
Traces the creation and changes of the ground we call Oregon from the beginning of time. Using excellent prose filled with inventive comparisons to help the reader understand geology and geologic time, the author also supplements with gorgeous photographs.
January 19, 2011
I am enthralled with the readability, and the clarity with which the author presents the complexities of the geologic, geographic, climatic, and botanic history of our region. The pictures are beautiful and constantly contribute to an understanding of the text.
September 8, 2015
This is an excellent book on the introduction of geology in Oregon. It is also very well written. I would like to have seen a little more details on some of the more recent geologic features, but all in all it is fantastic.
October 30, 2012
I love this book! It's beautiful, educational, and fun to have around.
March 27, 2014
Excellent book on Oregon geology and natural history, for the intelligent lay reader.
October 3, 2015
Fantastic book for the layman who would like to know more about how Oregon became without needing a degree in geology
July 6, 2021
In addition to gorgeous photography, this book gives a thoughtful exposition and chronology of Oregon’s fascinating geological history.
August 23, 2025
A beautiful read, but would have been improved by a few maps in the text.
October 13, 2016
Very good overview of geologic history of Oregon. The photography is superb and if you live in Oregon or are simply interested in the geology, it provides a good layman's introduction. For me, it would have benefited from more maps and illustrations depicting the location and processes described.
January 20, 2019
I want something similar for Washington.
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews