Callan Bentley Hey there folks, Long tıme no blog. I am enjoyıng Turkey. We spent several cool days ın Istanbul, checkıng out the awesome buıldıngs and twısty streets and great food there. Took a boat tour up the Bosphorus, walked across the Golden Horn. The Haghıa Sophıa ıs amazıng… a Chrıstıan cathedral datıng to Emporer Justınıan, then … Read more
It’s that time of year for me… summer’s here, and I’m winding up my duties at NOVA in preparation for some travels. We leave Sunday night for two weeks in Turkey, followed by my regional field geology course in Montana (also two weeks), followed by some family time and mountain climbing in New Hampshire (three … Read more
Mountain Beltway reader Greg Willis attended my colleague Ken Rasmussen’s Triassic Rift Valley field course last weekend, and sent me this photo of the view inside the Luck Stone diabase quarry in Centreville, Virginia: Here’s an annotated version: Both photos are enlargeable by clicking on them (twice). This quarry chews into rock right along the … Read more
I really appreciated the feedback everyone contributed regarding the river evolution graphic I posted a week and a half ago. The latest offering is from Kyle House, who linked to a couple of nice summary images derived from Stanley Schumm. Because the images were low-resolution, and black and white, I decided to do some re-drafting. … Read more
Cleaning out the backlog of photos I haven’t popped up here yet… Here’s three shots from last weekend, of folds (some kinky) which deform Harpers Formation foliation, just south of Harpers Ferry, West Virginia: The Harpers is a Cambrian-aged lagoonal mudrock, dated via Olenellus trilobites in Pennsylvania. It is part of a transgressive sequence that … Read more
In a week, I’ll be in Turkey. This is very exciting: Turkey has tons of cool geology, and a modicum of cool history as well. Anyone have any suggestions for stuff I should do/see/visit while there? Anything you particularly want to see geoblogged? Any “assignments”? Lily and I only have two weeks, so we will … Read more
Lockwood started it. He grabs two new lists from National Geographic “Our Amazing Planet“: the Ten Most Visited National Parks and the Ten Least Visited National Parks. Says he: Bold the ones you have visited, and italicize the ones you’ve never heard of before. Most visited: 10: Glacier 9: Acadia 8: Grand Teton 7: Cuyahoga … Read more
The Lilster & I drove out to Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, today, and crossed the Potomac River to hike up to the overlook at “Maryland Heights,” which is what they call the Blue Ridge north of the river. On the way uphill, I noticed this nice example of Harpers Formation bedding and cleavage dipping in … Read more
I wrote last fall about my visit to the Duke Quarry, home of a charismatic metavolcanic rock used to face buildings on the campus of Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. Here’s a sample of the “Duke Stone” that I brought back to NOVA, cut, polished, lacquered, and scanned. It’s quite lovely. You can click … Read more
Chris Barr’s informative website of the “Accidental Museum of Paleontology” that can be found in D.C. building stones is now live. You should go and check it out, and if you ever visit the city, you can use it as a guide for your tourism.
The Belt Supergroup is a series of sedimentary strata laid down in the Belt Sea, an inland sea (like modern Hudson Bay) that existed in the northwestern (by present coordinates) part of ancestral North America during the Mesoproterozoic era of geologic time. Estimates of the absolute age of these rocks range from 1470 to 1400 … Read more
I’ve developed a little cartoon diagram to show four stages of river landscape evolution. I use this image in Physical Geology when discussing how running water erodes the land. Check it out: There are two rows, and four columns. The columns are the four stages of river landscape evolution: youth, maturity, old age, and rejuvenation. … Read more
I spent the day lazily reading the igneous petrology chapters of Petrology by Blatt, Tracy, and Owens (third edition, 2006). Last time I read it, I didn’t get all that much from the igneous section, but this time around that’s the thing that motivated me to delve into it again. I don’t remember enough about … Read more
Tell me why I took this iPhone picture, and I’ll mail you a GEOLOGY ROCKS bumper sticker! Answer in the comments below…
I spent last Thursday on a long field trip in the Valley and Ridge province of northernwestern Virginia. Leading the trip was Dan Doctor of the USGS-Reston. Accompanying Dan was a UVA environmental science student named Nathan. And the NOVA crew rounded it out: professor Ken Rasmussen from the Annandale campus, associate professor Victor Zabielski … Read more
Heat-stressed map of the Chesapeake Bay / Washington, DC region, as seen at Kenilworth Aquatic Gardens. Looks like mudcracks, eh? Similar stresses; similar strains.
It seems I forgot to show this fossil when I found it in February of last year with my MSSE advisor John Graves. We were out in the Needmore Formation of the Fort Valley then. The Needmore is a formation I visited again yesterday with some colleagues in other outcrops further to the west. In … Read more
World! …I have an announcement! Three of my structural geology students from this past semester are now geoblogging… can’t say I had anything to do with that, but there it is. They are: Joe Maloney at Fossiliferous Weekly Aaron Barth at Got The Time and “AlanP” at Not Necessarily Geology Please check them out, and … Read more
So, I think I dropped a hint here that I was planning to travel to Turkey this summer. Lily and I will be there from the end of June until the middle of July. (And I’ll be going back in October for the Tectonic Crossroads conference.) In preparation for a trip like this, I enjoy … Read more