PAISANO PASS DRIVE-THROUGH VOLCANO - A UNIQUE EARTH SCIENCE EDUCATIONAL RESOURCE

Paisano Pass is a Drive-Through Volcano that provides excellent outdoor earth science educational opportunities coincident with recreation and tourism. The Visit Big Bend Snapshot Of History project is a model for earth education, sponsored and participated in by local, county, state and federal governments, funded by tourism taxes. The exhibit designed for U. S. Highway 90, interprets the complex history of a volcano in terms accessible to travelers, young or old, and will perhaps slow people down so they learn more about this country, and stay another night. This 4X5 foot exhibit combines expert scientific information adapted for a general audience, diagrams, maps, and photographs of sites visible from the road while driving through an extinct mountain of fire. It is also an outline for a mini-field trip to introduce people to discoveries passed from mentor to student by experienced geologists. These exhibits are prototypes of a system of field education that may include channeled instruction from satellite radio and online educational supplements. This is a critical time in geoscience education due to public ignorance of climate and energy issues. We conserve whatever we love and we love those things we know. Sympathetic education is the key.

Development Of The Paisano Volcano (abridged): 35 million years ago basaltic lavas erupted out of a molten body of rock called a pluton, with a temperature of perhaps 2000 °F, approximately 5 miles in diameter, that rose slowly from deep within the mantle of the earth and lodged in hard crust 2 to 3 miles below the surface where you stand. Explosive pyroclastic eruptions driven by steam and carbon dioxide followed, and then more lava flows. After a quiet period pyroclastic flows began to erupt again, and then a caldera crater collapsed during violent explosions that partially emptied a magma chamber under the volcano. Finally more lavas erupted, followed by late mafic dikes and plugs, and much younger nepheline syenite, that intruded into the older volcanic strata. Development of the broad shield complex was completed in from 1 to 2 million years. Weathering and erosion continue to carve the different types of igneous rock into the colorful cliffs and wide valleys that you see in Paisano Pass today.