“Did somebody say bugs?” …Yes, Mr. Lizard, it’s time for a photo gallery of the macro bugs I saw this past weekend. We got some caterpillars for you, some millipedes, and also a very cool moth. Feast your eyes! Unidentified caterpillar 1: Underwing caterpillar (?): Unidentified caterpillar 2: Millipedes: (See also here, if you … Read more
Camping this weekend; when we took the rain fly off the tent this morning, we found this gruesome scene of a predator and its prey, a miniature drama that played itself out above our heads while we slept: I love macro photography of critters like these… tiny dramas revealed!
Shot this on Friday with my iPhone, with student David’s hand lens held in front of it. Nice look at a resting moth: Not bad, eh? Anyone else got any recent iPhone macro photography to share?
So where did we leave off with the Capadoccia photos? I think we mentioned a hike, right? Here’s Lily buying orange juice from two boys who operated a refreshment stand in the middle of nowhere. There was a lot of good, fresh fruit in this dry land, a fact which surprised me. Here’s some apricots … Read more
The Friday fold visits the French Broad Massif of North Carolina’s Blue Ridge province.
Another look at Konnarock Formation diamictite, showing colorful reaction “halos” around some clasts.
On Saturday, after a fruitful 24 hours at the VCCS Science Peer Conference, my colleague Pete Berquist (of Thomas Nelson Community College) and I led a field trip to examine the geology of the Richmond, Virginia, area. We were joined by seven of our VCCS science-teaching colleagues and author Lisa Starr, a speaker at the … Read more
This weekend I went camping with my family in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, near Berryville. I poked around with river cobbles and experienced fluvial dynamics firsthand with an inner tube ride down the Shenandoah River, but mainly I turned off the geology part of my brain. Instead, the brain enjoyed idling, and thinking about how to … Read more
I realize the geological blogging has been rather light around these parts lately – just one more day of “fluff” posts… Here’s a damselfly, photographed close-up last Thursday along Route 340 south of Elkton, Virginia. There were also some rocks there… more on them tomorrow.
Yesterday, Lily and I embraced my first day of no-more-classes by taking a hike. We drove out to Massanutten Mountain and hiked up to Signal Knob, a ten-mile (roundtrip) jaunt with about 1500 feet of elevation gain. Along the way, we saw a lot of Massanutten Formation quartz sandstone (Silurian), a few trace fossils, a … Read more
A macro shot of a beetle (length ~11 mm) I saw on the wildlife-rich George Mason University structure trip two weekends ago… Neat iridescence, eh? I love macro photography, especially of bugs.
While on our structural geology field trip this week, my GMU students and I encountered an eastern worm snake, Carphophis amoenus amoenus. The little charmer at first reminded me of a boa, like the ‘rubber boa’ I once found in California (a real animal, not made of rubber), and then I convinced myself it was … Read more
Last Sunday, I took a solo hike along Pimmit Run in Virginia, accessing the valley via Fort Marcy, a Civil War fortification off of the George Washington Memorial Parkway. As always, I did a bit of geologizing along the route. One theme that emerged from the day’s photos was quartz veins. These veins form when … Read more