A weekend expedition to GigaPan the C&O Canal’s singular Paw Paw Tunnel results in an exposition on Devonian sedimentation, Alleghanian mountain-building, structural geology, and the incision of the Potomac River to produce entrenched meanders.
The Friday fold is presented in photo, annotated photo, and GigaPan formats. It’s a cleaved anticline in lower Martinsburg Formation limy slate from Page County, Virginia. See if you can spot Mr. E. coli in the GigaPan!
Last summer, my wife and I spent some time in the Canadian Rockies. One of the things we did was to take a three-day backpacking trip to Floe Lake, in Kootenay National Park, British Columbia. We picked a rough couple of days for hiking – We got a lot of Canadian Rockies precipitation out there: … Read more
Team M.A.G.I.C. had a productive month. Here are some of our latest images: link link link link link link link
I collected this sample the weekend before last on the Blue Ridge Thrust Fault field trip led by Alan Pitts. It’s a chunk of the Antietam Formation quartz sandstone, a Cambrian beach deposit. The face we photographed measures 15 cm by 12 cm. link It definitely looks best in full screen mode, so please feel … Read more
Last Thursday, my colleague Jim Buecheler and I took two students (Robin Rohrback and Alan Pitts) down to Charlottesville, Virginia, for a meeting at the state geological survey. The Department of Geology and Mineral Resources sponsors an annual one-day symposium on Virginia geology that I’ve participated in two or three times before. Last year I … Read more
Today, for your viewing pleasure, please check out five macro GigaPans of insect fossils from the Florissant fossil beds in Colorado (34.07 +/-0.10Ma). These amazing specimens were collected by Joe Cancellare, a student working on research supervised by Josh Villalobos of El Paso Community College in El Paso, Texas. Our M.A.G.I.C. project is helping Joe … Read more
GigaPan by Alan Pitts, as part of the M.A.G.I.C. project that we are working on. Here’s another one from a few meters away. Here’s a shot from 2.5 minutes after Alan saw this anticline for the first time. Here’s some shots of my own early visit to the site, after I first found it.
New M.A.G.I.C. GigaPans are shown of two connected Hawaiian samples: one an igneous rock, one a loose beach sand.
How could thematically-linked images like these be used to further geoscience education?
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Chime in!
Nice straight-limbed syncline in the Helderberg Group of West Virginia (Devonian limestones, mainly): Alan Pitts shot a sweet GigaPan of this outcrop which you can explore here, or you can just look at this zoomed-in detail: Aaron Barth is down there in the lower right corner for scale.
With my new “macrogigapan” rig from Four Chambers Studio, I produced a single image last week as part of my Mid-Atlantic Geo-Image Collection project (M.A.G.I.C.). I’m still learning the ropes of the machine – I shot about 3 times as many photos as I needed to to make this gigapan. Lessons learned, yet again. Anyhow … Read more
With my new “macrogigapan” rig from Four Chambers Studio, I produced these images last week as part of my Mid-Atlantic Geo-Image Collection project (M.A.G.I.C.). … Dive in! Porphyritic andesite from the Beartooth Plateau, Montana: Foliated limestone slate, location unknown: Clicking on the word “GigaPan” in the lower right corner will take you to a fuller-screen … Read more
Site of the mystery photo I posted over the weekend, the beach at Rooiels (“red grass” in Afrikaans), South Africa, is a lovely place… Located on the western side of False Bay a tad north of Cape Hangklip, Rooiels is somewhat famous in my mind because the Guru of Gigapan, Illah Nourbakhsh, spoke glowingly of … Read more
With my new “macrogigapan” rig from Four Chambers Studio, I produced this image last week before I left on vacation: That sample measures 18.5 cm long, and is about 4.9 cm wide. Pretty good resolution, eh?
Today’s fold is an anticline and its neighboring syncline, both exposed along a newly-opened stretch of New Route 55, west of Moorefield, West Virginia. The new Route 55 is a classic porkbarrel boondoggle courtesy of the late Senator Robert Byrd, but doggone if it didn’t open up some lovely new roadcuts. Here’s a stitched image … Read more
Giant City State Park is a patch of protected forest south of Carbondale, Illinois, where there are some pretty cool exposures of Pennsylvanian-aged Makanda Sandstone. Here’s a typical look at one: Notice the deep chasm on the right. This leads, maze-like, to other flat-bottomed and vertically-walled canyons: The orthogonal joint sets produces some nice tall, … Read more
All my Rockies students would agree. Just sayin’.
To follow up to my Cascade Canyon post, here’s a gigapan of the scene:
Dave Lageson of Montana State University and I ran into each on our respective field trips sometime last year outside of the Two Medicine Dinosaur Center in Bynum, Montana, and he told me that I had to go check out the Swift Dam area, a little ways northwest of the town of Depuyer. So, a … Read more
While out in the field with Butch Dooley last week, making major discoveries like I do, I was very impressed with the landscape-scale west Bighorn monocline, which takes formerly horizontal Madison limestone and skews it to a westward dip where the mountains end and the intermontane basin begins. It’s totally sweet. Check it out in photo form and gigapan, too.