Callan Bentley Last week, I finished reading Living in the Appalachian Forest: True Tales of Sustainable Forestry, by Chris Bolgiano. It’s a grab-bag of stories from the forested mountains of the south-central Appalachians, ranging from Pennsylvania down to Kentucky and maybe Georgia, too. West Virginia and Virginia get the most attention. The driving question behind the book … Read more
Shawn at the blog Vi-carius is hosting this month’s Accretionary Wedge. He asks for a geoblogosphere-wide brainstorm on “dream geology courses” – an inspirational topic! I have a few ideas: A travel course dedicated to exploring the roots of geological thinking and the geological timescale. It would clearly need to be based in the U.K. … Read more
Good lighting on these fossils at the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Drumheller, Alberta, eh? You’ve got a batch of brachiopods mixed with crinoid columnals and little cornucopia-shaped rugose corals. Maybe some sponge spicules in there, too… This is a great rock because (a) it’s full of well-preserved fossils in a fine-grained matrix, and (b) it’s … Read more
This is a wheel bug, so called because of that protuberance on its back… Here’s another one – but this “wheel” has a flat tire…
The Boulder Batholith outside of Butte, Montana, is actively weathering, and shedding off grus. In the third installment of the Transitions of the Rock Cycle series, we watch an igneous rock turn to sediment.
Picked this one up the summer before last and took its portrait without recording too much else about it. There’s a small fault in there towards the bottom too. Sorry I forgot to mention it. My fault… Happy Friday! A light rock for “black Friday,” eh? Hope you had a happy Thanksgiving.
Migmatite is a special rock that is partly metamorphic and partly igneous. Let’s take a look at it in Part 2 of Callan’s “Transitions of the Rock Cycle” series.
An outcrop of the Ordovician-aged Martinsburg Formation is used to illustrate the development of slaty cleavage, and hence a major transition in the Rock Cycle.
Justin Samuel at GSA sent me these images from the annual meeting in Charlotte. They show me demonstrating GigaPan technology at the Pardee Symposium called “Digital Geology Speed Dating”. With my colleagues Ron Schott and Jen Piatek, I suggested that GigaPans are a cool medium with readily obvious geologic usage for research, outreach, and education. … Read more
These guys were all over the exterior of our house in October, trying to get into the interior. Here’s the view from the outside, looking down on the back of stinkbug: Nasty species – invasive, destructive to plants, persistent in its desire to be indoors, and most pointedly, downright smelly.
My students Alan Pitts, Chris Johnson, Robin Rohrback and I have been busy adding to the Mid-Atlantic Geo-Image Collection. Check out a few of these new GigaPan images: link link link link link link link
The Friday fold comes from a stop on the “Neoacadian Inner Piedmont” field trip that Callan attended prior to the GSA meeting in Charlotte, North Carolina, last week.
Quartzite, shattered and healed and shattered again and again and again. It’s cataclasite, seen in the North Carolina Piedmont and inferred to be Mesozoic in age due to its brittle style of deformation.
Callan reflects on major moments this week in his personal and professional lives.
Today, I’ve got a batch of additional photos of the Walker Top Granite to share, variably mylonitized (sheared out under ductile conditions)… Nice garnets in some spots: Delta porphyroclast: Lovely sheared-out rocks…
Found this caterpillar in the dirt the other day outside my house… Here it is (in the palm of my leather work gloves – the width of a finger may be seen blurrily in the background): I spent some time looking for matches on Bug Guide and in Garden Insects of North America by Whitney … Read more
It wasn’t all rocks and games on the Neoacadian Inner Piedmont trip. I also saw a lizard:
My students Chris Johnson and Robin Rohrback have been busy adding to the Mid-Atlantic Geo-Image Collection. Check out a few of these new GigaPan images: link link link link link
The Friday fold is seen at one of the stops on Callan’s pre-GSA-Charlotte field trip: a small waterfall in North Carolina’s Inner Piedmont.
Check out these lovely images (mouth-watering, even) of the protomylonitic and mylonitic Walker Top Granite of North Carolina’s Inner Piedmont. There’s also some views of the field trip participants and scenery.