Check out the argillite boulder in the left midground of this GigaPan, which I’ve showed here before. It was taken at the Icefields Center parking area in Jasper National Park, Alberta: link There, you’ll find some lovely orange lichens, some iron oxide staining, some graffiti, and a fair number of sub-aligned glacial striations. Also, at … Read more
Devonian metamorphic rocks (garnet-bearing gneiss) exposed on the western side of Cabbage Island, Maine: And here it is in GigaPan form: link
Posted this morning as my “Christmas gift” to blog readers in both photo and GigaPan form, here are the exquisite stromatolites of Helen Lake, Banff National Park, Alberta. link link link link link link link Finally, three other non-stromatolitic GigaPans from the site: One of Artomys Formation siltstone / shale interbeds… link …and two of … Read more
A hike to Helen Lake, Banff National Park, Alberta, brings your intrepid geoblogger face to face with a fresh landslide and a curious landform parallel to the glacial valley. Is it a pro-talus rampart?
Want to see something cool? Itty bitty stromatolites… like baby’s fingers! There’s a big weathered-out stylolite at the base of this stromatolite-bearing layer, too. These elfin stromatolites are part of the boulder in the lower left (foreground) of this GigaPan, taken at the Icefields Center parking area in Jasper National Park, Alberta: link
Let’s journey to the Cretaceous today, to see sandstones, shales, and even some coal strata that have been folded during the eastward thrusting that built the Canadian Rockies. Here’s the same fold, in context, shot in GigaPan on a different day, from a different angle. Can you match it up? link Ben Gadd showed me … Read more
Back in 2011, when we were still living in D.C., Lily and I made a hiking trip out to Buzzard Rocks. It was a destination. Now that I live out here in the Fort Valley, I see Buzzard Rocks all the time, and I love it. It’s such a cool feature – a spot on … Read more
It’s been a long time since I’ve shared some of the work of our GigaPan making team. Here are some of the highlights from the last five months of work… In the images below, see if you can find (a) ten thousand fusilinid forams excavated by Texas ants, (b) Devonian trace fossils in black shale, … Read more
The Friday fold is an outcrop in Yoho National Park that showcases differences between buckle folding and passive folding.
Here’s a breccia that Dan Doctor and I found in a tabular zone within the Helderberg Group (Devonian limestones) in one of the massive new roadcuts along Corridor H. link Is it a fault breccia or a sedimentary breccia? The breccia was bedding parallel, which suggests it could be just another bed, but it’s so … Read more
Pemaquid Point, Maine, is a locally-owned and -managed park near an old lighthouse. I went there yesterday with my family. We’re on vacation in coastal Maine for a week. At Pemaquid Point, the action of waves have cleaned the rocks, and they offer a delightful three-dimensional look at Acadian-aged metamorphics and granite pegmatite dikes, with … Read more
It’s been a while since I’ve shared some of the work of our GigaPan making team. We’re gearing up for our NSF-funded summer GigaPan generating session, so it’s worth taking a look back at some of the highlights from the last couple of months of work… See if you can find (a) evidence of pressure … Read more
Back to Texas, today. Here’s a cross-sectioned Turitella snail from the Buda Formation limestone: It’s exposed in a block of rock on the north side of Mt. Cristo Rey. You can explore these GigaPanned blocks of the Buda in search of your own Turitella… How many can you find? link link link
On “Border to Beltway”‘s visit to Kilbourne Hole, after we whet our appetite with Hunt’s Hole, Michael finds a xenobomb. Ernie and Boris look on with envy: A “xenobomb” is a xenolith (in this case, of mantle peridotite), slathered in a coating of lava and tossed out of a volcano in the middle of a … Read more
While on Corridor H 2 weeks ago with Alan Pitts, we stopped astride the Patterson Creek Mountain Anticline, with extensive road cuts displaying Tonoloway Formation overlying Wills Creek Formation. We love this spot for its lovely folds and halite casts. See what I mean? link link This time, however, my eye was drawn to the … Read more
While out on the Corridor H field trip last week before the heavy snow, I found this squeal-inducingly-lovely example of a stylolite in Helderberg Group limestones (Devonian passive margin carbonates): The stylolite is a pressure-solution surface, made especially apparent in this example because of the starkly different grain sizes and colors on either side of … Read more
One of the intriguing rocks you find in Virginia, at the interface between the Valley and Ridge province and the Blue Ridge province, is distinctive brecciated Antietam Formation. The Antietam (sometimes known as the “Erwin,” especially in Shenandoah National Park), is a quartz arenite (quartz sandstone) that has been variably fused to quartzite in some … Read more
It’s time to bring you up to date on some of the latest imagery produced by the Mid-Atlantic Geo-Image Collection. All of the following images were constructed by my student Robin Rohrback-Schiavone, on the GIGAmacro photographic imaging system in our lab… Several of the Precambrian samples came to us on loan from Jay Kaufman of … Read more
This spring, I traveled to west Texas to assist Joshua Villalobos of El Paso Community College in capturing a series of GigaPan images, in hopes of creating a comprehensive virtual field experience revealing that area’s spectacular geology. Since then, my student Robin Rohrback-Schiavone has been using our GIGAmacro photographic imaging system to make a series … Read more
Over the summer, I shot these two GigaPans of the “Great Unconformity” in Wind River Canyon (Owl Creek Mountains), Wyoming: link link This week, Team M.A.G.I.C. (by which I mean my student Robin Rohrback-Schiavone) finished up a series of three macro GigaPans of rock samples from the site (made with our one-of-nine-in-the-world GIGAmacro rig by … Read more