My AGU Blogosphere neighbor Evelyn of Georneys fame is hosting this month’s Accretionary Wedge. Her topic? “Field camp memories”… I never attended a bona fide field camp myself, but I attended a lovely “regional field geology” course that my undergraduate alma mater, the College of William & Mary, put on each summer in the Colorado … Read more
That’s my posse of field course students (plus co-instructor Pete Berquist, fifth from the left) at Drumheller, Alberta, in July.
Limestone strata in a variety of orientations, with a nice tilted axial plane. Outcrop is on the east side of the Icefields Parkway, across from one of the many glacier overlooks. Lucy and Alex both wanted to act as sense of scale for this one… Can’t say I blame them.
This is a display at the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Drumheller, Alberta: It shows the domed skull of a pachycephalosaur: And it shows a virtual cross-section through that skull, revealing the size of the brain it protects: Weird animal. Great museum display: it says it all!
What are these students up to? I’ll give you a hint: this is Dinosaur Provincial Park in the Great Plains of southern Alberta. The badlands style topography here offers a nice vertical section through clastic sedimentary rocks originally deposited adjacent to the Western Interior Seaway. On our Canadian Rockies field course in July, my co-instructor … Read more
Concentric ribs with hackles on a joint face, quartzite (metamorphosed fine-grained quartz sandstone stained with hematite) from Waterton Lakes National Park, southern Alberta.
Modern raindrop impressions in wet mud, West Virginia: Mudcracks in limestone, Mississippian, Alberta, Canada:
Here’s a cool outcrop of the Neoproterozoic Miette Group. Most of the Miette is classified as “slate” and “gritstone,” through these particular exposures, on the Icefields Parkway south of Jasper, are fine-grained and lacking in slaty cleavage. They don’t seem to have been too metamorphosed at all right here, as Sebastian shows in this photo: … Read more
A guest post by Callan’s student Jacob Douma Traveling with Callan Bentley and Pete Berquist through the Canadian Rockies on their Regional Geology Field Course in July 2012, we were exposed to a variety of physiographic features. Among them, was Red Rock Canyon located 16 km from Waterton Townsite within Waterton Lakes National Park, Alberta. … Read more
Royal Tyrrell Museum geologist Dave Eberth donates time and expertise to help Callan’s students understand the Cretaceous-aged Horseshoe Canyon Formation in central Alberta.
A guest post by Nicholas Rossi, a student in Callan’s Canadian Rockies field course. Turtle Mountain is located in the Blairmore Range in Alberta Canada about 160km south of Calgary. It is the site of the Frank Slide, a landslide of over 90 million tons of rock that gave way on Turtle Mountain’s East side … Read more
Cretaceous clams from the final big transgression of the Western Interior Seaway, the “Bearpaw Sea”: We saw these last month at Devil’s Coulee in southern Alberta. They’re big!
Photo by Stephen Smith Alderson / Carthew lakes / summit area, depending on who you ask. Waterton Lakes National Park, Alberta.
The Friday fold is a kink fold in thinly-laminated limestone from the same site as yesterday’s mysterious orange oncoids.
Callan presents a mystery rock found in blocks of sedimentary rock on a talus slope near the Consolation Lakes in Banff National Park, Alberta. Are they orange oncolites? Or alien embryos? 🙂
Ever seen an armored mud ball? In this post, Callan encounters a small herd of these geological oddities in a coulee in southern Alberta.
Yesterday, I showed you a scene of geologists (including me) clustered around some (presumably interesting) outcrop. I asked what you thought we might be looking at. Howard Allen, a denizen of this part of the globe, immediately identified the scene as that of the downstream end of the Athabasca Glacier. Several people guessed that we … Read more
Photo by Sarah O. Tune in tomorrow for the answer!
A cobble of green Belt/Purcell argillite, exposed on the trail to Crypt Lake in Waterton National Park, Alberta, displaying a well-developed “weathering rind”:
In Waterton Lakes National Park, Alberta, my students and I camped under the shade of cottonwood trees… But some of the cottonwoods’ branches were looking a little thin… Caterpillars were munching on their leaves. And some trees had been completely denuded by the voracious little larvae: All three photos are taken on roughly the same … Read more