Posted this morning as my “Christmas gift” to blog readers in both photo and GigaPan form, here are the exquisite stromatolites of Helen Lake, Banff National Park, Alberta. [gigapan id=”159358″] link [gigapan id=”159462″] link [gigapan id=”159461″] link [gigapan id=”159459″] link [gigapan id=”159458″] link [gigapan id=”159355″] link [gigapan id=”159359″] link Finally, three other non-stromatolitic GigaPans from … Read more
The exquisite stromatolites of Helen Lake, Banff National Park, are presented in photographic and GigaPan renditions. Enjoy unwrapping them as your “Christmas gift” from Callan.
Want to see something cool? Itty bitty stromatolites… like baby’s fingers! There’s a big weathered-out stylolite at the base of this stromatolite-bearing layer, too. These elfin stromatolites are part of the boulder in the lower left (foreground) of this GigaPan, taken at the Icefields Center parking area in Jasper National Park, Alberta: [gigapan id=”159489″] … Read more
Greetings from the field… here’s a scene I contemplated yesterday…
On the trail up to Crypt Lake in Waterton Lakes National Park (southernmost Alberta, Canada), there’s a ‘traditional’ hiking trail, and then an intense ledge on a glacial headwall that you must teeter along, including scaling your body up into and through a person-sized tunnel! Right at the transition between the two “phases” of the … Read more
The summer before last (2011), I spent some time in Wyoming on an energy resources field trip run by Sheridan College, and one stop we made was to look at “oil shale” (really kerogen-rich marlstone) of the Green River Formation, an Eocene lake deposit in southwestern Wyoming. The oil shale is exposed on the east … Read more
Callan attends the Geological Society of Washington’s fall field trip, examining the relationship between grape-growing and the underlying geology of two provinces in northern Virginia: the Blue Ridge and the Valley & Ridge. With GSW compatriots, Callan visited Hume Vineyards in the central Blue Ridge province and North Mountain Vineyard and Winery in the Shenandoah Valley. This is part II of the field trip report.
Given that I’m leaving tomorrow for the Canadian Rockies, I’ve been inspired to look through some of my photos from last summer, and to realize how few of them I’ve blogged so far. So let me show you some folded things today that Lily and I saw the afternoon we arrived at Waterton Lakes National … Read more
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
After our safari, Lily and I were taken up onto the Great Escarpment in northern South Africa. The escarpment is supported by sedimentary strata of the Transvaal Supergroup that overlie the Archean basement rock of the Kaapvaal Craton. The Transvaal strata are Paleoproterozoic in age, somewhere between 2.5 and 2.0 billion years old. They are … Read more