Callan Bentley Over the summer, I went up to Vermont to visit my friends the Clearys. Joe Cleary is a college friend and a talented luthier. He and his wife Tree and their children Jasper and Juniper have settled in Burlington, a lively town with a lot of cool stuff going on. Joe took time out one … Read more
This was brought in last week by a student… It’s a broken concretion that she found in Des Moines County, Iowa, many years ago. She also had a slab of limestone with crinoid columnal fossils, and a broken geode from the same locality. I think this concretion is a thing of beauty, like a fossilized … Read more
Folded & boudinaged granite dikes in tonalitic gneiss, Barberton granite-greenstone belt, South Africa. From Passchier, CW, Myers, JS, and Kroner, A., (1990). FIELD GEOLOGY OF HIGH GRADE GNEISS TERRANES. Very crudely annotated: This is a sweet example of how you can get different structures developing in different orientations relative to the principal stress directions. In … Read more
As mentioned, I spent a significant part of last weekend was spent on a paleomagnetic sampling project with collaborators from the University of Michigan. On Friday, this was our field area: That’s the south slopes of Old Rag Mountain, a popular Blue Ridge hiking destination because unlike many Virginia peaks, when you get to the … Read more
This video was produced by my friend Pete Berquist. It shows rapidly moving “sheets” of sand saltating down Grandview Beach in Hampton, Virginia, during high winds associated with Hurricane Earl. What do you notice here? A couple of things jump out at me, but I’d be curious to hear what this video makes Mountain Beltway … Read more
In Istanbul over the summer, Lily and I checked out the “Blue Mosque,” named for the predominant color of the mosaic tiles in its interior. It’s more formally know as “Sultan Ahmed Mosque,” named for the sultan who commissioned its construction in 1609. It is an elegant building: I loved the “pile of bubbles” effect … Read more
The past couple of days, I’ve been in the field, collecting samples with Dr. Fatim Hankard, a post-doctoral researcher from the University of Michigan, and Matt Domeier, a PhD candidate from that same fine school. We’re interested in using Virginia’s wealth of Catoctin formation feeder dikes to do paleomagnetism measurements that might help us constrain … Read more
Check it out: In the canyon of the Jefferson River, Montana, you can find yourself some limestone (Mississippian Madison Group, I think of the Lodgepole Formation) that has seen a wee bit of faulting: And here’s an annotated copy… Both of these images are enlargeable by clicking through (twice): Note the quarter for scale: this … Read more
Fourth edition of the “Friday fold;” second one via video. Happy Friday!
The other day, Chris Rowan of Highly Allochthonous posted some pictures (and video!) of the Teton Range in Wyoming, a normal fault-bounded block of rock that has rotated along a north-south axis, with the west side dropping down and the east side rising up relative to the floor of Jackson Hole. This is classic “Basin … Read more
Whilst hiking at Dolly Sods over the weekend, I found this old artifact: Upper 10 is apparently a “Sprite”-esque lemon-lime soda, discontinued in America but still being marketed abroad. But that wasn’t what got me jazzed, of course. Look more closely… That is a lovely little conchoidal fracture, and it’s so exquisite because it preserves … Read more
Over the long Labor Day weekend, my fiancée Lily and my friend Seth and I took a three-day backpacking trip in the Dolly Sods Wilderness area of West Virginia: Dolly Sods is a unique place, a little patch of flora that is more typical of Canada. It sits atop the eastern Continental Divide, and most … Read more
This fold is located on Highway 287, north of Wolf Creek, Montana. Annotated version: As with last week’s Friday Fold, this fold owes its existence to (a) deposition of sandstone and shale in the Western Interior Seaway, and (b) deformation under a giant thrust sheet during the thin-skinned compressional tectonics of the Sevier Orogeny. In … Read more
Over the summer, I finished reading an excellent history of creationism called The Creationists, authored by Ronald L. Numbers. Many of my students at Northern Virginia Community College come to my geology classes from a creationist background. Some are true believers, some are looking for the perspective of science. Some are quiet about it, others … Read more
Over the summer, when my blogging access was limited to my iPhone, I uploaded a photo (taken with the iPhone) of a metamorphosed graded bed on the summit of Mount Washington, New Hampshire. Here’s another one that I saw, further down on the mountain, on the Auto Road (famous for its iconic bumper sticker): Lens … Read more
This recycling collection can in Istanbul amused me:
Another animated GIF, this one showing the ancient defensive walls that bound old town Istanbul (which is old town Constantinople, which is old town Byzantium), now ringed by a freeway and then the rip-rap-covered shore of the Bosphorus: There’s a paved walking path between the freeway and the shore; that’s where I was standing to … Read more
Happy Friday, everyone!
Here’s some stuff that I used this summer and found to be awesome and well worth investing in. MSR WindPro camp stove – Unlike most MSR isopro stoves, where the stove screws on top of the squat fuel canister, in this one, there is a little hose that connects the two, side by side. This … Read more
One of the stops my Rockies students and I made this summer was a dinosaur paleontology tour through the Two Medicine Dinosaur Center in Bynum, Montana. The folks there are very accommodating, and at my request gave the class a bit of stratigraphic context for the dinosaur fossils. For instance, we visited the geologic formation … Read more