Here’s my crew from July’s Regional Field Geology of the Canadian Rockies course, checking out the Burgess Shale at the Walcott Quarry in Yoho National Park. A couple of the locals joined us for this portrait. Original photo courtesy of Stephen Smith, modified by CB
Callan describes the geology along his new commute from the Fort Valley east to the Annandale campus of NOVA. The driving route traverses the Valley & Ridge, Blue Ridge, and Piedmont provinces, including the Culpeper Basin, and stops just shy of the Coastal Plain.
The final meeting of my spring semester Snowball Earth class was a field trip to the University of Maryland, hosted by Snowball guru Jay Kaufman, a specialist in chemostratigraphy using stable isotopes. Here, Jay welcomes the class to his wet lab: Doing chemostratigraphy takes lots of samples. Here’s a drawer full of samples from one … Read more
A couple of visitors above the entrance to my building on campus today: They’re honking greetings to all the students showing up for 8am exams…
This week, I took 20 minutes out of my day to have a conversation with a group of students… …in Canada. As you can see, our conversation was not in person, but mediated by the Internet’s video conferencing technology service called Skype. A free Skype account and a video camera allows free, easy video conversations … Read more
Last Thursday, my colleague Jim Buecheler and I took two students (Robin Rohrback and Alan Pitts) down to Charlottesville, Virginia, for a meeting at the state geological survey. The Department of Geology and Mineral Resources sponsors an annual one-day symposium on Virginia geology that I’ve participated in two or three times before. Last year I … Read more
I did things a little differently in my latest field class, the Regional Field Geology of Eastern California. Instead of having a post-trip project (like I’ve traditionally done with my Montana/Wyoming Regional Field Geology course), I had the students complete a take-home test. I’ve just finished grading those tests, and was pleased to see the … Read more
Sunday was our first full day in the field. Here’s a few looks at my NOVA students doing geology out in eastern California. We spent the day on, and next to, the Volcanic Tableland north of Bishop, a massive stack of ash fall and ignimbrite deposits erupted from Long Valley Caldera 760,000 years ago: the … Read more
Yesterday I flew from DC to Reno, Nevada in the company of 11 students, and then we rented vehicles and drove south on Route 395, one of the greatest roads in America, to Bishop, California, where we area based for the next 3 days. We’re doing a regional field geology course examining the extraordinary rocks, … Read more
In the White Mountains of eastern California, just west of the Deep Springs Basin (site of my coldest camping experience ever, followed by a memorable morning walk in the playa and discovery of a bat mummified by salt), there lies a classic field mapping location, the Poleta folds. Here’s what it looks like from Google … Read more
Callan visits a new outcrop of highly-sheared rocks in the basement complex of Virginia’s Blue Ridge province.
Happening on campus, right now:
Here’s the talk I gave at GSA last month: [youtube=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXt5aZIu5Xk”] It’s presented here at a slower pace than the actual talk was, since I didn’t have to run and catch a plane 45 minutes after presenting it, but there are some PowerPoint bugs with some of the animations. Oh well – recording it and … Read more
These are all in the northern stairwell between the 2nd and 3rd floors of the Godwin Building here on the Annandale campus of NOVA. The cement blocks have clearly separated along their mortared edges, and the disruption of the paint layer in a series of en echelon fractures reveals that deeper structural issue. I find … Read more
All my Rockies students would agree. Just sayin’.
Our field class visited the Museum of the Rockies yesterday. Here’s the full team!
I just drew up a little checklist for the different formations my Rockies students will be seeing next starting next week out in Montana: The original black and white images (two columns on two pages) come from Self-Guided Field Trips Near Bozeman (1982), by Stephan G. Custer, Donald L. Smith, Molly Walker, and 1982’s crop … Read more
A fresh gigapan, of my office bookshelf. There’s some rocks there: Find anything neat?
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
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