Darrel Cowan of the University of Washington has pitched in a Friday fold. Check this lovely scene out: Darrel says this is a recumbent fold in the Upper Triassic Nizina and Chitistone limestones. I took the photo when I worked for Shell in 1973 or 1974. I’m pretty sure it is on the west wall … Read more
As noted previously, the old way of viewing gigapixel imagery is no more. But there is a new, better way. The GIGAmacro company has a better viewing platform that can be used either with images uploaded to their server or with pre-existing images that currently “live” at GigaPan.com. Here’s an example: a roadcut of limestone … Read more
Some scaly Italian limestone shows off two foliations (S and C) which reveal the kinematic motions that built the Apennines.
This image graces the cover of the new report, Challenges and opportunities for research in tectonics: Understanding deformation and the processes that link Earth systems, from geologic time to human time. A community vision document submitted to the U.S. National Science Foundation: Make it bigger by clicking it The photo is of a landscape in … Read more
A trip to one of the most famous outcrops in the world, a place with a stratum that marked a profound shift in the state of the planet, and a profound shift in geologic thinking. Plus, for the author, it’s a romantic journey back in time.
The Friday fold visits the Apennine Range of central Italy.
I was in southern France last week, exploring an awesome suite of caves cut into the Causses limestone plateau. My family and I took an afternoon to paddle a canoe down 5 kilometers of the Célé River. While floating along, we spied a gentle, open fold in the limestone layers that crop out along the … Read more
I spent last weekend at the National Association of Geoscience Teachers’ Eastern Section meeting, based out of the Community College of Baltimore County in Catonsville, Maryland. One of the two field trips I took headed out to the western Piedmont, Blue Ridge and Valley & Ridge provinces of western Maryland. On that trip, we took … Read more
Rathlin Island lies north of mainland Northern Ireland, a few miles offshore. I spent three lovely days there this past summer, investigating the geology and appreciating the wildlife (puffins and other sea birds, and seals). The geology is pretty straightforward: Paleogene basalt overlying Cretaceous “chalk” (really not so chalky here – technically, it’s the Ulster … Read more
When in Shetland, one of my first stops was the museum in Scalloway, and one of the ancillary benefits of visiting there is the castle next door: Scalloway Castle includes building stones derived from the local limestone – a Neoproterozoic unit that has recently been chemostratigraphically correlated with Snowball Earth cap carbonates elsewhere in the … Read more