Friday folds: Dalradian schists at St. Ninian’s Isle
Remember St. Ninian’s Isle? It is connected to Mainland Shetland by a tombolo. But it has rocks there, too. Here are some outcrops on the beach: If you visit these schisty fins, you’ll find they are populated by a cavalcade of small folds. Some of the folds are crisp things known as kink bands: Annotated … Read more
Oddball Icelandic rocks, part I: A green ignimbrite
Iceland does basalt really, really well. But there are a few non-basaltic igneous rocks to be found there, too. One of them is a green ignimbrite (pyroclastic conglomerate) that crops out in coastal Berufjörður, eastern Iceland. Check it out!
Hverir, Mývatn, Iceland
Today, I offer up a few photos and some video from the Hverir geothermal area on the east side of Mývatn National Park in Iceland – a rift zone astride the central Mid-Atlantic Ridge, and thus an area where you would expect to see a high heat flow through the crust. Heat interacting with meteoric … Read more
A virtual field trip to Rathlin Island, Northern Ireland
Rathlin Island lies north of mainland Northern Ireland, a few miles offshore. I spent three lovely days there this past summer, investigating the geology and appreciating the wildlife (puffins and other sea birds, and seals). The geology is pretty straightforward: Paleogene basalt overlying Cretaceous “chalk” (really not so chalky here – technically, it’s the Ulster … Read more
Friday fold: Torqued talc from the 2016 Biggs awardee
Callan’s colleague Joshua Villalobos won the 2016 Biggs Award. He also makes GigaPans of folds, like these talc-bearing rocks of the Allamoore Formation.
Virginia Museum of Natural History specimens in GIGAmacro view
One of the small sub-projects of my 2015-2017 Chancellor’s Commonwealth Professorship is to create some GIGAmacro images of cool fossil specimens from the Virginia Museum of Natural History in Martinsville. Curator of paleontology Alex Hastings was good enough to loan us a few specimens to image, and hopefully there will soon be more where they … Read more
The Age of American Unreason, by Susan Jacoby
I probably should have read this book eight years ago when it was first published, but somehow I missed it then. I recently heard the author, Susan Jacoby, on the podcast Point of Inquiry, and was impressed at the cannon of works she had produced. The current U.S. election cycle has spurred me to think … Read more
Friday fold: Shetland geopark rock wall at Northmavine
Can a Friday fold be a work of art as well as a source of geologic insight? The answer can be found as you enter Shetland’s Northmavine region.
Eyes on some augens in a nice gneiss
Take a look at these gorgeous exposures of augen gneiss in eastern “mainland” Shetland, U.K. Includes 3 GigaPans of the site.