On my way back to Virginia from Hawaii, I had a three hour layover in the Atlanta airport. There, I spotted this charismatic stone paver on on the terminal floor. It showed folds, and so I snapped a photo, but it also shows plenty more… An annotated copy: Happy Friday, all!
On a birding hike yesterday morning, I found this: This is a little slab of kinked phyllite of the Candler Formation. This metamorphic rock started as mud (and ash) deposited atop the Catoctin Formation, and it was later squeezed and heated during Appalachian mountain-building, encouraging the growth of micas at the expense of clay. A … Read more
Click to enlarge I’m writing this on the Amtrak train from New York back to Charlottesville, traveling (again) under orange-hazy skies due to Canadian wildfire smoke. I took my son to Manhattan for a concert, and we stopped off en route for an overnight in Philadelphia, visiting a former student of mine who’s now an … Read more
A return to the “video Friday fold” format:
Callan shares a few outcrops from coastal Maine, part of the Avalonia terrane that accreted to ancestral North America during the Acadian Orogeny. They are volcaniclastic rocks, coarse and fine, and showing both overprinting kink bands and cross-cutting basaltic dikes.
Happy Friday! Here are some kink-folded metasediments from Virginia’s Lynchburg Group to help usher in the weekend.
It’s Friday! Adam Forte, a geology professor at LSU, posted this image yesterday on Twitter: It’s a box of sheets of newsprint, stored vertically and ignored for a while, now rotated 90° so we’re looking at a cross-sectional view. To me, this is an excellent example of a physical analogue modelling experiment (albeit inadvertent) that … Read more
On his way to get his COVID vaccine, Callan visits a new outcrop showing folded and faulted strata of the Neoproterozoic Lynchburg Group.
Exploring his new digs in Charlottesville, Callan is introduced to a large exposure of phyllite at a dam’s spillway. The foliation there is folded in many ways. Share in a dozen field photos of the site…
From a creek bed in northern Colorado, the Friday fold distorts foliation in early Proterozoic quartzofeldspathic gneiss, peppered with small almandine garnets.
Last weekend was the annual meeting of the eastern section of the National Association of Geoscience Teachers. On Friday afternoon, we visited Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, and my colleague Beth Doyle led a great field trip to examine the rocks exposed there. This was my favorite outcrop we saw: Here is a close up of … Read more
Today, we take a look at the structural geology that reveals the deformation evolution (first ductile, then brittle) of the South Mountains metamorphic core complex, south of Phoenix, Arizona. Expect lots of photos of smeared-out rocks, broken by faults.
A reader asks: “What is foliation and what makes it so important to the structure of rock?”
Callan answers with a lot of images of beautifully foliated rocks.
Some scaly Italian limestone shows off two foliations (S and C) which reveal the kinematic motions that built the Apennines.
A showcase of five new 3D digital models of awesome rock samples and outcrops, produced using Agisoft Photoscan.
My friend Ander Sundell at the College of Western Idaho is the source of today’s Friday fold. It’s from somewhere in Sardinia, and I think you’ll find it visually striking: Ander says: The rocks here are Silurian phyllites generated from mudstones that were deposited on the floor of the rheic ocean basin. The color and … Read more
The edge of ancestral North America can be found in the canyon of the Salmon River in western Idaho. Folds exposed the Squaw Creek Schist near Riggins record the stresses of adding terranes on during North America’s westward movement since the breakup of Pangaea. The Friday fold crinkled up during the accretion of a terrane to the growing North American continent.
At the birthplace of the term “mylonite,” we can find Friday folds hidden in the foliation.
Take a look at these gorgeous exposures of augen gneiss in eastern “mainland” Shetland, U.K. Includes 3 GigaPans of the site.
I took this image in 2005, when I was working up a geologic history of the C&O Canal National Historical Park. It’s a vein of quartz, gracefully folded within the Catoctin Formation. The exposure is along the railroad tracks at Point of Rocks, Maryland, easternmost extent of the Blue Ridge province on the north shore … Read more