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10 February 2023
Friday fold: Kelvin-Helmholtz waves in granite?
Reader Christian Gronau returns with another “guest Friday fold” submission. Christian writes, Greetings from a cold and wet west coast. A good time to root through old rock samples – and let the imagination run free … The little compilation below strikes me as visually compelling (both photographs are mine) – but how likely is it that the suggested analogy has any merit ? Would it have some …
5 June 2020
Friday fold: Harbledown Island
Reader Christian Gronau writes with this Friday fold contribution: Greetings from Cortes Island, BC – at the opposite end of the Strait vis-a-vis Lopez Island. Your Mountain Beltway blog is always of interest, and I have been following it for several years by now. Thank you for putting the effort into this worthwhile website. Quite regularly your posts elicit “echoes” and make me go back to some of my own …
16 August 2019
Friday fold: near Mistaya Lodge in the Canadian Rockies
Quick, awesome Friday fold here from the Canadian Rockies and Maggie Romuld: Maggie also posted another intriguing image of her hiking in the Canadian Rockies – and set geoTwitter abuzz with a discussion of whether she had captured load casts bulging out of the bottom side of a bed or stromatolites projecting upward from the top of a bed. Have a look & read the ensuing discussion here. Happy Friday!
22 August 2018
Q&A, episode 5
A reader asks: “What is foliation and what makes it so important to the structure of rock?”
Callan answers with a lot of images of beautifully foliated rocks.
5 May 2017
Friday fold: sea monster in stone
It’s Friday, the end of the workweek, but also the beginning of the celebration of folded rocks. Examine a particularly sinuous example from the buckled Cambrian limestones of Canada’s Kootenay National Park.
3 March 2015
Ichnofossils in Gog quartzite
At the Spiral Tunnels overlook on the Trans-Canada Highway, you can look at trains. Or, you can check out some lovely trace fossils in boulders which divide the viewing area from the highway: These are in the Gog Formation, a Cambrian-aged quartz arenite, mostly fused to quartzite nowadays… I know which subject I would choose to spend my time looking at…
26 December 2014
Friday fold: another gem from the Chancellor Slate
That pretty much speaks for itself, I reckon.
29 October 2014
A beefy stylolite
I saw this large, chunky stylolite this summer somewhere along the trail from Takkakaw Falls to the Walcott Quarry of the Burgess Shale (in Yoho National Park, British Columbia). I like the way weathering has highlighted its form.
26 October 2014
Bedding / cleavage relations in the Stephen Formation, Yoho NP
Good afternoon! Here are a few photos, both plain and annotated, showing the relationship between primary sedimentary bedding and tectonic cleavage in the “tectonised Stephen” Formation atop the Cathedral Escarpment (in Yoho National Park), just northeast of the Walcott Quarry where the (thicker, basinward) Stephen Formation hosts the Burgess Shale. Weathering exploits both these planes of weakness… Here, the cleavage is more planar at the bottom of the sample, and …
24 October 2014
Friday fold: Three more from the Chancellor Slate
Remember our examination of buckle folding versus passive folding in the Chancellor Slate (cleaved limy mudrock) of eastern British Columbia? Well, here’s another example: There’s so much awesomeness going on in that image, it’s hard to know where to start. The prominent black thin layers are buckled in a very boxy, asymmetric way. In places, the layer is discontinuous, suggesting faulting or shortening via pressure solution. Note how the cleavage …
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.