Callan Bentley 
New M.A.G.I.C. GigaPans are shown of two connected Hawaiian samples: one an igneous rock, one a loose beach sand.
How could thematically-linked images like these be used to further geoscience education?
Got any ideas?
Chime in!
Here’s a mystery rock that’s just aching to have its identity be crowdsourced: I got these photos from Rick Diecchio of George Mason Univerisity, who got them from a local fellow who dug it up in his yard in Dale City, Virginia. Rick says: I was stumped at first, but the more I look at … Read more
On the airplane ride back from Texas, I bought a copy of Michael Crichton’s semi-posthumous final novel, Micro, which was co-authored by Richard Preston after Crichton’s death in 2008. Preston wrote a superb book about Ebola virus in the DC area, so I was intrigued to see his influence. Plus, and of utmost priority, I … Read more
A few scenes out the left side of the airplane from when I flew from El Paso to Houston a week and a half ago… Sand dune field overprinting desert vegetation and human roadways: Outcrop pattern of horizontal strata (tracing out the contours of this hill), and the weird geometry of human road systems: More … Read more
Callan shows off a new sample from Texas, a peridotite xenolith launched into the air from a maar volcanic eruption, slathered in a layer of basalt. With full intent to coin a neologism, he dubs it a “xenobomb.”
Another sample from the collection on display, both indoors and out, at the University of Texas at El Paso. Don’t know anything about it beyond its lovely differential weathering. Happy Friday.
Riding a cable-car up the side of the Franklin Mountains, Callan checks out the local stratigraphy and structure (and igneous intrusions). Join him on an insightful cruise up several thousand feet and through a billion years of geologic time.
After seeing the contact of the Campus Andesite with Western Interior Seaway sedimentary rocks (Cretaceous in age), we moved a bit on down the line, and saw this disconformable contact between the Cretaceous shales below, and a bouldery sedimentary breccia above. Note the concave-up shape of the contact to the left of Elizabeth Nagy-Shadman (of … Read more
First thing we saw on the post-InTeGrate field trip to the rocks of El Paso, Texas, was this contact between the aforementioned Campus Andesite, and the Cretaceous sedimentary rocks into which it intruded (contact metamorphosed in the area of this photo): I decided to try switching up my annotation fonts. Whaddya think?
Callan looks south across the border from Texas. Above the drug-war-ravaged town of Juarez, the Sierra de Juarez Mountains feature an enormous recumbent synform.
On the campus of the University of Texas at El Paso, there is a sign for the Kidd Seismic Observatory. The sign has seen some brittle deformation of its reflective letters. I infer this due be due to differential shrinkage of the letters (relative to the sign they are attached to) in the intense Texas … Read more
The campus of the University of Texas at El Paso is a beautiful place. You can look south into Mexico, a scant half mile away. It’s got rocky hills rising up between buildings and between stadiums (stadia?), and a utterly unique campus architecture based on the Himalayan nation of Bhutan. Here’s a look at the … Read more
This is insane. Check it out – a malachitized and azuritized log, on display in front of the Geological Sciences building at the University of Texas at El Paso: Have you ever seen anything like that? It’s cool meets cool. Awesome.
From the road that keeps on giving: new New Route 55, in West Virginia, west of Moorefield.
I’m in El Paso, Texas, today (and tomorrow and Saturday), collaborating on a massive brainstorming session for a new NSF-funded initiative called InTeGrate, which is all about Interdisciplinary Teaching of Geoscience for a Sustainable Future. As leader Cathy Manduca said today when she opened our session, “We’re here to save the world!” And we’re going … Read more
Had this brainstorm a few weeks back (or maybe months?). Been meaning to blog it up, but hadn’t gotten the chance to flesh it out. The geologic map of the Commonwealth comes from Chuck Bailey of William & Mary, who gave me permission to use it for this project. Anyhow – do you think there … Read more
This image has been in my “to blog” folder for more than a year: But here’s the thing – I can’t think of what I was going for when I drew this. The closest I can figure is that I was trying to illustrate conceptually what differentiates diamictites from other poorly sorted sedimentary rocks. Any … Read more
Why are these people smiling? photo by Yvette Kuiper Because they are structural geologists, and they are psyched to be at an extraordinary outcrop: This is a famous pavement outcrop of polyphase-folded banded iron formation (BIF) near Soudan, Minnesota. I went there last fall before the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America, on … Read more
In the past 24 hours, Erik Klemetti and Siim Sepp both gave us their top ten reasons for loving their branches of geo-science. Their lists demonstrated their passion for (respectively) volcanoes and sand, and so I feel inspired to make a list, too. Here are the top 10 reasons I love structural geology: 10. It’s … Read more
This beastie lives in an old quarry in West Virginia, along old Route 55. And from a slightly different perspective… This fold is in Devonian limestones of the Helderberg Group, kinked up probably during the Alleghanian Orogeny (the assembly of Pangea) in the late Paleozoic.