Friday fold: Mazatzal Orogeny, Arizona

Reader Mike Pendergrass contributes this Friday’s fold: I found your blog a couple years ago and I share your love of structural geology.  I did my Master’s Thesis while at Northern Arizona University in the early 80’s and mapped an area on the Mazatzal Mountains of central Arizona.  The Mazatzals in my field area contain … Read more

Pieces of the beginning, via Chelyabinsk

A week ago today, I was in Tempe, Arizona, at Arizona State University, for a workshop on broadening participation (increasing diversity) in the geosciences. One of the neat things about ASU as a setting for this meeting is their enormous meteorite collection. I was particularly taken with the display of material from the extraordinary Chelyabinsk … Read more

Friday fold addendum

Lee Allison, State Geologist of Arizona and exemplar of public outreach via blogging, sent me an e-mail yesterday regarding that awesome coastal Greenland shot by Alistair Knock that I featured as the Friday fold. Lee, like many of you, found the image entrancing and intriguing, and as he explored the unannotated version, he made some … Read more

How to make a Grand Canyon in seven easy steps

This series of cartoon images ended up on the board yesterday in Historical Geology lab… E = erosion D = deposition Yes, oversimplified: I didn’t include the newest thinking about the subtleties involved in putting together the Brahma and Vishnu Schists and Zoroaster Granite, and I didn’t include mention of faulting (either ancient or more … Read more