On our second day in Capadoccia, Lily and I went for a walk through one of the valleys that are eroded into the landscape there. Bas-relief hoodoos emerging from the wall of the canyon: We came to one area with classic turret-like hoodoos: Note the gravel layers in that column’s section, and the human at … Read more
Callan shares some more images from last summer’s trip to Capadoccia, Turkey. Eroded turrets of ignimbrite served as dwellings for Byzantine-era Christians, who decorated them with distinctive art.
Click this image to go to a big panorama (but not big enough to be hosted by Gigapan) of one of the valleys near Göreme, Capadoccia, Turkey: Note: The agriculture that lines the bottom of the valley. The colors of the tuff, and how they vary from place to place. The differentially eroding layer that … Read more
Today, you get the first of several batches of photos dealing with one of the most magical places I’ve ever been, the Cappadocia region of Turkey. Cappadocia (pronounced “kap-uh-doke-ee-yuh“) is an area of eroded volcanic tuffs. The overall effect is badlands-like, but without the micro-turrets and hoodoos. The individual erosional remnants are larger in Cappadocia … Read more
Visit the “faultcano” in the Owens Valley of eastern California: a cinder cone which has been cut and offset along a normal fault associated with Basin & Range extension.
Before the Tectonic Crossroads conference two weeks ago, I had the good fortune to participate in a Istanbul-to-Ankara geology field examining the Tavşanlı Zone, a tectonic suture zone where a portion of the Tethys Ocean basin closed. This paleo-convergent boundary is marked by a suite of interesting rocks, including blueschists, ophiolites, and eclogites. I’d like … Read more
I wrote last fall about my visit to the Duke Quarry, home of a charismatic metavolcanic rock used to face buildings on the campus of Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. Here’s a sample of the “Duke Stone” that I brought back to NOVA, cut, polished, lacquered, and scanned. It’s quite lovely. You can click … Read more
I spent the day lazily reading the igneous petrology chapters of Petrology by Blatt, Tracy, and Owens (third edition, 2006). Last time I read it, I didn’t get all that much from the igneous section, but this time around that’s the thing that motivated me to delve into it again. I don’t remember enough about … Read more
Searching around for the current Where on Google Earth, I found this astonishing place in western New Zealand: That’s Mount Taranaki, and evidently the vegetation change you see in the circular colored shape around the mountain must be due to a protected-area boundary. Check out the radial drainage pattern on that sucker! Check it out … Read more
My friend Barry R., now residing in PostDocVille, Denmark, took a trip to Iceland last week to check out the eruption of Eyjafjallajökull. Unfortunately, by the time he got to the volcano, it was no longer spouting lava, but the scene is dramatic regardless. You can sample some of his photos below, or see the … Read more
A quick post to share a few images of an outcrop I visited last September out in California’s Owens Valley. This is a spot where alluvial fans coming off the eastern Sierra Nevada were overrun by a basaltic lava flow (Jeff, Kim, Fred, and Kurt for scale): The unofficial term for these conglomerates deposited by … Read more
The Grenville Orogeny, responsible for Virginia’s basement complex, was one mountain-building event among many that helped put together a Mesoproterozoic supercontinent called Rodinia. But Rodinia didn’t last: it broke apart during the Neoproterozoic to form the Iapetus Ocean basin. This rifting event is recorded in Virginia’s Blue Ridge province in the Swift Run Formation and … Read more
A new paper in the journal Geology examines an interesting question: how can you tell feeder dikes from non-feeder dikes? The answer is, normally you can’t. Normally, there’s no way to tell for sure whether a given dike actually funneled magma to the paleo-surface, or whether it never reached the paleo-surface. The reason for this … Read more
On the September 2009 GSA field forum in the Owens Valley, the final stop of our first day was to check out the so-called “Crucifix Site,” along Chalk Bluff Road (north of Bishop, California, at the southern margin of the Volcanic Tableland). It’s called the “Crucifix Site” because there is a metal cross erected there: … Read more
Today, some photographs from Guatemala. I know one of my geoblogopeers is down in Guatemala doing research, so I’ll be interested to hear her take on these photos. These photos all come to us courtesy of my friend Courtney, who is a librarian at M.I.T., and a fellow M.S.-graduate of the University of Maryland geology … Read more
