Time Traveling Through Highlands Ranch

Monday August 19, 2024

Dr. Donna Anderson, Affiliate Faculty in Geology, Colorado School of Mines, is the presenter. She will be discussing landscape changes and time traveling through HR and Colorado.

Landscape changes over the last 500+ million years will be highlighted in this PowerPoint presentation, which will also include a short video.

Continents came together and split apart several times while traveling from the tropics at sea level to today’s middle latitude and mountain elevations. Each landscape hosted incredibly different and now-extinct plants and animals, leaving behind a rich fossil record, including those in Highlands Ranch.

A short “movie” will show how the plates have changed over the last 4 billion years.

A colleague from the Rocky Mountain Association of Geologists will be present to help with the display table of rocks and fossils and will be available to answer questions.

ABOUT OUR PRESENTER:

Dr. Donna Anderson, Affiliate Faculty in Geology, Colorado School of Mines is a semi-retired geologist, working since 1974 in geotechnical engineering in California and later in the oil and gas industry in the western U.S. and internationally. She received a B.A. in Earth Science and Geography at Cal State Fullerton (1974), a M.S. in Geology at UCLA (1980), and a Ph.D. in Geology (sedimentology/stratigraphy) at Mines (1997). Her post-Ph.D. career interwove industry and academia as a consultant and geological advisor in the oil and gas industry, retiring in 2015.

Since 2000, she has been on the faculty in the Mines Dept. of Geology and Geological Engineering as a research professor and Affiliate Faculty. She has taught undergraduate and graduate students in the field, core lab, and classroom and has been on dozens of Mines thesis committees across departments.

Throughout her career Donna has participated in geologic societies, foundations, and local community groups, and is a Past President of the Rocky Mountain Association of Geologists and is currently on the Board of the Dinosaur Ridge Foundation. Having moved toward community outreach, she enjoys peeling back the layers of the geologic landscape for the non-geologist.

Dr. Donna Anderson and co-author Paul Haseman recently published Golden Rocks: The Geology and Mining History of Golden, Colorado, a free eBook in the Arthur Lakes digital repository.

https://repository.mines.edu/handle/11124/14162

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