Friday fold: Folded Mountains Ale
My friend Eric Pyle drew my attention to this ale earlier in the week – I reckon that will do for this week’s Friday fold. Cheers! And Happy New Year!
2015 Yard List
It’s that time of the year – a time to state my “yard list” tally for the previous year. I have been posting this list every year since I moved to the Fort Valley: 2012 (39 species) 2013 (51 species) 2014 (58 species) In 2015, we had 65 species of birds spotted and definitively identified … Read more
Serpentinite mélange on Marshall’s Beach
South of the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, there are beachside exposures of serpentinite mélange: tectonically sheared-out former oceanic crust accreted to western North America as part of an accretionary wedge.
Corona Heights Fault, San Francisco
At the end of the AGU Fall meeting, Callan visits the Corona Heights “mirror” fault, renowned for its gorgeous slickensides. Explore the site in photos in GigaPans.
Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies, by Nick Bostrom
How much thought have you given to the consequences of achieving an non-biological intelligence? If you’re like me, you’ve thought about the notion in a Hollywoodized sense, but once you get out of the cinema showing the latest Terminator film, you might not dwell on the topic too much further. I’ve given artificial intelligence (AI) … Read more
Cryptonomicon, by Neal Stephenson
Because I was impressed with Seveneves, I decided to make my next read another novel by Neal Stephenson. There are several highly-praised options to choose from, but the one that came to hand first in the library was 1999’s Cryptonomicon. It’s a monster of a tome, clocking in at just over 900 pages, which is … Read more
Four new GIGAmacro images of sedimentary rocks
It’s been a week and a half since Mountain Beltway has seen any publishing action, given the overlapping timesucks of the AGU Fall Meeting and the end of the semester. But now I’m back in the Appalachian mountain belt, and my grades are all in, and I have time to think about indulgences like blogging … Read more
Friday fold: Nice gneiss from Salt Lake, Utah
Another guest Friday fold… this one from my colleague Tiffany Rivera of Westminster College in Salt Lake City, Utah, the one who brought you yesterday’s thrombolite pictures… Tiffany writes that these shots come from a man-made boulder field / berm along the lake. The boulders were these beautifully folded gneisses. Antelope Island exposes some of … Read more
Thrombolites of the Great Salt Lake, Utah
I saw mention of thrombolites exposed along the shore of Antelope Island in the Great Salt Lake the other day in my Facebook feed; because the description cited a professor at Westminster College in Salt Lake City, I prompted my friend and colleague Tiffany Rivera, also a geology professor at Westminster, to go check it … Read more
Considering the Spechty Kopf diamictite
I have known for a long time about a diamictite in the latest Devonian part of the Appalachian stratigraphic sequence, since it is exposed in the lowermost part of the section (western end of the outcrop) at Sideling Hill, Maryland. When I led field trips there, I talked students through the multiple possible origins for … Read more