As mentioned, I spent a significant part of last weekend was spent on a paleomagnetic sampling project with collaborators from the University of Michigan. On Friday, this was our field area: That’s the south slopes of Old Rag Mountain, a popular Blue Ridge hiking destination because unlike many Virginia peaks, when you get to the … Read more
Fourth edition of the “Friday fold;” second one via video. Happy Friday!
Over the summer, when my blogging access was limited to my iPhone, I uploaded a photo (taken with the iPhone) of a metamorphosed graded bed on the summit of Mount Washington, New Hampshire. Here’s another one that I saw, further down on the mountain, on the Auto Road (famous for its iconic bumper sticker): Lens … Read more
One of the stops my Rockies students and I made this summer was a dinosaur paleontology tour through the Two Medicine Dinosaur Center in Bynum, Montana. The folks there are very accommodating, and at my request gave the class a bit of stratigraphic context for the dinosaur fossils. For instance, we visited the geologic formation … Read more
Tension gashes are small veins that open up when rocks get stretched. Often, they are arrayed en echelon with respect to other tension gashes, all oriented in the same direction. Here is a sample of tension gashes I found this summer in rip-rap (i.e., not in situ) at some building site in New England. (I … Read more
Beautiful fiancée for scale.
This is the coolest thing I’ve seen this week: a graded bed metamorphosed via Acadian mountain building: The graded bed starts at the Swiss army knife at left, where you see an abrupt transition between coarse grained metamorphic porphyroblasts (“pseudo-andalusites”) and finer grained quartzite. This was once a mud to sand transition when these were … Read more
… And here are some ripple marks from a block of the same sandstone in the previous image. Nice! Hope everyone is doing well. Lots of good geological experiences to report on, buy it’s hard to write a substantive blog post from phone… You’ll have to wait until I’m back at a computer!
Here’s a package of mudcracks from a block of riprap on the waterfront of Burlington, Vermont: Oh yeah….
Yesterday’s field work took us to this classic mass wasting site:
It’s late afternoon in Jackson Hole, with the sun dipping down behind the Tetons. I’m waiting for some students to finish up their hike in Cascade Canyon and ferry back across Jenny Lake. Here’s a snapshot of the moment:
Dashboard decor…
The students had placed this flag on te van antenna when I came out this morning… The other side says “it’s too gneiss!”
Here’s a nice sample of folded gneissic banding in basement complex of the Gallatin Range, Montana. According to Dave Mogk of Montana State University (who I met in person for the first time on Saturday), these high grade metamorphic rocks are as old as 3.2 Ga (billion years old). They experienced temperatures as high as … Read more
Greetings from Bozeman, Montana, where my students and I are on Day 3 of our Rocky Mountain Regional Geology class. Here’s a nice long example of plumose structure to start your Monday. More to come, now that I am back in the States and reconnected with my iPhone.
In a week, I’ll be in Turkey. This is very exciting: Turkey has tons of cool geology, and a modicum of cool history as well. Anyone have any suggestions for stuff I should do/see/visit while there? Anything you particularly want to see geoblogged? Any “assignments”? Lily and I only have two weeks, so we will … Read more
The Lilster & I drove out to Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, today, and crossed the Potomac River to hike up to the overlook at “Maryland Heights,” which is what they call the Blue Ridge north of the river. On the way uphill, I noticed this nice example of Harpers Formation bedding and cleavage dipping in … Read more
Chris Barr’s informative website of the “Accidental Museum of Paleontology” that can be found in D.C. building stones is now live. You should go and check it out, and if you ever visit the city, you can use it as a guide for your tourism.
World! …I have an announcement! Three of my structural geology students from this past semester are now geoblogging… can’t say I had anything to do with that, but there it is. They are: Joe Maloney at Fossiliferous Weekly Aaron Barth at Got The Time and “AlanP” at Not Necessarily Geology Please check them out, and … Read more