Reader Eric Fulmer contributed this week’s Friday fold. It’s a beauty! Eric writes that this outcrop is from “the Belgian Ardennes near Durbuy. There’s a well-exposed anticline along the Ourthe River. The stone is late-Devonian limestone typical of the immediate area that was later deformed regionally due to the Variscan orogeny. The Ardennes are classic … Read more
Today’s fold comes to us from the Alps, courtesy of blog reader “Earth Mama.” She says: Attached is a photo of the outcrop, near Brienz, Switzerland, and a GE screenshot of the location. I saw this as I was looking out the train window, and was able to grab my camera in time. Best I … Read more
Elizabeth Eide of the National Academies shared this image with me a year or two ago, when she gave a talk on Norwegian geology for the Geological Society of Washington. Those are some bookshelfed gneiss layers sandwiched between upper-left and lower-right carbonates. The “bookshelfing” refers to the numerous parallel brittle fractures along which the gneiss … Read more
The Shenandoah Valley of western Virginia records the switch in late Ordovician time from passive margin sedimentation associated with the Sauk and Tippecanoe epeiric seas, to active margin sedimentation associated with the onset of the Taconian Orogeny to the east. Higher up in the stack, a similar pattern is seen: a return to passive margin … Read more
Right after I got to Istanbul on this most recent trip, I took a taxi from my hotel down to the Bosphorus, to check out the Rumeli Hisarı, a fort complex built in 1452 by Sultan Mehmet the II in anticipation of the following year’s siege of Constantinople. It’s constructed at the narrowest point on … Read more
Hey there folks, Long tıme no blog. I am enjoyıng Turkey. We spent several cool days ın Istanbul, checkıng out the awesome buıldıngs and twısty streets and great food there. Took a boat tour up the Bosphorus, walked across the Golden Horn. The Haghıa Sophıa ıs amazıng… a Chrıstıan cathedral datıng to Emporer Justınıan, then … Read more
My cat Lola has a thing for big sheets of paper, particularly maps. Here she is this morning, “helping” me plan a summer trip to Turkey: