That’s Aden Crater, a Pleistocene shield volcano in southern New Mexico. Here’s what it looks like from above (Google Maps view): I also noted the position of two nearby maar craters: Kilbourne and Hunt Holes. When you climb up to the edge of Aden and look in, you see the congealed and fractured remnants of … Read more
Lily and I took our son to the Virginia Scottish Games on Sunday. This is an annual competition of events in traditionally Scottish feats – throwing heavy things, mainly. There is also fried food, whisky, and some terrific music. The event is held at the Great Meadow, south of The Plains, Virginia. I had never … Read more
A lovely example of a volcanic breccia (from the Eocene Absaroka Volcanics of southern Montana) is showcased, in two different photographs.
Kilbourne Hole is the crater of a maar volcano in southern New Mexico, just across the state line from El Paso, Texas. I went there the weekend before last with a team from El Paso Community College, led by Joshua Villalobos. This is the place where xenobombs come from! If you go to the right … Read more
Join Callan for a look at submarine volcanism and later deformation near Ely, Minnesota. Archean tectonics fluffed these pillows up and squashed them down again.
This summer is the first summer in half a decade that I won’t be spending time camping at Pebble Creek campground, in the Lamar Valley of northeastern Yellowstone (“America’s Serengeti”). While I’m very excited to be nesting and exploring my new home in the Fort Valley, it does make me a bit wistful to think … Read more
Callan presents a collection of well-exposed amygdules, seen along the Dark Hollow Falls trail in Shenandoah National Park, Virginia. These white dots on a green background are the signatures of (1) Iapetan rifting, and (2) Alleghanian metamorphism.
Another guest Friday fold – this one supplied by Ander Sundell of the College of Western Idaho, and his student Katie Ursenbach, who took the shot and gave permission for me to re-post it here. You’re looking at cuspate-lobate folds due to primary sedimentary settling. the Snake River Canyon in southwestern Idaho. A pile of … Read more
Today, for your viewing pleasure, I offer you: A series of big honkin’ gas pockets in a 615 ka basaltic lava flow in the Owens Valley of California. This same lava flow has been featured here before, since it imparted a lovely contact metamorphism to the alluvial fan over which it erupted. These things are … Read more
Have you ever seen Archean pillow basalts? How about Archean pillow basalts that have grown much taller through vertical extrusion along a ductile shear zone? Come to the southern Superior Craton to see more!
I’ve been showing a lot of photos lately from my field course’s trip up into the White Mountains. While we were driving up the road from Westgard Pass to the Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest, we saw something interesting going on in the southern Owens Valley. Take a look at this view to the southwest, from … Read more
Sunday was our first full day in the field. Here’s a few looks at my NOVA students doing geology out in eastern California. We spent the day on, and next to, the Volcanic Tableland north of Bishop, a massive stack of ash fall and ignimbrite deposits erupted from Long Valley Caldera 760,000 years ago: the … Read more
Callan shows off a new sample from Texas, a peridotite xenolith launched into the air from a maar volcanic eruption, slathered in a layer of basalt. With full intent to coin a neologism, he dubs it a “xenobomb.”
From “Volcanic Versus Anthropogenic Carbon Dioxide” by Terry Gerlach in the June 14, 2011 issue of EOS: Human activities emit ~135 times as much carbon dioxide as the world’s volcanoes? Holy cow.
Another day, another geology LOLcat challenged issued by a geoblogger… Okay, I’ll bite: Other geology LOLcats have been found curling up all over the geoblogosphere in the past 24 hours: Outside the Interzone Georneys
The Shenandoah Valley of western Virginia records the switch in late Ordovician time from passive margin sedimentation associated with the Sauk and Tippecanoe epeiric seas, to active margin sedimentation associated with the onset of the Taconian Orogeny to the east. Higher up in the stack, a similar pattern is seen: a return to passive margin … Read more
And now, for the final half of my final day in Capadoccia, Turkey… We continued hiking along up the scenic valley that I mentioned a few days ago, checking out the lovely scene in the lovely weather… The valley floor was reasonably wet and vegetated, but the higher slopes were eroding at a rate too … Read more
A year and a half ago, on my way back to Modesto from Yosemite, I pulled over at the side of the road and found a piece of urbanite full of whoppers. But that curiosity wasn’t what caught my eye and made me pull over in the first place. Instead, what I noticed was this: … Read more
I’ve got two more batches of Capadoccia photos for you. Sorry if you feel bored with this continuing series — but I think it was not only my favorite part of Turkey (and geomorphologically interesting) but photogenic too… So on our final day in Capadoccia, Lily and I took a hike up another valley. We … Read more
So where did we leave off with the Capadoccia photos? I think we mentioned a hike, right? Here’s Lily buying orange juice from two boys who operated a refreshment stand in the middle of nowhere. There was a lot of good, fresh fruit in this dry land, a fact which surprised me. Here’s some apricots … Read more