Callan Bentley I don’t have much time to blog this day/week/month, so here are two stromatolite images from downstream of Grinnell Glacier in Glacier National Park, Montana. This is the same area where I was attacked by a voracious stromatolitic Pac-man, of course. For more on the geology of GNP, see Filip’s post here.
I shot this gigapan (900 images) last Thursday during the lunch break of the annual “Geology of Virginia” symposium hosted by the Commonwealth of Virginia’s Department of Geology and Mineral Resources. It shows the rock garden outside the DGMR’s offices in Charlottesville, a place where they have collected charismatic megasamples from across the state’s five … Read more
The Friday fold is glimpsed from Google Earth. Atop a valley glacier in south-central Alaska’s Kenai mountain range, a fold of “transverse moraine” displays parasitic folds.
My former student Jared Fortner (now at Radford University) won Wo(G)E #279 with his immediate recognition of the tsingy of Madagascar. Jared asked that I host the next edition here also: Click on the image for the full screenshot: make it bigger and give it some context. Where is this place? Why should anyone care? … Read more
Yesterday afternoon, I went to the Longworth House Office Building on Capitol Hill to attend a briefing arranged by the American Meteorological Society on the topic of geoengineering as a response to climate change. The two speakers, Ken Caldeira and David Keith, argued that the U.S. should invest heavily in geoengineering research, so we can … Read more
Lily and I took a hike yesterday over Old Rag Mountain, a popular destination in Shenandoah National Park. I took the opportunity to shoot a few gigapan images of the scene. If you click on the word “Gigapan” in the lower right of any of these images, it will take you to gigapan.org’s full page … Read more
My high school classmate Christie Wilde Rogers posted this amazing photo on Facebook yesterday — a print, apparently made of feather dander (powder down) that was left behind on a pane glass window when an owl (apparently a great horned owl by the size and shape) smacked into it. Zoomed in, and with the contrast … Read more
Here’s a joint extracted from gelatin during this year’s GMU structural geology “Make a Joint” exercise: A soda bottle full of congealed gelatin serves a “rock.” We then use construction clamps to impart a stress field to the gelatin bottle. Into it, we inject fluid plaster of Paris. The extra pore fluid pressure causes a … Read more
Spotted this one a week ago today, when I was out exploring north of the Rocky Islands with my GMU Structural Geology students…
Well, in spite of it being a busy week, I allowed myself ten minutes yesterday morning to search for Where on (Google) Earth #278, and I found it in southeast Australia. So now it’s my turn to put a screenshot of some location from Google Earth online, and it’s your job to figure out where … Read more
Busy days here in DC and northern Virginia… Blogging time has been limited. A few more shots from this past summer’s time at Mount Washington, to fill the void… Prius atop mountain: The Great Gulf: Hikers in relatively warm weather: Another look down the Great Gulf: Glacial cobble of diorite, exotic to the top of … Read more
Cretaceous calcarenite layers, folded along the coast of Spain (?). From the repository of geological images hosted by the European Geological Union, Imaggeo. I was reminded of Imaggeo earlier this week, and it’s a great place to go browse around for cool photos of geological things. It could use a better search interface, but oh … Read more
We now return to Mount Washington, New Hampshire, where our intrepid heroes summit the mountain in a mere three hours (from Pinkham Notch via the Lion Head): To refresh your memory of the story so far, we had seen metamorphosed turbidites, like this one (new image): …and checked out some gorgeous metamorphic porphyroblasts of “pseudoandalusite,” … Read more
Another group of interesting cobbles from the same sand and gravel pit that I described earlier in the week: Here’s the same sample, gone all animated, for your perspectivizing pleasure: What we’re seeing here is some fine-grained gray colored rock (siltstone, I guess?) that’s developed a pronounced weathering rind marked by a large amount of … Read more
Hoo boy. This one made me yelp… While on the glacial geology of western Pennsylvania trip last Saturday, we visited a gravel quarrying operation. The operators were extracting gravel from a glacial lake delta deposit, and it was full of glacial outwash — sediments washed out from the melting front of the Erie lobe of … Read more
A week ago Saturday, my three Honors students and I went on a field trip led by Gary Fleeger of the Pennsylvania Geological Survey, to examine some cool glacial features in western Pennsylvania. The trip was associated with the joint meeting of the northeastern & north-central sections of the Geological Society of America, held in … Read more
A few items for your perusal… Simon Winchester wrote an article that made a lot of geologists cringe; then he wrote another that dug the hole deeper. If you haven’t been following the conversation on Twitter, then you can play catch up. Some of us geobloggery types are submitting a letter to the Newsweek editor … Read more
At last weekend’s northeastern / north-central GSA meeting in Pittsburgh, David Saja of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History presented a talk entitled, “Geometric Analysis of Folded Greywacke Layers from Pacheco Pass, California.” [Abstract link] In addition to the standard PowerPoint presentation that 99% of GSA speakers use, David also brought in some hand-samples (what … Read more
I was sent a review copy of a new book about the Earth’s magnetism, and I finished reading it last week. It’s called North Pole, South Pole: The Epic Quest to Solve the Great Mystery of Earth’s Magnetism, and the author is Gillian Turner, a senior lecturer in physics and geophysics at Victoria University in … Read more
Visitation statistics for Mountain Beltway over the past month and a half. Interesting to think about the implications… Should I do more current events blogging?