Transect Trip 13: a better plume!
Okay… That last plumose structure was nothing compared to this beauty…
Okay… That last plumose structure was nothing compared to this beauty…
Spectacular plumose structure on rusty joint surface Weverton Formation:
Bedding and cleavage intersect in the Weverton Fm. Bedding = Cambrian Cleavage = late Paleozoic (Alleghanian)
Gorgeous back-rotated quartz-filled tension gashes in the Antietam Fm. Sinistral sense of shear:
Side view of Skolithos tubes:
Looking down on Skolithos ichnofossils in the Antietam Fm. quartz sandstone:
A few rip-up clasts in arkosic matrix (Swift Run Fm.):
Live geoblogging continues… Here’s some nice round quartz pebbles in the Swift Run Fm:
Neoproterozoic arkose and mudstone above the basement complex:
Multiple anastomosing high strain zones cut through the Blue Ridge basement complex during Paleozoic mountain-building. Ar/Ar cooling ages on muscovite here are 320-340 Ma.
Charnockites are orthopyroxene-bearing granitoids, common in the core of the Blue Ridge Anticlinorium:
With a distinctive orange weathering rind:
Live geoblogging my post-NE/SE GSA field trip: Bill Burton and Chuck Bailey prep the group with a discussion of map patterns in the Blue Ridge…
Just got back from three days of geology conferencing at the Northeastern & Southeastern Joint Section Meeting of the Geological Society of America in Baltimore. No time to blog whilst there, though I shot a dozen or so tweets up to my Twitter feed: small beer compared to a nice meaty blog post. Apologies if … Read more
Yesterday I attended a climate change briefing hosted by the American Meteorological Society (in conjunction with NSF, AGU, AAAS, and the American Statistical Association). It was in the Hart Senate Office Building, but I didn’t see any senators at the briefing. It was an interesting format: 3 talented speakers giving 3 “fifteen-minute” presentations (really more … Read more
The one I posted earlier came via iPhone, and iPhone cameras are rather low in resolution, especially after pocket-lint accumulates on the unprotected lens. I took this one with my normal camera & I think it came out a bit better: Penny (upper center-left) for scale. I’ve got high-resolution versions of this if anyone needs … Read more
Thursday is ‘fold day’ here at Mountain Beltway. Let’s take a look at some folds I saw last weekend in New York City. We’ll start with a bunch seen in the Manhattan Schist in Central Park. Here’s an example of the foliation in the schist. It’s got finer-grained regions and coarser, schistier regions with big … Read more
All the photos I posted over the weekend here were via iPhone, and hence not particularly high-quality, despite their excellent geological content. Now I’ve downloaded the photos from my real camera, and have a few good ones to show. Here’s a succession of photos of the same specimen of Pterodactylus longirostrus, each progressively more zoomed … Read more
Today, a few photos of my spring Environmental Geology class doing a New Orleans Case Study lab using our lovely Emriver river process simulator: That’s it. I mainly shot these photos for Steve Gough, as NOVA is participating in the new grant he submitted to NSF, but I figured I would share them here, too. … Read more
Last Friday, I spent the evening riding up to New York on a bus. To pass the time, I had my iPod and a new paper by Francis Macdonald and colleagues in Science. The paper examines the timing of one of the episodes of “Snowball Earth” glaciation. There’s some important new data in this paper, … Read more