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16 November 2011
Labradorite is mineral du jour
Other members of the geoblogosphere have been posting brief image-heavy missives on labradorite over the past 24 hours. Collectively, they remind me that I’ve got a backlog of photos from the Adirondacks of upstate New York to share. Here are a few scans of cut and polished cobbles of the anorthosite from the Adirondack Massif, including bluish crystals of labradorite. What I find most lovely about these, though, is not …
Vesicle-rich layering in Catoctin Formation
I saw this boulder lining a garden this past weekend down in Nellysford, Virginia, in the scenic valley of the Rockfish River draining the eastern slope of the Blue Ridge. It’s a piece of the Neoproterozoic-aged Catoctin Formation, a series of lava flows and associated rocks that erupted on the breakup of the early supercontinent Rodinia and the subsequent opening of the Iapetus Ocean basin. The white “polka dots” are …