East Coulee

The badlands of the Red Deer River Valley are a two-hour drive to the east of Calgary, where ice and melt water from the last glacial maximum have carved through the overlying glacial sediments into the flat-lying Mesozoic strata, which include fluvial sands and silts, volcanic ash beds, tongues of marine shale, and plenty of dinosaur fossils. East Coulee is just minutes outside of Drumheller, the home of the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology. The museum is famous for its dinosaur collection, which breathed life back into the old coal-mining town; it would be well known to many of our geoscience students. In addition to name recognition, we picked this site because of its relatively simple stratigraphy.

Outcrops can be represented through a variety media in a variety of ways. Below are just a few, including drone video and 3D models explorable in Virtual Reality.