In Shenandoah National Park, astride Virginia’s Blue Ridge, feeder dikes of Catoctin Formation (meta-)basalt cut across the Grenvillian-aged granitoid basement. Due to their mafic composition and columnar jointing, these feeder dikes generally weather more rapidly than their host rocks. I led a field trip in the park on Thursday for my son’s school, and my … Read more
The Friday fold is a guest submission from Bill Burton, who took the photo of these lovely ptygmatic folds in migmatite in a national park on the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Park Service.
An inaugural visit to an outcrop in Shenandoah National Park reveals the signature of lava flows ~600 million years old.
You could use a macro GigaPan of some pretty sand, I think. [gigapan id=”181069″] Link That’s sand from near Acadia National Park, in Maine. Exploring it, you can find both small chunks of Acadian granite, and green rods that are sea urchin spines. It’s fun – check it out.
I’ve been thinking lately about Harpers Ferry, the spot where West Virginia, Virginia, and Maryland meet, at the confluence of the Potomac River and the Shenandoah River. I’ve noted small outcrops of its overturned beddding here previously, and also described a book I read about the man who made the place infamous: John Brown. I … Read more
As longtime readers know, late summer is when my Rockies students submit their final projects – web-based explanations of key geologic sites they examined during the trip. Today, I offer you a guest blog post by student John Leaming. You’ll notice that I’m not *completely* absent from the post, however – I make a couple … Read more
After reading the post last weekend about the discordant offshoot of the Purcell Sill, Rich Gashnig (post-doc at Georgia Tech) sent me a few photos he shot at Piegan Pass (at the head of a side-canyon adjacent to the one containing Grinnell Glacier). They show the Purcell Sill leaving one stratigraphic horizon and jumping to … Read more
The Neoproterozoic Purcell Sill is a stark, obvious black stripe in the strata of Glacier National Park. Here it is emerging from behind “The Salamander” glacier, above Grinnell Glacier Cirque: Zooming in, you can see the “baked” (bleached) zones above and below this concordant intrusion. But this time, during my visit to this special place, … Read more
Pisolites are large primary concretions that develop in backreef or lagoonal settings such as the Permian Tansil Formation of New Mexico, into which is cut the enormous hole called Carlsbad Caverns.
The coarser strata of the Neoproterozoic Miette Group in the Canadian Rockies of Alberta record changing water current strength over time, and maybe an iceberg or two.