A couple of weeks ago, I was killing time down in Front Royal, and I spent a pleasant hour in the Royal Oak Bookshop. I saw a used paperback copy of Tony Horwitz’s classic Confederates in the Attic there, and bought it, thinking I could give it away to a friend or visitor who didn’t … Read more
Callan describes the geology along his new commute from the Fort Valley east to the Annandale campus of NOVA. The driving route traverses the Valley & Ridge, Blue Ridge, and Piedmont provinces, including the Culpeper Basin, and stops just shy of the Coastal Plain.
Here’s another video, wherein I’ve made some improvements from the last one (reserved the lower right corner for the webcam “talking head” video inset, and adjusted the microphone for fewer audio blowouts). It’s still not perfect – there’s a disconnect between the audio and the webcam video that becomes more and more pronounced throughout the … Read more
Callan presents a collection of well-exposed amygdules, seen along the Dark Hollow Falls trail in Shenandoah National Park, Virginia. These white dots on a green background are the signatures of (1) Iapetan rifting, and (2) Alleghanian metamorphism.
I’m playing around with Microsoft Expression screen capture for the book project I’m working on, and here is a video I worked up yesterday as a demonstration of this new way of telling a geologic story: The Grenville Orogeny and the rifting of Rodinia (opening of the Iapetus Ocean): [youtube=”www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6itZWD8bQc”] I’m frustrated by the way … Read more
I’m cleaning out my backlog of old photos. Here’s some small living things that I’ve taken pictures of in the relatively recent past… Let’s start with two butterflies in the Gallatin Range, Montana: Returning to Virginia, here’s a fuzzy little white moth: A crane fly is next… (M.A.G.I.C. has been churning out lots of crane … Read more
Further upstream from the Skolithos and the snake and the diabase rip-rap… The field review team wandered down onto a creekside outcrop of Antietam Formation. The Antietam is a quartz sandstone, with variable levels of deformation, depending on where you look. In some places, it has been gently strained with the little Skolithos tubes taking … Read more
The word “Shenandoah” is thought to mean “daughter of the stars,” a lovely turn of phrase even if there’s no evidence for it. The name has been applied to a variety of features in the Commonwealth of Virginia. One is the Shenandoah River, and the valley in which it flows. Here’s a look at the … Read more
Handwritten notes by Ernst Cloos (legendary structural geologist from Johns Hopkins University) on the area I visited last Monday on a field review of the new geologic map of the Elkton East quadrangle by Chelsea Jenkins, Chuck Bailey, Mary Cox and Grace Dawson.
As I mentioned, Monday had me out in the field, looking at the western Blue Ridge and eastern Valley & Ridge provinces in Virginia. This was a field review for the new geologic map of the Elkton East quadrangle by Chelsea Jenkins, Chuck Bailey, Mary Cox, and Grace Dawson. Immediately after lunch, we visited an … Read more