Callan Bentley A cactus you can pet with your bare hand? Turns out it can tell you something about whether that island contains any land iguanas. A case study in the easing of natural selective pressure.
As noted last week, I spent the week spanning New Year’s Eve in the enchanted isles of the Galapagos. The previous week (over Christmas) my family and I were in coastal Ecuador. I saw a total of three species of iguanas in the two locations, and they offer a neat little story of evolution. Let’s … Read more
For the final Friday fold of 2018, we return to Utah’s Slate Canyon, where “Mountain Beltway” reader Octavia Sawyer shares an anticline with parasitic folds shaped like “sea serpents.”
Dozens of delectable geological images from the Galapagos Islands, showing fluid basalt flows and violent pyroclastic deposits along with many primary volcanic features (and a bit of sedimentology thrown in for good measure).
New year’s day is the time I tally up and report the bird species seen in my yard on the forested slope of Massanutten Mountain in Shenandoah County, Virginia. This is my seventh such annual list. Here are the previous iterations: 2012 (39 species) 2013 (51 species) 2014 (58 species) 2015 (65 species) 2016 (59 … Read more
The Friday fold is a guest submission from AGU’s new Chief Digital Officer, and shows a spectacular set of recumbent folds in Crete.
Here’s a kid’s book to consider for the holiday season: The 50 State Fossils: A Guidebook for Aspiring Paleontologists, written by Yinan Wang and illustrated by Jane Levy. It has a simple structure: each state gets a page, and that page is divided into four parts: a map of the state w/ areas highlighted showing where … Read more
A guest Friday fold brings us to a position in the sky somewhere over eastern Death Valley National Park. Join us in contemplating the Titus Canyon Anticline.
A summary of resources to learn about the geology of Washington, D.C. and the surrounding region, in anticipation of AGU’s Fall Meeting being held in the nation’s capital city.
The countryside near Provo, Utah yields a terrific Friday fold in an outcrop of Cambrian limestone.