Callan Bentley My AGU Blogosphere neighbor Evelyn of Georneys fame is hosting this month’s Accretionary Wedge. Her topic? “Field camp memories”… I never attended a bona fide field camp myself, but I attended a lovely “regional field geology” course that my undergraduate alma mater, the College of William & Mary, put on each summer in the Colorado … Read more
Last week, we featured an insect that got into the house. This week, three insects that found their way into our screened-in porch. Wasps have an uncanny ability to get in there and get stuck. We inadvertently nab at least one per day that way. Pencil eraser for scale.
Alan Pitts‘ Jeep Liberty for scale.
In the delivery room last week, while we waited for Lily’s labor to ramp up, I finished reading The Omnivore’s Dilemma, by Michael Pollan. I think it was one of the most insightful, important books I’ve ever read. I was pre-disposed to like it, because I really enjoyed Pollan’s earlier book The Botany of Desire, … Read more
Well, it’s been kind of quiet on the Mountain Beltway front this week – but I have a good excuse. Early on Friday morning, my son Baxter was born. The little guy arrived weighing more than 9 pounds (4.125 kg), and measuring 21 inches from beak to tail. He’s very sweet and wonderful. Lily and … Read more
Usually the bugs I photograph are outside. But this guy was on the leg of the coffee table in our living room! How he got in, I have no idea. Pencil eraser for scale.
That’s my posse of field course students (plus co-instructor Pete Berquist, fifth from the left) at Drumheller, Alberta, in July.
Mantisflies: an awesome, under-appreciated family of insects. This one was on a glass sliding door on our house: I love the diversity of insects that we get around our new house.
Limestone strata in a variety of orientations, with a nice tilted axial plane. Outcrop is on the east side of the Icefields Parkway, across from one of the many glacier overlooks. Lucy and Alex both wanted to act as sense of scale for this one… Can’t say I blame them.
This is a display at the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Drumheller, Alberta: It shows the domed skull of a pachycephalosaur: And it shows a virtual cross-section through that skull, revealing the size of the brain it protects: Weird animal. Great museum display: it says it all!
What are these students up to? I’ll give you a hint: this is Dinosaur Provincial Park in the Great Plains of southern Alberta. The badlands style topography here offers a nice vertical section through clastic sedimentary rocks originally deposited adjacent to the Western Interior Seaway. On our Canadian Rockies field course in July, my co-instructor … Read more
That’s an adult Monochamus clamator, the spotted pine sawyer, a kind of longhorned beetle. This one was on my deck this morning. My, what long antennae you have! “Give me a kiss,” the beetle says…
Geoblogger Siim Sepp contributed this lovely fold. He says: I saw a nice fold in Ireland. I like it because it looks like SS to me which are my initials. If you want, you can post it as your friday fold. I haven’t used it yet in my blog. This small outcrop is in Donegal, … Read more
NASA’s Earth Observatory posted a colorful confluence image last Thursday, and it reminded me that I have a similar site of my own to share. This is on the Icefields Parkway, north of the Athabasca Glacier and Snow Dome, a hydrological drainage triple point. Here, we’re a short distance into the Arctic Ocean drainage. (West … Read more
Last Thursday, I shot a few GigaPans of moderately-dipping quartz sandstone layers (the Silurian-aged Massanutten Formation) in the creek a few miles from my house. All four GigaPans are at popular local swimming holes. The first three are from Red Hole, and the last one is from Blue Hole. Check them out: link link link … Read more
We had a turkey in the yard this week: Pretty cool. These photos were taken from my “office” on the second floor of our house, through the window overlooking the front “yard.” I saw a flock of about 15 individual turkeys strutting through a neighbor’s field last week, too. I love living out here in … Read more
The Friday fold is a selection of five fold photos from the Selkirk Fan in the Omineca Belt of British Columbia, submitted by structural geologist Marek Chichanski of De Anza College (California).
Concentric ribs with hackles on a joint face, quartzite (metamorphosed fine-grained quartz sandstone stained with hematite) from Waterton Lakes National Park, southern Alberta.
Grab your coffee and join Callan & Lily for a stroll along the quartzite cliffs of Hermanus, South Africa. Bedding, cross-bedding, joints, faults, veins, folded veins, and faulted veins all await you there in the morning light.
Modern raindrop impressions in wet mud, West Virginia: Mudcracks in limestone, Mississippian, Alberta, Canada: