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.