While we’re out on Corridor H, let me show you some new halite casts I found (either the Wills Creek Formation or the Tonoloway Formation): Salt casts are among my favorite primary structures. They speak very specifically to hypersaline depositional conditions.
While out on the Corridor H field trip last week before the heavy snow, I found this squeal-inducingly-lovely example of a stylolite in Helderberg Group limestones (Devonian passive margin carbonates): The stylolite is a pressure-solution surface, made especially apparent in this example because of the starkly different grain sizes and colors on either side of … Read more
Today, we continue with the story of the field trip I took last week out to Corridor H, the new superhighway in West Virginia that is practically unused, and decorated with multistory roadcuts of spectacular Valley and Ridge sedimentary sequences, and their attendant structures. From the putative Hampshire Formation exposures with their uncharacteristic marine incursion … Read more
See the size of those road cuts? Count all those cars? Exactly. Why this place isn’t swarming with geologists, I cannot for the life of me comprehend.
I went out last Tuesday to Corridor H, the exemplary new highway cutting through the Valley and Ridge province of eastern West Virginia. Joining me was former student Alan Pitts, a devotee of Corridor H from way back in the early days when we just called it “New Route 55.” The boondoggle highway is now … Read more
The work of team M.A.G.I.C. continues. This is a lovely sample quartet of salt cast samples from Silurian-aged Tonoloway Formation limestone. I collected these samples on Corridor H’s newly-opened section west of Moorefield, West Virginia, last spring. The big one at the bottom was collected by my friend Leigh Henry, who graciously loaned it to … Read more
Renowned geological aerial photographer Michael Collier gives Callan a lift over the Fort Valley and Massanutten Mountain in his two-seater Cessna.
A couple of weeks ago, I was killing time down in Front Royal, and I spent a pleasant hour in the Royal Oak Bookshop. I saw a used paperback copy of Tony Horwitz’s classic Confederates in the Attic there, and bought it, thinking I could give it away to a friend or visitor who didn’t … Read more
Alan Pitts‘ Jeep Liberty for scale.
Modern raindrop impressions in wet mud, West Virginia: Mudcracks in limestone, Mississippian, Alberta, Canada: