Happy Saturday morning, everyone. I’m on my way down to the National Mall for fellow Tribesman Jon Stewart’s “Restoring Sanity” rally, but I thought I would just quickly post a little geological treat for Mountain Beltway readers. These are pisolites (basically like a big oolite, but without the biological component that would qualify them as … Read more
In honor of this month’s Accretionary Wedge (geoblog carnival; this month the theme is “deskcrops”), I recorded the following short video, showcasing some samples I have in my office: stromatolite (western Montana), conglomerate (Patagonia), schist (New Hampshire), anorthosite (New York), amygdular meta-basalt (Virginia), amphibolite (California), hematite concretions (eastern Montana), and a stretched-pebble lineated meta-conglomerate (Turkey).
Last Wednesday, I took a field trip to the North Anatolian Fault in Turkey, but I got distracted by this fine looking display of sedimentary structures in a dried-up mud puddle in an old quarry. The coin, a Turkish lira, is about the same size as a U.S. quarter. What you’re seeing here are dessication … Read more
Over the long Labor Day weekend, my fiancée Lily and my friend Seth and I took a three-day backpacking trip in the Dolly Sods Wilderness area of West Virginia: Dolly Sods is a unique place, a little patch of flora that is more typical of Canada. It sits atop the eastern Continental Divide, and most … Read more
Over the summer, when my blogging access was limited to my iPhone, I uploaded a photo (taken with the iPhone) of a metamorphosed graded bed on the summit of Mount Washington, New Hampshire. Here’s another one that I saw, further down on the mountain, on the Auto Road (famous for its iconic bumper sticker): Lens … 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
Here’s a new video from Greg Willis, the same guy who brought us a fine video on Piedmont geology. In this new opus (20 minutes), Greg details the geology of the Massanutten Synclinorium (Shenandoah Valley, Massanutten Mountain, and Fort Valley) in western Virginia. WordPress isn’t letting me embed it here, but you should go and … Read more
Beautiful fiancée for scale.
This is the coolest thing I’ve seen this week: a graded bed metamorphosed via Acadian mountain building: The graded bed starts at the Swiss army knife at left, where you see an abrupt transition between coarse grained metamorphic porphyroblasts (“pseudo-andalusites”) and finer grained quartzite. This was once a mud to sand transition when these were … Read more
Heat-stressed map of the Chesapeake Bay / Washington, DC region, as seen at Kenilworth Aquatic Gardens. Looks like mudcracks, eh? Similar stresses; similar strains.