More photos from the flight from Reno to Minneapolis in March. The photos in today’s post come from the air above the Dakotas and Minnesota. First up: a series showing the intersection of natural patterns (presumably related to ground moraine) and the palimpsest geometric regularity of anthropogenic designs: Are these kettles? A close up look … Read more
The word “Shenandoah” is thought to mean “daughter of the stars,” a lovely turn of phrase even if there’s no evidence for it. The name has been applied to a variety of features in the Commonwealth of Virginia. One is the Shenandoah River, and the valley in which it flows. Here’s a look at the … Read more
Here are some photos out the window of my flight home from California the week before last… Snow on the north sides of mountains, but not on the south sides (view is from the south towards the north): Same thing here: And again… And again… it would appear that our route from Reno to Minneapolis … Read more
A few scenes out the left side of the airplane from when I flew from El Paso to Houston a week and a half ago… Sand dune field overprinting desert vegetation and human roadways: Outcrop pattern of horizontal strata (tracing out the contours of this hill), and the weird geometry of human road systems: More … Read more
After seeing the contact of the Campus Andesite with Western Interior Seaway sedimentary rocks (Cretaceous in age), we moved a bit on down the line, and saw this disconformable contact between the Cretaceous shales below, and a bouldery sedimentary breccia above. Note the concave-up shape of the contact to the left of Elizabeth Nagy-Shadman (of … Read more
Some fall photographs from 2007, taken of the south fork of the Shenandoah River, southeast of Massanutten Mountain, in Virginia’s Valley & Ridge province. Photos are by my NOVA colleague, the biologist (and pilot) Mike Peglar: Our leaves are changing color now, and I’d imagine if we were soaring over the Shenandoah Valley this morning, … Read more
The first stop on our pre-GSA field trip to the subprovince boundaries of the Superior Craton was a place just north of Virginia, Minnesota, where the Mesabi Iron Ranges are mined (same Proterozoic banded iron formations that were portrayed as the backdrop of the mining activity depicted in the film North Country). The pull-off is … Read more
Hurricane Irene passed this way two weeks ago, and dumped a lot of rain on the mid-Atlantic region and the northeast. As a result, runoff increased, rivers swelled, and sediment was mobilized. Some of that sediment was suspended and transported downstream. On Tuesday, I got this e-mail from my colleague Ken Rasmussen, who took students … Read more
On Tuesday morning, before the earthquake hit, I answered an e-mail about DC faults. I get unsolicited e-mails all the time (and occasionally phone calls, too). The contact comes from people who have a geological question, find my blog, and figure that I might be willing to answer it for them, or to direct them … Read more
Yesterday afternoon, I spent some time in the field with a colleague, a student, and a gigapan. I took four gigapan images, which are of varying quality due to the partly cloudy day, but still you ought to find them interesting to explore. You can see any of them full-screen by clicking on the word … Read more