Spheroidal weathering in Columbia River basalt

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I’m in Idaho for the Rocky Mountain section meeting of the Geological Society of America. Yesterday, I was delighted to tour around in eastern Washington’s Channeled Scablands with my colleague Bill Richards (North Idaho College). I took a lot of photos, but here are two to start – lovely examples of “onion skin” style weathering … Read more

Trace fossils in the Massanutten Sandstone

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Over the weekend, my wife and I took a walk with our son at the Storybrook Trail, an accessible trail with a fine overlook to the east over the Page Valley. There, the Massanutten Sandstone shows a bunch of big beefy trace fossils at this site: both bedding-parallel (Arthophycus-like) and bedding-perpendicular (Skolithos-like) traces. Here’s Bax … Read more

Friday fold: 3D syncline in Macigno Formation

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Alan Pitts is the source of today’s fold, a beautiful 3D model of a differentially-weathered sycline in the Late Oligocene to Early Miocene deep water Macigno Formation from western Tuscany, Italy. Here’s a photo: Now for the 3D model, hosted by Sketchfab; After it loads, use your mouse to grab this thing and finesse it … Read more

Sapiens, by Yuval Noah Harari

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Sapiens is one of the most fascinating books I’ve read in a long time. It was a best-seller, and the adjectives in the many reviews you can find online are all equally accurate: “highly intellectual and compulsively readable,” “encyclopedic … concise but eloquent, both skeptical and opinionated.” The book takes as its mission a survey … Read more

Soundings, by Hali Felt

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The Heezen and Tharp (1977) World Ocean Floor Panorama is an amazing map – an ideal amalgam of science and art. It is the result of a collaboration between Bruce Heezen and Marie Tharp, in conjunction with artist Heinrich Berann, made a beautiful map that brought a state-of-the-art-as-of-1978 understanding of the seafloor immediately into the … Read more

An opportunity to help in Canoa

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As I mentioned last week, I have family in one of the coastal towns in Ecuador that was hardest hit by the magnitude 7.8 earthquake the previous weekend. Don and Wendy have asked me to share this opportunity to help: The James Dean Byrd Foundation runs a school in Canoa, La Escuela Bilingue los Algarrobos, … Read more

Brachiopodapalooza via GIGAmacro

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Another week, another batch of new images produced on my home-based Magnify2 imaging system from GIGAmacro. This week, you can see that I’ve been on a real brachiopod tear – here are seven images of those two-shelled filter feeders from the Paleozoic… [gigapan id=”186440″] Link [gigapan id=”186107″] Link [gigapan id=”186379″] Link [gigapan id=”186280″] Link [gigapan … Read more