B2B Coastal Plain trip

Last week, the “Border to Beltway” field exchange team went to Dora Kelly Park in Alexandria, Virginia. There, a ravine reveals the boundary between the Coastal Plain and the underlying metamorphic rocks of the Piedmont… My NOVA colleague Ken Rasmussen joined us for the day, leading us deep below the soil profile to examine the … Read more

Documenting doomed outcrops: Scientists’ Cliffs, Maryland

The community of Scientists’ Cliffs in Maryland is a private community that happens to sit on some of the most amazing fossil exposures in the Coastal Plain. The strata in question are part of the Miocene-aged (~14 Ma) Calvert Formation. The Scientists’ Cliffs outcrops are better than the more famous outcrops at Calvert Cliffs State … Read more

“Got migmatite?”

Had this brainstorm a few weeks back (or maybe months?). Been meaning to blog it up, but hadn’t gotten the chance to flesh it out. The geologic map of the Commonwealth comes from Chuck Bailey of William & Mary, who gave me permission to use it for this project. Anyhow – do you think there … Read more

DCSWA tour

Yesterday, I took about fifteen members of the DC Science Writer’s Association on a walking tour of DC’s geology. I was honored to present the capital city’s epic geologic story to an esteemed crowd of professional science writers from Nature, Science, the National Academies, the National Institutes of Health, the Washington Post, and other institutions. … Read more

Geology of the Richmond area field trip

On Saturday, after a fruitful 24 hours at the VCCS Science Peer Conference, my colleague Pete Berquist (of Thomas Nelson Community College) and I led a field trip to examine the geology of the Richmond, Virginia, area. We were joined by seven of our VCCS science-teaching colleagues and author Lisa Starr, a speaker at the … Read more

Falls of the James III: river work

In today’s post, I’ll finish up with my geologic discussion of the falls of the James River in Richmond Virginia, south of Belle Isle. Previously, we’ve examined the bedrock at this location (the Petersburg Granite) and a series of fractures – some faults and some extensional joints – that deform that granite. Now we come … Read more

Falls of the James I: pluton emplacement

Last Friday, NOVA colleague Victor Zabielski and I traveled down to Richmond, Virginia, to meet up with Chuck Bailey of the College of William & Mary, and do a little field work on the rocks exposed by the James River. Our destination was Belle Isle, a whaleback-shaped island where granite has been quarried for dimension … Read more