At last weekend’s northeastern / north-central GSA meeting in Pittsburgh, David Saja of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History presented a talk entitled, “Geometric Analysis of Folded Greywacke Layers from Pacheco Pass, California.” [Abstract link] In addition to the standard PowerPoint presentation that 99% of GSA speakers use, David also brought in some hand-samples (what … Read more
Migmatite schist sample from Orange Springs Farm, near Unionville, Virginia, with cm-demarcated pencil for scale. Sample was cut and polished. Here’s what the untreated sample looks like: [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XDDcLVp_4Ss] Happy Friday. Enjoy your weekend. I’m off to the Northeastern / North-Central joint section meeting of the Geological Society of America today. We’ll see if my time … Read more
Second in the on-going series about the geology of San Francisco: this post explores the pillow basalts of the Marin Headlands Terrane.
The first in a multi-part series on the geology of San Francisco and the surrounding area.
My final day at AGU was Thursday, and I spent a lot of it working on school stuff, but I did zip down to the Moscone Center for a session on communicating science to the public in an age of increased public scrutiny. Michael Mann of Penn State was the big draw here, discussing his … Read more
I took a break yesterday morning from nonstop AGU meeting stuff, and got out into the city a bit. A former student of mine, Alan P., lives in San Francisco these days, and works at a local bike shop. So Alan scored us a couple of bicycles and we went for a ride from North … Read more
Man, this meeting is intense. There’s so much going on all the time that for every session or talk you commit to, you’re missing literally dozens of others. This is kind of like going to the library and picking out a book, knowing that there are many other books you’re not reading — but with … Read more
San Francisco is great. I got out here Friday night and spent a lovely day Saturday hiking over the Golden Gate Bridge and through the Marin Headlands with my fiancee. That evening, for my 36th birthday, we went out to the Tadich Grill, source of the best cioppino (Italian seafood soup) in the city. Sunday, … Read more
The author recounts a field trip in October along the section of Turkey’s North Anatolian Fault that last ruptured in 1944. The rock types on either side of the fault are compared, offset markers are illustrated, and several types of landforms particular to strike-slip faults are shown. The post concludes with an examination of the town of Gerede itself, which is built directly atop the fault.
I got to Pittsburgh around 1:30pm yesterday, which meant I had several free hours before the opening reception for new Fine Fellows. I took a bunch of photos of the exhibits there, but my traveling laptop doesn’t have the image processing software that I usually employ to resize these things, so for now I’ll just … Read more
I’m off today to the first ever Fine International Conference on Gigapixel Imaging for Science, held in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania over the next several days. There, as one of this year’s cadre of Fine fellows, I’ll be given a Gigapan camera robot and photo-stitching software, and they will train me how to use it. I’m looking … Read more
After our mind-boggling encounter with the limestone strata turned lurid pink by their high-pressure encounter with subduction, our band of merry geologists set off for a stroll: We began the walk in greenschist + blueschist mélange, as seen here with a Turkish 1-lira coin (26 mm diameter; about the same size as a U.S. quarter) … Read more
Happy Saturday morning, everyone. I’m on my way down to the National Mall for fellow Tribesman Jon Stewart’s “Restoring Sanity” rally, but I thought I would just quickly post a little geological treat for Mountain Beltway readers. These are pisolites (basically like a big oolite, but without the biological component that would qualify them as … Read more
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
Picking up where we left off last time, we were in some partly-serpentenized peridotite, part of the Burham Ophiolite in Turkey’s Tavşanlı Zone, an ancient tectonic suture. Our next stop on the field trip allowed us to visit some diabase dikes: Here’s a close-up of the right contact of the dike with the host peridotite: … Read more
Yesterday, I shared a few thoughts about the first couple of stops on the field trip I took earlier this month from Istanbul to Ankara, prior to the Tectonic Crossroads conference. Today, we’ll pick up with some images and descriptions from the next few stops. After lunch, our next stop brought us to a relatively … Read more
Before the Tectonic Crossroads conference two weeks ago, I had the good fortune to participate in a Istanbul-to-Ankara geology field examining the Tavşanlı Zone, a tectonic suture zone where a portion of the Tethys Ocean basin closed. This paleo-convergent boundary is marked by a suite of interesting rocks, including blueschists, ophiolites, and eclogites. I’d like … Read more
Looks like I’m late to the party… While I was away, apparently the geoblogosphere went on a rampage of cooling columns. Everyone was posting images of their favorite columnar joints, and I was left out in the cold. Let me remedy that now. As it turns out, I was visiting some columns while everyone else … Read more
Today I’m in the air, on my way back to Turkey for the Tectonic Crossroads conference being held in Ankara next week. Before the meeting, I’m joining a field trip to examine a subduction zone complex. Over three days, we will drive from Istanbul to Ankara by way of ophiolites and blueschists and other geologic … Read more
Just got back from three days of geology conferencing at the Northeastern & Southeastern Joint Section Meeting of the Geological Society of America in Baltimore. No time to blog whilst there, though I shot a dozen or so tweets up to my Twitter feed: small beer compared to a nice meaty blog post. Apologies if … Read more