asia

Travels in Siberia, by Ian Frazier

by

I’ve let my subscription to the New Yorker lapse, but before I did, I was pleased to read each week its diverse suite of authors on a diverse suite of topics. This has been a source of surprising delight on several occasions, and has allowed me to discover not only topics I never thought to … Read more

Friday fold: Himalayas, northern India

by

My colleague Martin Schmidt of the McDonogh School, who I know through the National Association of Geoscience Teachers eastern section, recently shared a bunch of fold photos with me. They have a “dated” feel because they were originally shot on slide film, but the folds themselves of course are timeless. I’ll be featuring a bunch … Read more

Pieces of the beginning, via Chelyabinsk

by

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

The Road to Samarcand, by Patrick O’Brian

by

The week before last, I finished a fun adventure novel, The Road to Samarcand. This is the first book I’ve read by Patrick O’Brian that’s not part of his epic (21 books!) Aubrey-Maturin series. I chose it because it was available as a (free) download from my public library, which meant I could “read” it … Read more

Friday fold: Pakistani Perplexity

by

In last week’s Friday fold, I featured this image… …which prompted commenter Lynn David to ask, What’s going on to the west side of that red/green rock cored syncline in #2? It looks like some sort of disconformity but then I looked closer (and man, does that rock redden up) and it appears that the … Read more

Friday folds: Turpan Depression

by

Rob Simmon of NASA’s Earth Observatory is the source for today’s Friday folds. Last week, he tweeted this image to me: That’s a excellent example of the outcrop pattern of a more or less horizontal outcrop of folded rock. To the north is a synform (notice that where streams have eroded it, the bull’s-eye pattern … Read more

Rumeli Hisarı

by

Right after I got to Istanbul on this most recent trip, I took a taxi from my hotel down to the Bosphorus, to check out the Rumeli Hisarı, a fort complex built in 1452 by Sultan Mehmet the II in anticipation of the following year’s siege of Constantinople. It’s constructed at the narrowest point on … Read more

Jointed Virgelle

by

One of the stops my Rockies students and I made this summer was a dinosaur paleontology tour through the Two Medicine Dinosaur Center in Bynum, Montana. The folks there are very accommodating, and at my request gave the class a bit of stratigraphic context for the dinosaur fossils. For instance, we visited the geologic formation … Read more

Turkey update

by

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

The coming flood

by

In January, a large landslide occurred in the Hunza Valley of Pakistan’s Karakoram Range, near the village of Attabad. Like the Madison River landslide in Montana (1959), or the Gros Ventre landslide in Wyoming (1925), a river was dammed by the slide debris, and the impounded waters began to rise. At Gros Ventre, the landslide-dammed … Read more

Is this dike a feeder?

by

A new paper in the journal Geology examines an interesting question: how can you tell feeder dikes from non-feeder dikes? The answer is, normally you can’t. Normally, there’s no way to tell for sure whether a given dike actually funneled magma to the paleo-surface, or whether it never reached the paleo-surface. The reason for this … Read more