Callan gets ready for a summer of travels out in the Rocky Mountains, including teaching a field geology course, participating in a workshop about teaching energy, visiting the Burgess Shale, and… getting married!
I don’t have much time to blog this day/week/month, so here are two stromatolite images from downstream of Grinnell Glacier in Glacier National Park, Montana. This is the same area where I was attacked by a voracious stromatolitic Pac-man, of course. For more on the geology of GNP, see Filip’s post here.
A few microscope photos for you, showing close-ups of feldspars in igneous dikes in the Crazy Mountains of Montana… You’ve seen these rocks before, when I posted a few field photos from this area in August 2009. I took these images of feldspar phenocrysts in a hand sample (from a quartz latite dike) with my … Read more
Friday’s prompt to post the French Thrust shot gave me the opportunity to dig into my “Rockies” folder a bit. Here’s two other shots from my inaugural summer leading my Geology 295 field class out there. Hiking the trail to Grinnell Glacier: …It looks like we’re in the Appekunny Formation here, third from the bottom … Read more
That title sounds kinky, right? Well, calm down. I’m behind the curve on the latest Accretionary Wedge (as I was for the one before that), but here’s a quick image to join the parade of geologic photos that Ann is hosting. While it’s not my favorite, it’s definitely a favorite, more by virtue of the … Read more
Here’s your Friday fold, straight from the canyon of the Jefferson River, near Cardwell, Montana. Perspective is to the south. East is on the left; west is on the right. Bigger version This is right next to the outcrops of LaHood Conglomerate that I mentioned earlier this week. My Rockies course co-instructor Pete Berquist and … Read more
Remember the LaHood Conglomerate? Here’s a few field photos of my Rockies class visiting it last July: Amphibolite clast: Marble clast: I love how well-rounded these clasts can be — like eggs. When these grains were loose cobbles, tumbling down into the Belt Sea, the Earth was only 3 to 3.5 billion years old. The … Read more
Yesterday, I asked for you to evaluate this rock sample of the Belt supergroup and tell me how many structures (both primary and tectonic) that you could identify in it. Thanks to everyone who participated in the discussion. Here’s my annotated copy of that photo for comparison:
Last summer, in Bonner, Montana on my Rockies field course, I took the students to see some nice exposures of Belt Supergroup strata on the side of the road. We were keeping our eyes peeled for both primary structures (i.e., patterns in the sediment that formed at the time of their deposition) and secondary, or … Read more
Check it out: In the canyon of the Jefferson River, Montana, you can find yourself some limestone (Mississippian Madison Group, I think of the Lodgepole Formation) that has seen a wee bit of faulting: And here’s an annotated copy… Both of these images are enlargeable by clicking through (twice): Note the quarter for scale: this … Read more
This fold is located on Highway 287, north of Wolf Creek, Montana. Annotated version: As with last week’s Friday Fold, this fold owes its existence to (a) deposition of sandstone and shale in the Western Interior Seaway, and (b) deformation under a giant thrust sheet during the thin-skinned compressional tectonics of the Sevier Orogeny. In … Read more
Happy Friday, everyone!
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
This is the second of my Rockies course student projects that I wanted to share here on the blog: it is a guest post by Filip Goc. Enjoy! -CB —————————————————————————– The Rocks around Glacier National Park, Montana: Introduction to the formations The geology around Glacier National Park is great for beginners because the area is … Read more
This weekend, I wanted to share some of the best work from this year’s Rockies field course students. Let’s start with a nice video by Marcelo Arispe: I thought this was a really nice job making a video using still images and a voiceover. The only thing I would change would be in the Gallatin … Read more
Let this be a lesson to you, kids. Don’t get too close to wild stromatolites, even if they are Mesoproterozoic… These exceptionally large stromatolites are on the threshold of the Grinnell Glacier, in Glacier National Park, Montana. No stromatolites or geologists were harmed during the production of this blog post. Photos by NOVA Rockies student … Read more
It’s that time of year for me… summer’s here, and I’m winding up my duties at NOVA in preparation for some travels. We leave Sunday night for two weeks in Turkey, followed by my regional field geology course in Montana (also two weeks), followed by some family time and mountain climbing in New Hampshire (three … Read more
The Belt Supergroup is a series of sedimentary strata laid down in the Belt Sea, an inland sea (like modern Hudson Bay) that existed in the northwestern (by present coordinates) part of ancestral North America during the Mesoproterozoic era of geologic time. Estimates of the absolute age of these rocks range from 1470 to 1400 … Read more
In January, a large landslide occurred in the Hunza Valley of Pakistan’s Karakoram Range, near the village of Attabad. Like the Madison River landslide in Montana (1959), or the Gros Ventre landslide in Wyoming (1925), a river was dammed by the slide debris, and the impounded waters began to rise. At Gros Ventre, the landslide-dammed … Read more