George Freitag, CEG, to Present at the 2016 AEG Annual Meeting

George will be giving a presentation on the engineering geology of the Meyers Cone along Interstate 84. If you are attending the meeting, this presentation will be a part of Technical Session #17 this Friday at 9:40 am. Below is a synopsis of the presentation:

Engineering Geology of the Meyers Cone,
Interstate 84, Columbia River Gorge, Oregon

Lidar and new geologic data have revealed a previously unmapped Quaternary volcanic vent system near MP 49 along Interstate 84 (I-84) in Hood River County, Oregon.  We refer to the feature as the Meyers Cone, which is a 650-ft-high olivine basalt edifice with two prominent flow lobes, the Anderson Point and Trotter Point lobes, that extend under I-84 into the Bonneville Pool.  Features including a 25-ft-high, 1,200-ft-long volcanic flow are preserved on the inside of the cone.  A northeast-southwest trending rampart system is present on the west side of the cone and goes toward other newly identified vents to the southwest.  Eruptions on the east side of the cone deposit on a pre-existing, north-sloping, alluvial fan complex. A band of east-west oriented tension features (scarps) on the upper portion of the fan are interpreted to be the result of destabilization of the fan by deposition of material near the fan toe.  The historical Fountain Landslide along I-84, east of the Meyers Cone, is located near the toe of the fan.  Previous workers interpreted the subject area solely as a distal portion of the Trout Creek Hill basalt (385 Ka) that flowed down the Wind River drainage from Washington and temporarily blocked the Columbia River. Beginning with railroad construction in the 1880s and continuing with the construction of the Historic Columbia River Highway in 1914-15, US-30 in the 1950s, and I-80N/I-84 in the 1960s, the geology of these transportation routes has been influenced by the Meyers Cone.  We propose the cone should be officially named after Joseph Meyers, the Oregon geologist who first identified some of the flow features in the 1950s.

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