Spain/Canary Islands Field Trip This fall Karen Harpp has been collaborating with our visiting Whitnall professor Wes Gibbons and Tere Moreno to plan a trip in January to southern Spain and the Canary Islands. The trip is tied to both my volcanology class and Wes' tectonics class, but of course it's open to all geology students. It should be an incredible field experience, thanks to Wes and Tere's detailed planning. Here are some excerpts from Wes' description of the trip: "The itinerary will include overnight stops in hotels on the Spanish plains, in mountain villages, in the incredible city of Granada, along the Mediterranean coast, inside a barely dormant volcano on Tenerife, and on the small, remote island of La Palma. Travel will be by plane, minibus, boat, and automobile. The emphasis will be on volcanoes and mountain belt tectonics, but the geology visited will be varied. Localities will include intraplate continental and oceanic alkaline volcanoes, calk-alkaline subduction-related volcanics, thin-skinned fold-and-thrust limestone belts, deeply subducted eclogites, orogenic collapse-related sedimentary basins, and the famous Messinian salinity crisis Mediterranean evaporites. The route will culminate in a visit to the youngest of the Canary Island eruptive centres: the volcano of Teneguia which last erupted in 1971. For the culturally and historically aware, the itinerary will include visits to the 16th century Castilian town of Almagro (in La Mancha of Don Quixote fame), the remains of Santa Maria cathedral in Cazorla (torched by Napoleon) and the 13th century Alhambra in Granada ("the most exciting, sensual and romantic of all European monuments"). For the scenically aware the journey will contrast the dry plains of La Mancha with the olive plantations of Jaen, the high limestone peaks of the Sierra de Cazorla with the huge, rounded mountains of the Sierra Nevada, and the sandy Mediterranean and volcanic Canaries coastlines. Weather permitting, we will also climb to the highest point in Spain: Teide volcano at 12,269'."