Callan Bentley The summer before last (2011), I spent some time in Wyoming on an energy resources field trip run by Sheridan College, and one stop we made was to look at “oil shale” (really kerogen-rich marlstone) of the Green River Formation, an Eocene lake deposit in southwestern Wyoming. The oil shale is exposed on the east … Read more
Found this fellow in my woodpile: Note the finger tip at lower left for scale. Here’s a close-up. I think it’s a fishing spider:
It’s a cold morning in the Fort Valley.
The Friday fold is an exposure of the Ross Sandstone in Ireland, bent into a syncline that dives below water.
I got The Planets from the Fort Valley library a few weeks ago, because Dava Sobel wrote it. She wrote the excellent Longitude, and that was enough for me. Also, I’ve been really into astronomy lately. Watching the meteor shower earlier this week was stunning, and I loved training my binoculars on nebulae and stars … Read more
Here we go again. Another warning of an apocalypse that won’t happen. Thank goodness Erik already covered why the world won’t end this weekend, so I don’t have to be bothered writing it up. Want to hear about the “Mayan Apocalypse” from Mayans? Try this discussion at the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian. … Read more
This maggot, with his prominent segmentation and his contrasting armor plates, reminded me of something in an H.P. Lovecraft story: Cool. And “ewww.”
On Duck Creek (Ellendale, NC quadrangle), you can see folded xenoliths within the Toluca Granite (383 Ma, 378 Ma, or 368 Ma, depending on which mineral you ask). The granite there contains xenoliths that contain pre-exisiting fabrics and structures, and we stopped at Duck Creek on the pre-GSA-Charlotte field trip I took to the Neoacadian … Read more
Monday I posted photos of what I had thought was a batfly, but I was wrong. A skeptical reader forwarded a link to the post to an actual entomologist, and he said “Nope, that’s no batfly.” I was right about it being parasitic, but the host is more likely deer (which we have in abundance … Read more
The cover story in the November issue of GSA Today was by David Montgomery, MacArthur “genius” award winner and author of Dirt. Montgomery has a new book out on creationism and “flood geology,” and the article is a précis of the historical roots of creationism that appears in that book. The article is titled “The … Read more
Last week, we took a closer look at the xenoliths (MME’s?) in the Boulder Batholith. Here is a look at a fracture, perhaps a small fault, in that same outcrop. There are no marker units by which we could detect offset here, so we can’t say for sure it’s a fault. But definitely weathering has … Read more
Callan reviews a new book by Doug Macdougall: “Why Geology Matters.”
UPDATE: This isn’t really a bat fly. It’s a deer ked. Back in October, I was weed-whacking in the yard, cutting down some 1-meter-tall grass and then picking up bundles of the fallen grass to put on our compost pile. I was out in the yard doing this for about an hour, then I came … Read more
In last week’s Friday fold, I featured this image… …which prompted commenter Lynn David to ask, What’s going on to the west side of that red/green rock cored syncline in #2? It looks like some sort of disconformity but then I looked closer (and man, does that rock redden up) and it appears that the … Read more
The week before last, I showed you the Boulder Batholith, as it crops out southeast of Butte, Montana. Today, I’ll share a few more photos of xenoliths (or perhaps microgranular mafic enclaves?) from that same outcrop: Man, I miss that old Swiss Army knife. The damned security actors at Calgary Airport confiscated it last summer. … Read more
Slightly annotated photo of a Permian therapsid skull on display in the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Drumheller, Alberta. Another photo of this same skull is here. This reptile needs an orthodontist.
I went into work on the weekend recently, and found two lovely new specimens of mylonite in the lab. Not sure whose they are, or where they came from, but I knew I had to photograph them so I could share them here with you:
We had several of these guys come inside in October, only to find themselves trapped and spend days flying around the window screens, trying to find a way back outside. This one is dead: Look at those stripey antennae! That thread-like waist! That extended stinger(?) or is it an ovipositor?
Found these lovely places over the past few weeks while searching (unsuccessfully) for Where On (Google) Earth? scenes… Click on any of them to make them bigger.