Skype as an EASY method of connecting scientists and students

This week, I took 20 minutes out of my day to have a conversation with a group of students… …in Canada. As you can see, our conversation was not in person, but mediated by the Internet’s video conferencing technology service called Skype. A free Skype account and a video camera allows free, easy video conversations … Read more

Slickensides on a fault cutting granite

Another shot from my pre-GSA structural geology field trip to the Superior Craton last fall, up in southern Ontario, Canada. The image shows slickenlines coated with brownish fault gouge and oxide staining, cutting through a high-potassium granite (see fresh surface at upper left). The slickenlines are little gouged grooves where asperities (bumps) on the block … Read more

Aligned tourmalines

…in an Archean schist within the Superior Craton. Same outcrop as the criss-crossing dikes I showed yesterday. We’ve got tourmalines on the plane of foliation in the Setters Schist in Maryland, too, but they aren’t aligned like these Canadian tourmalines; instead the Maryland ones are scattered willy-nilly across the plane of foliation, like pencils on … Read more

Dikes crossing dikes

A pretty cool outcrop I saw on my pre-GSA structural geology field trip to the Superior Craton: Can you see what caught my eye here? It’s a nice series of cross-cutting relationships. A series of sedimentary rocks were sheared out and metamorphosed, transforming into schists with internal boudins, and then they were cross-cut by first … Read more

Friday folds (and boudinage): Superior Craton day 3, stop 1

Today the Friday fold comes with copious bonus structures. It’s the first stop we hit on Day 3 of the pre-GSA Minneapolis field trip to examine the structural geology of the subprovince boundaries within the Superior Craton. This particular site showed granitoid dikes that had been deformed during dextral transpression into a variety of structures … Read more

Friday fold: mafic metavolcanics

Okay – in spite of numerous distractions (see every other post so far this week), it’s time to return to the pre-GSA Minneapolis structural geology field trip. Our final stop of the second day in the field was a series of folded up mafic metavolcanics. I’ve got some photographs of them. These mafic volcanics were … Read more