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
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
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
The Friday fold is a series of strata underwater near California’s famed “Mavericks” surf break.
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
The geological tour of San Francisco continues with an examination of the graywacke deposits of the
For the structural geology fans among AGU’s readership, enjoy the weekly installment of the Friday fold.
Right after I got to Istanbul on this most recent trip, I took a taxi from my hotel down to the Bosphorus, to check out the Rumeli Hisarı, a fort complex built in 1452 by Sultan Mehmet the II in anticipation of the following year’s siege of Constantinople. It’s constructed at the narrowest point on … Read more
When I was done with my sophomore year at William & Mary, I embarked on a time-honored tradition among W&M geology majors: the Geology 310 Colorado Plateau field course. Jess alluded to this same course in her Magma Cum Laude contribution to this month’s Accretionary Wedge geology blog “carnival,” too. My version of Geology 310 … Read more
Over the summer, I went up to Vermont to visit my friends the Clearys. Joe Cleary is a college friend and a talented luthier. He and his wife Tree and their children Jasper and Juniper have settled in Burlington, a lively town with a lot of cool stuff going on. Joe took time out one … Read more
In the 1987 comedy Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, John Candy and Steve Martin have a funny experience. It involves a cozy hotel room (one bed only) and the two travelers are huddled up for warmth. As he wakes up, John Candy thinks he is warming his hand “between two pillows.” At hearing this, Steve Martin’s … Read more
Last Sunday, I took a solo hike along Pimmit Run in Virginia, accessing the valley via Fort Marcy, a Civil War fortification off of the George Washington Memorial Parkway. As always, I did a bit of geologizing along the route. One theme that emerged from the day’s photos was quartz veins. These veins form when … Read more
Sunday morning, NOVA adjunct geology instructor Chris Khourey and I went out to Sugarloaf Mountain, near Comus, Maryland, to poke around and assess the geology. Sugarloaf is so named because it’s “held up” by erosion-resistant quartzite. It’s often dubbed “the only mountain in the Piedmont,” which refers to the Piedmont physiographic province. Here’s a map, … Read more
Okay; we are nearing the end of our Transect saga. During the late Paleozoic, mountain building began anew, and deformed all the rocks we’ve mentioned so far. This final phase of Appalachian mountain-building is the Alleghanian Orogeny. It was caused by the collision of ancestral North America with the leading edge of Gondwana. At the … Read more
From the basement complex, the next unit up in the Blue Ridge province’s stratigraphic sequence is the Swift Run Formation. It rests atop an erosional unconformity. After the Grenville Orogeny (~1.1 Ga) added a swath of new crust along the margin of the North American continent, the landscape began to weather and erode. Eventually, an … Read more
It is time to debrief the post-NE/SE-GSA field trip that I went on, affectionately dubbed the “Transect Trip” for the past 27 iPhone-uploaded “live”-geoblogged posts. First off, I’d have to say that I enjoyed the live-field-blogging experiment overall, though I’ve got some critiques of the process and products. I think it’s amazing that I can … Read more
On a granite block