Friday fold: crumpled & faulted Brallier
The Friday fold is found on a newly-opened section of road in West Virginia. Join Callan in checking out some synclines and associated faults in the Devonian-aged Brallier Formation.
west virginia
Currents in the Devonian deep
This blog has been noticeably photo deficient lately! Time to remedy that. Today, I offer you a couple of shots of the Brallier Formation (shale / fine-grained sandstone) in West Virginia’s Valley & Ridge province, a few miles northwest of Moorefield, on the newly-opened section of New Route 55. The Brallier was deposited in a … Read more
Friday fold: Anticline / syncline pair
Today’s fold is an anticline and its neighboring syncline, both exposed along a newly-opened stretch of New Route 55, west of Moorefield, West Virginia. The new Route 55 is a classic porkbarrel boondoggle courtesy of the late Senator Robert Byrd, but doggone if it didn’t open up some lovely new roadcuts. Here’s a stitched image … Read more
Friday fold: the Devil’s Backbone
The Friday fold is a guest photo by James Edward Bailey, a 5th grade student from Reston, Virginia. It is the anticline shown is known as “the Devil’s Backbone,” located near Marlinton, West Virginia, right on the boundary between the Valley & Ridge province and the Appalachian Plateaus. It clearly shows differential weathering of weaker layers and tougher layers. …Also some lovely fall colors!
Conglomerate from Dolly Sods
While my focus was more on bugs and plants than geology this time around, I did hike a new trail at Dolly Sods this past weekend, and on that trail I found several nice boulders of conglomerate. These stood out as being much coarser than the pervasive quartz sandstone of the Pennsylvanian-aged Conemaugh Group which … Read more
New hallway display: geologic provinces of northern Virginia
Callan shows off a new hallway display in his building at Northern Virginia Community College, showcasing the numerous geologic provinces of northern Virginia (as well as adjacent mid-Atlantic states).
Let’s coin a name for this phenomenon
I didn’t mention it yesterday, but there was one other structure that I saw at my newest outcrop on New 55. This is it: That’s a bunch of fractures. The broken rock is being altered by preferential fluid flow through the fractures. The fluid is not inert; it’s chemically active, and reacting with the rock. … Read more
Friday fold: scenes from new 55
This week’s edition of the “Friday fold” takes us to Route 55 in West Virginia, to deformed Appalachian strata of the Valley and Ridge province. A few bonus structures are also shown — some ripple marks, slickensides, and pencil cleavage.
Delicious dendrites
Hopefully seasoned readers of this blog will remember this nice chunk of limestone with pyrolusite (MnO2) dendrites growing on its surface. I took some close-ups with my Nikon microscope a few weeks ago. Here they are; enjoy! The width of the field of view in each photograph is about 1.1 cm: BTW, Mike likes dendrites, … Read more
Dolly Sods
Over the long Labor Day weekend, my fiancée Lily and my friend Seth and I took a three-day backpacking trip in the Dolly Sods Wilderness area of West Virginia: Dolly Sods is a unique place, a little patch of flora that is more typical of Canada. It sits atop the eastern Continental Divide, and most … Read more