In the White Mountains of eastern California, just west of the Deep Springs Basin (site of my coldest camping experience ever, followed by a memorable morning walk in the playa and discovery of a bat mummified by salt), there lies a classic field mapping location, the Poleta folds. Here’s what it looks like from Google … Read more
Today, I share with you eight images that I took yesterday on Skyline Drive in Shenandoah National Park: Blocks of Antietam Formation quartzite (meta-quartz sandstone) of Cambrian age, used in the low rock walls of an overlook parking pull-out. They all bear lovely Skolithos trace fossils (seen end-on, and in cross-section):
This summer, a week or two after our wedding, my wife and I found ourselves in the Canadian Rockies for a pre-honeymoon. Part of our time was spent on a backpacking trip to Floe Lake in Kootenay National Park, British Columbia. On our hike in, we passed this outcrop of Chancellor Slate, a Cambrian aged … Read more
This is a boulder of Cambrian-aged Flathead Sandstone, the unit overlying the Great Unconformity exposed in Wind River Canyon, Wyoming. Click to make it 5000 pixels wide. Swiss Army knife for scale. It shows a lovely example of multiple upside-down cross-beds. It also shows a heavy layer of caliche on what is (now) the upper … Read more
My man Walcott contributed a lot of images to the USGS stockpile during his travels. Today, I’ll feature one from Bishop, California, from 1894: Got it from here. Rock hammer on the left for scale. The caption reads: Plicated layers of thin bedded chert in limestone etched by erosion, Lower Cambrian (?). Hill two miles … Read more
Here’s a gigapan I shot yesterday, looking north at the contact between the New Market and Lincolnshire Formations at the classic “Tumbling Run” outcrop south of Strasburg, Virginia: See if you can find the E. coli plush toy I included, or the cm-scale pencil! As usual, you can see it full screen, by clicking on … Read more
Callan pays a visit to the grave of celebrated paleontologist and geological administrator Charles D. Walcott.
Callan joins some students from George Mason University on a field trip to the rock exposures at Thoroughfare Gap, Virginia, where meta-sedimentary rocks are exposed in the eastern Blue Ridge province.
Over the summer, I went up to Vermont to visit my friends the Clearys. Joe Cleary is a college friend and a talented luthier. He and his wife Tree and their children Jasper and Juniper have settled in Burlington, a lively town with a lot of cool stuff going on. Joe took time out one … Read more
The other day, Chris Rowan of Highly Allochthonous posted some pictures (and video!) of the Teton Range in Wyoming, a normal fault-bounded block of rock that has rotated along a north-south axis, with the west side dropping down and the east side rising up relative to the floor of Jackson Hole. This is classic “Basin … Read more
Cleaning out the backlog of photos I haven’t popped up here yet… Here’s three shots from last weekend, of folds (some kinky) which deform Harpers Formation foliation, just south of Harpers Ferry, West Virginia: The Harpers is a Cambrian-aged lagoonal mudrock, dated via Olenellus trilobites in Pennsylvania. It is part of a transgressive sequence that … Read more
I mentioned going out in the field last Thursday with Liz Johnson‘s “Geology of Skyline Drive” lab course at James Madison University. We started the trip south of Elkton, Virginia, at an exposure where Liz had the students collect hand samples and sketch their key features. Here’s one that I picked up: Regular readers will … Read more
Sunday morning, NOVA adjunct geology instructor Chris Khourey and I went out to Sugarloaf Mountain, near Comus, Maryland, to poke around and assess the geology. Sugarloaf is so named because it’s “held up” by erosion-resistant quartzite. It’s often dubbed “the only mountain in the Piedmont,” which refers to the Piedmont physiographic province. Here’s a map, … Read more
On the transect trip, I also saw some nice meso-scale “minor” structures that probably formed during Alleghanian deformation. Prominent among the ones that really impressed me were these en echelon tension gash arrays, deforming the Antietam Formation quartz sandstone and well exposed in blocks used to construct the wall along Skyline Drive and the Sandy … Read more
We just looked at the Chilhowee Group, a package of sediments that records the transition for the North American mid-Atlantic from Iapetan rifting through to passive margin sedimentation associated with the Sauk Sea transgression. Well, if we journey a bit further west, we see the sedimentary stack isn’t done telling its story. The saga continues … Read more
…So where were we? Ahh, yes: an orogeny, and then some rifting. What happened next to Virginia and West Virginia? Let’s consult the column… After the rifting event opened up the Iapetus Ocean, seafloor spreading took place and tacked fresh oceanic crust onto the margin of the ancestral North American continent. As North America (“Laurentia”) … Read more
Bedding and cleavage intersect in the Weverton Fm. Bedding = Cambrian Cleavage = late Paleozoic (Alleghanian)
A few photos from last May’s spring field trip with the Geological Society of Washington… Here’s the group at Chain Bridge Flats (far westernmost-Washington, D.C.), looked at the metamorphic rocks there — a metagraywacke melange known as the Sykesville Formation. Another group shot, with field trip leaders Tony (khaki shirt) and Gary (red jacket) Fleming … Read more