Reader Eric Fulmer has contributed a fold as a balm for the end of another week of COVID-19 self-quarantine. Check it out: Eric writes, I was in Hopeville, WV a couple of years ago. The entire area between Cabins and Hopeville is a real joy (geologically and recreationally) as some of the most resistant rocks … Read more
This is such a gorgeous map: Link 0.43 Gpx GigaPan of a geologic map by Berg, T.M., Edmunds, W.E., Geyer, A.R., Glover, A.D., Hoskins, D.M., MacLachlan, D.B., Root, S.I., Sevon, W.D., and Socolow, A.A., (1980) I’ve been organizing a bunch of geologic maps this week for my Historical Geology students, and this is one of … Read more
I’ve been making a little daily video series over the past couple of weeks about rocks I have at my home – a quarantine-driven focus on the samples at hand around the house (as well as a few local outcrops). In many of the videos, I’m joined by my son, who know goes by the … Read more
Folded Eocene turbidites exposed on the face of a spectacular waterfall in the Spanish Pyrenees. It’s Friday; enjoy this fold!
What day is it again? Hard to keep track in the days of raging coronavirus infections, but it is in fact Friday, which means that if you want a dose of the halcyon pre-COVID-19 days, you can enjoy this example of a false fold from Death Valley National Park’s Titus Canyon.
We are living in surreal times. It hardly seems possible, but a week ago this evening, I drove down the Las Vegas strip with my students, ogling at the glitz and spectacle and crowds. Now, a mere 7 days later, Vegas has been shuttered, and it’s been shuttered for days. We traveled freely through California … Read more
Hi everyone, and greetings from eastern California’s Death Valley, where I’m leading a field geology course over our spring break. I found an excellent Friday fold for you: That’s the Cambrian-aged Bonanza King Formation, a package of limestones, as exposed in lower Titus Canyon, Death Valley National Park. Here’s the thing: the lower part of … Read more
The Friday folds are revealed in an elegant cross-section through fantastic rocks in the Extremadura region of Spain.
The Friday fold is a lovely little sandbox analogue model by Prof. Marco Martins-Ferreira, who posted it on Twitter this week: As deformation proceeds, you can see the layers develop folds that then morph into faults, shoving deeper layers atop more shallow strata. As a bonus, you can hear Marco’s baby cooing in the … Read more
Today’s Friday Fold comes from Edith Carolina Rojas, the dynamic geology professor at The College of The Desert in Palm Desert, California. She’s an awesome person, and also the sense of scale in this amazing image: Edith shares that this gorgeous structure is an anticline is located in Split Mountain Gorge in Fish Creek Canyon. … Read more
The Friday fold shows disharmonic crumpling in marbles of the Boyden Cave Root Pendant in California’s Sierra Nevada. The GigaPan image displayed is part of the digital legacy of Ron Schott, who passed away a year and a half ago.
Reader John Christian shared these folds with me via email last week. They are quartz veins in slightly metamorphosed Precambrian igneous rocks found near Sunflower, AZ in the Mazatzal Mountains. The second photo is a close-up shot of the curviest, cleanest batch of folds from the first shot. These are beautiful examples of folds in … Read more
A roadside boulder in the Bronx shows folded gneissic banding. It’s another guest-submitted Friday fold!
I participated this year in the Secret Santa Rock Exchange, wherein I shipped out a mystery rock to a random person, and got back a mystery rock from another random person. What fun! My mystery rock has folds in it! It’s from Matt Bruseke at Kansas State University. Check it out: Matt writes that this … Read more
Because I’m putting together a field course for spring break 2020 to Death Valley California, I was looking through old Death Valley photos this week, from the last time I went to that special place. It was seven years ago! How time flies… This one is in Mosaic Canyon, and was taken by my student … Read more
I spent some time in east central Tennessee last week, visiting the Earth Sciences department at Tennesee Technical University in their lovely newly-remodeled home on the main campus quad. In a hallway display case, they had many beautiful specimens on display to educate and inspire. Here are two lovely examples of folding. Terrific rocks to … Read more
From a creek bed in northern Colorado, the Friday fold distorts foliation in early Proterozoic quartzofeldspathic gneiss, peppered with small almandine garnets.
This Friday’s fold is found in a metasedimentary beach cobble I found last summer in southeastern Newfoundland: A lovely little “pocket fold,” it came home with me and is among the handful of “deskcrops” I keep in my home office. Happy Friday and happy November!
The Friday fold is a slab of banded iron formation now dwelling in the University of Washington’s Department of Earth & Space Sciences. But where did it come from? India? Brazil? Perhaps you can help identify its provenance.
