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
When is an apparent anticline not an fold? Find out on this week’s edition of the Friday Fold…
Found this beautiful cobble while hiking Sacagawea Peak with my family yesterday, in Montana’s Bridger Range. It’s not actually folded as much as it appears to be; the laminations are slab like and nearly parallel to the surface in this photo, with the cobble surface sectioning them obliquely to produce this pattern.
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
Happy Friday, friends. Here’s a rock sample that I recently polished up: It shows crenulations in “pinstriped” schist of the western Piedmont in Pleasant Grove Park in Fluvanna County, mapped as the Mine Run Complex. Lovely stuff, eh?
Last week, I was lucky enough to visit Pushawalla Canyon in the Indio Hills region of southern California. There, my colleague Kim Blisniuk (San Jose State University) led our students through an exercise mapping alluvial deposits as a way of constraining offsets along the Mission Canyon strand of the San Andreas Fault. I noted that … Read more
Greetings from southern California! I’m running a spring break field course in the Mojave and Colorado desert. Here’s a pretty amazing fold pair in Palm Springs Formation, butted up against (darker) Mecca Formation along a fault. This is in Painted Canyon, in the Mecca Hills, a transpressional pop-up between the Painted Canyon Fault and the … Read more
Reader Christian Gronau returns with another “guest Friday fold” submission. Christian writes, Greetings from a cold and wet west coast. A good time to root through old rock samples – and let the imagination run free … The little compilation below strikes me as visually compelling (both photographs are mine) – but how … Read more
A return to the “video Friday fold” format: