The first time I went to the Billy Goat Trail (Potomac, Maryland) with geology as the goal (as opposed to mere recreation), it was 2002. The trip was led by a professor at the University of Maryland. I was a graduate T.A. then, and didn’t know anything about the local geology. I remember at the … Read more
It’s a rough life, working in the places I have to work… here are a few photos from yesterday’s field trip on the Billy Goat Trail with my NOVA Physical Geology students. Photos are courtesy Dr. Meg Coleman, who joined us for the hike. A post-lunch lecture on river incision (note the two prominent bedrock … Read more
Yesterday, I took my GMU structural geology class to the Billy Goat Trail, my favorite local spot for intriguing geology. Unlike last year, we managed our time well enough that we got to clamber around on the rocks downstream of the amphibolite contact. Here’s Sarah, Lara, Kristen, and Alan, negotiating a steep section: Justin, Joe, … Read more
Sunday morning, NOVA adjunct geology instructor Chris Khourey and I went out to Sugarloaf Mountain, near Comus, Maryland, to poke around and assess the geology. Sugarloaf is so named because it’s “held up” by erosion-resistant quartzite. It’s often dubbed “the only mountain in the Piedmont,” which refers to the Piedmont physiographic province. Here’s a map, … Read more
Thursday is ‘fold day’ here at Mountain Beltway. Let’s take a look at some folds I saw last weekend in New York City. We’ll start with a bunch seen in the Manhattan Schist in Central Park. Here’s an example of the foliation in the schist. It’s got finer-grained regions and coarser, schistier regions with big … Read more
One of the cool things about being the local geoblogger is that people get in touch with you about local geology. Sometimes this even leads to meeting up for field trips. Here’s two quick photos from a recent (January 2010) field trip to a creek near Springfield, Virginia. My host was Barbara X, a local … Read more
On last May’s GSW spring field trip to Chain Bridge Flats, I saw a quartz vein: Surely, upon looking at this photograph, you will be struck by the way the vein is not the same thickness along its length, and parts of it appear to be a white line transitioning into a parallelogram, and back … Read more
A few photos from last May’s spring field trip with the Geological Society of Washington… Here’s the group at Chain Bridge Flats (far westernmost-Washington, D.C.), looked at the metamorphic rocks there — a metagraywacke melange known as the Sykesville Formation. Another group shot, with field trip leaders Tony (khaki shirt) and Gary (red jacket) Fleming … Read more
Check out these cool structures in one of the amphibolite bodies exposed along the Billy Goat Trail (C&O Canal NHP, near Potomac, Maryland): Those are shear bands — basically small shear zones that are discretely localized within a larger body of less-deformed rock. Note the grain-size reduction visible in the shear bands, their dextral sense … Read more