Reader and former student Paxton DeBusk shared this lovely folded gneiss with me at the conclusion of the Virginia Geological Field Conference a few weeks ago: That’s a lovely hand sample, with a high folding:volume ratio! Happy Friday, all
It’s Friday! Here’s a lovely sight, contributed by reader Fred Atwood: [youtube_agu id=Au-jIGfbs8g] Those are quartz veins in one of my favorite local rock units, the Mather Gorge Formation. Fred reports, This is at Madeira School in Great Falls between Black Pond and the Potomac. The rocks around Great Falls, particularly those on the Billy … Read more
The subtitle of this wonderful book is “Watermen, Crabs, and the Chesapeake Bay.” It’s an excellent account of crab ecology in the Chesapeake Bay as it stood in the mid-1970s, and simultaneously a sympathetic portrait of the lives of the locals who capture those crabs for sale to the seafood market. The writing is thoughtful … Read more
A reader asks: “What is foliation and what makes it so important to the structure of rock?”
Callan answers with a lot of images of beautifully foliated rocks.
Break out your paddle and sunhat. We’re going kayaking on Lake Moomaw, in search of Friday folds…
Stop the presses! This late-breaking Friday fold has just been submitted here at Friday Fold Headquarters. This is from Philip Prince/Virginia Division of Geology and Mineral Resources: It’s a recumbent fold of Harpers Formation metasandstone in the James River Face area. Pretty lovely exposure. This outcrop would make a good 3D model. Happy Friday to … Read more
A solo hike in search of anticlines yields new outcrops and good views!
On a family hike, Callan’s son finds some interesting smooth lines on a rock. What are they? What do they tell us? Tune in for a brief history of Appalachian geology.
Remember the Virginia Geological Field Conference from back in October? Well here’s a folded quartz vein we observed along a small shear zone in the Blue Ridge basement complex. There are two views of it, from approximately perpendicular points of view: These rocks are Mesoproterozoic, but the vein would obviously be younger than that, and … Read more
New year’s day is the time I tally up my accumulated bird species seen in my yard on the forested slope of Massanutten Mountain. This is my sixth such annual list. Here are the previous iterations: 2012 (39 species) 2013 (51 species) 2014 (58 species) 2015 (65 species) 2016 (59 species) Here we go, in … Read more