You are browsing the archive for September 2016 - Mountain Beltway.
30 September 2016
Friday fold: Torqued talc from the 2016 Biggs awardee
Callan’s colleague Joshua Villalobos won the 2016 Biggs Award. He also makes GigaPans of folds, like these talc-bearing rocks of the Allamoore Formation.
28 September 2016
Virginia Museum of Natural History specimens in GIGAmacro view
One of the small sub-projects of my 2015-2017 Chancellor’s Commonwealth Professorship is to create some GIGAmacro images of cool fossil specimens from the Virginia Museum of Natural History in Martinsville. Curator of paleontology Alex Hastings was good enough to loan us a few specimens to image, and hopefully there will soon be more where they came from. Here are three examples: a fossil plant, and two fossil vertebrates: Strobilus cone …
24 September 2016
The Age of American Unreason, by Susan Jacoby
I probably should have read this book eight years ago when it was first published, but somehow I missed it then. I recently heard the author, Susan Jacoby, on the podcast Point of Inquiry, and was impressed at the cannon of works she had produced. The current U.S. election cycle has spurred me to think more than I usually do about what constitutes rational thought, and why it seems to …
23 September 2016
Friday fold: Shetland geopark rock wall at Northmavine
Can a Friday fold be a work of art as well as a source of geologic insight? The answer can be found as you enter Shetland’s Northmavine region.
22 September 2016
Eyes on some augens in a nice gneiss
Take a look at these gorgeous exposures of augen gneiss in eastern “mainland” Shetland, U.K. Includes 3 GigaPans of the site.
21 September 2016
Stađarbjargavík
Based on this photo, what do you think Stađarbjargavík might have to offer? If you guessed columnar jointing in basalt, you’d be right! Looking down the fjord, south of Hofsós (in Iceland): The place is basically a series of miniature Giant’s Causeways, full of unpopulated exemplars of cooling columns! Little coves separate the small peninsulas, each filled with rounded column bits: Here’s a spot where one more is about to …
20 September 2016
A virtual field trip to examine the Peninsula Sandstone on Table Mountain
Take a virtual field trip to Table Mountain, near Cape Town, South Africa. Digital media to explore from the site include: a 3D model, 3 GigaPans, and a 360° spherical photo!
19 September 2016
Geopoetry: a short recounting of Virginia’s long history
…And now for something completely different! This past weekend, my family gathered in Capon Springs, West Virginia, to celebrate my mother’s 70th birthday. She asked for an unusual birthday gift – an original poem from each member of the family. Writing poetry isn’t something most of us do, but my mom was an English teacher in her career, and poetry is important to her. Collectively, we acquiesced and set our …
16 September 2016
Friday fold: Centenary migmatite
The Friday fold is a guest submission from Bill Burton, who took the photo of these lovely ptygmatic folds in migmatite in a national park on the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Park Service.
15 September 2016
Pillow basalts from eastern Washington: a 3D model
Since I showed off some Icelandic pillow basalts yesterday, today I thought I would showcase a new 3D model of big pillows in Columbia River basalt of eastern Washington, taken from a photo set I made when I was out there in May:
Callan Bentley is Associate Professor of Geology at Piedmont Virginia Community College in Charlottesville, Virginia. He is a Fellow of the Geological Society of America. For his work on this blog, the National Association of Geoscience Teachers recognized him with the James Shea Award. He has also won the Outstanding Faculty Award from the State Council on Higher Education in Virginia, and the Biggs Award for Excellence in Geoscience Teaching from the Geoscience Education Division of the Geological Society of America. In previous years, Callan served as a contributing editor at EARTH magazine, President of the Geological Society of Washington and President the Geo2YC division of NAGT.