Another year, another batch of student projects from my Rockies field course, each intended to elucidate some aspect of the geology of the Montana / Wyoming Rocky Mountains for the general public: Geology of Grand Teton National Park (Marcell) Tilted glaciolacustrine beds near Glacier National Park (James) Blog on various aspects of the field course’s … Read more
As longtime readers know, late summer is when my Rockies students submit their final projects – web-based explanations of key geologic sites they examined during the trip. Today, I offer you a guest blog post by student John Leaming. You’ll notice that I’m not *completely* absent from the post, however – I make a couple … Read more
Yesterday, I posted a panorama and asked you what you saw. Responses offered as comments on the blog were modest, but there was more activity on Twitter: Here are those responses: @theAGU @callanbentley I see some really cool layering of rocks. I wish I knew more about geology. — Justin Shinohara (@JustinShinohara) August 11, 2015 … Read more
Click to enlarge Noodle on that for a minute. I’ll post my answer later. No hints for now. Just examine what you see in the outcrop.
I got horrible news yesterday. One of my favorite students committed suicide Saturday night. Ernie was a participant in last year’s Border to Beltway field exchange. He was a student at El Paso Community College, and was an enthusiastic participant in both phases of that program (a week in spring in West Texas, a week … Read more
What is Matt looking at here? Matt was one of my Rockies students this summer, a geology major at the University of Virginia. Together with another UVA student and students from Mary Washington University and George Mason University, Matt embarked on a mountain-climbing hike during our evening camping at Swift Dam, near Depuyer, Montana. The … Read more
An outcrop of Silurian-aged Rose Hill Formation in West Virginia reveals excellent examples of ripple marks and trace fossils.
As part of my work on the GEODE project, I’m always looking for good imagery to teach key concepts in geoscience. One important concept that I’ve been thinking about lately is the principle of relative dating on the basis of inclusions. Just as you can’t bake a loaf of raisin bread without already having raisins … Read more
Some time ago, I featured as Friday fold the extraordinarily complex duplex structure to be seen in the Cretaceous “gastropod limestone” member of the Kootenai Formation at Sandy Hollow, Montana. Today, let’s take a deeper look through a couple of hand-shot GigaPan images: Here’s the bigger of the two: [gigapan id=”176119″] link Here’s one with … Read more
My favorite place to have lunch in Montana is at the Grinnell Glacier cirque in Glacier National Park. This is the dining room table: You’re looking at a bedding-plane-parallel exposure of Mesoproterozoic stromatolites here. Every few years, I’m lucky enough to hike up there with motivated students and share food atop this unparalleled view into … Read more