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You are browsing the archive for December 2012 - Page 2 of 3 - Mountain Beltway.

17 December 2012

Another five days until nothing much happens

Here we go again. Another warning of an apocalypse that won’t happen. Thank goodness Erik already covered why the world won’t end this weekend, so I don’t have to be bothered writing it up. Want to hear about the “Mayan Apocalypse” from Mayans? Try this discussion at the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian. Not only is the idea of a Mayan doomsday scientifically unsound, it doesn’t accord with …

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Monday macrobug: Lovecraftian larva

This maggot, with his prominent segmentation and his contrasting armor plates, reminded me of something in an H.P. Lovecraft story: Cool. And “ewww.”

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14 December 2012

Friday fold: the folded xenoliths of Duck Creek

On Duck Creek (Ellendale, NC quadrangle), you can see folded xenoliths within the Toluca Granite (383 Ma, 378 Ma, or 368 Ma, depending on which mineral you ask). The granite there contains xenoliths that contain pre-exisiting fabrics and structures, and we stopped at Duck Creek on the pre-GSA-Charlotte field trip I took to the Neoacadian Inner Piedmont to check out these xenoliths. Here are some less impressive xenoliths, strung out …

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13 December 2012

When a batfly is really a deer ked

Monday I posted photos of what I had thought was a batfly, but I was wrong. A skeptical reader forwarded a link to the post to an actual entomologist, and he said “Nope, that’s no batfly.” I was right about it being parasitic, but the host is more likely deer (which we have in abundance in the tall grass on our land) rather than bats. It’s called a “deer ked.” …

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“The evolution of creationism,” by David Montgomery

The cover story in the November issue of GSA Today was by David Montgomery, MacArthur “genius” award winner and author of Dirt. Montgomery has a new book out on creationism and “flood geology,” and the article is a précis of the historical roots of creationism that appears in that book. The article is titled “The Evolution of Creationism,” and the book it’s derived from is The Rocks Don’t Lie. I’ve …

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12 December 2012

Fault in the Boulder Batholith

Last week, we took a closer look at the xenoliths (MME’s?) in the Boulder Batholith. Here is a look at a fracture, perhaps a small fault, in that same outcrop. There are no marker units by which we could detect offset here, so we can’t say for sure it’s a fault. But definitely weathering has been strongly enchanced along the trace of this planar feature.

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11 December 2012

Why Geology Matters, by Doug MacDougall

Callan reviews a new book by Doug Macdougall: “Why Geology Matters.”

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10 December 2012

Monday macrobug: Batfly!!

UPDATE: This isn’t really a bat fly. It’s a deer ked. Back in October, I was weed-whacking in the yard, cutting down some 1-meter-tall grass and then picking up bundles of the fallen grass to put on our compost pile. I was out in the yard doing this for about an hour, then I came inside to have dinner with Lily and Baxter. Halfway through dinner, I felt something crawling …

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7 December 2012

Friday fold: Pakistani Perplexity

In last week’s Friday fold, I featured this image… …which prompted commenter Lynn David to ask, What’s going on to the west side of that red/green rock cored syncline in #2? It looks like some sort of disconformity but then I looked closer (and man, does that rock redden up) and it appears that the synclinal axis suddenly gets smashed up against “something” – possibly a fault of a different …

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6 December 2012

More xenoliths from the Boulder Batholith

The week before last, I showed you the Boulder Batholith, as it crops out southeast of Butte, Montana. Today, I’ll share a few more photos of xenoliths (or perhaps microgranular mafic enclaves?) from that same outcrop: Man, I miss that old Swiss Army knife. The damned security actors at Calgary Airport confiscated it last summer. 🙁

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