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17 November 2023

Friday fold: Floor paver in the Atlanta airport

On my way back to Virginia from Hawaii, I had a three hour layover in the Atlanta airport. There, I spotted this charismatic stone paver on on the terminal floor. It showed folds, and so I snapped a photo, but it also shows plenty more… An annotated copy: Happy Friday, all!

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15 September 2023

Friday fold: Candler Formation

On a birding hike yesterday morning, I found this: This is a little slab of kinked phyllite of the Candler Formation. This metamorphic rock started as mud (and ash) deposited atop the Catoctin Formation, and it was later squeezed and heated during Appalachian mountain-building, encouraging the growth of micas at the expense of clay. A strong differential stress made sure those micas grew in one preferred orientation, and that resulted …

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8 August 2023

Three new videos from Montana

I spent several enjoyable weeks in Montana last month, and shot some new video content there for my YouTube channel. Here are three videos that may be of interest to readers of this blog:

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28 July 2023

Friday fold/fauxld duet from Glacier National Park

When is an apparent anticline not an fold? Find out on this week’s edition of the Friday Fold…

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30 June 2023

Friday fold: Wissahickon block

Click to enlarge I’m writing this on the Amtrak train from New York back to Charlottesville, traveling (again) under orange-hazy skies due to Canadian wildfire smoke. I took my son to Manhattan for a concert, and we stopped off en route for an overnight in Philadelphia, visiting a former student of mine who’s now an assistant professor of geology at Rowan University in New Jersey. While walking around Philly, I …

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9 June 2023

Friday fold: Pleasant Grove Park

Happy Friday, friends. Here’s a rock sample that I recently polished up: It shows crenulations in “pinstriped” schist of the western Piedmont in Pleasant Grove Park in Fluvanna County, mapped as the Mine Run Complex. Lovely stuff, eh?

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17 March 2023

Friday fold: Pinto Gneiss, varnished and un-

Last week, I was lucky enough to visit Pushawalla Canyon in the Indio Hills region of southern California. There, my colleague Kim Blisniuk (San Jose State University) led our students through an exercise mapping alluvial deposits as a way of constraining offsets along the Mission Canyon strand of the San Andreas Fault. I noted that much of the alluvium was sourced to the northeast, to the Little San Bernardino Mountains. …

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10 March 2023

Friday fold: Painted Canyon

Greetings from southern California! I’m running a spring break field course in the Mojave and Colorado desert. Here’s a pretty amazing fold pair in Palm Springs Formation, butted up against (darker) Mecca Formation along a fault. This is in Painted Canyon, in the Mecca Hills, a transpressional pop-up between the Painted Canyon Fault and the San Andreas Fault. Happy Friday!

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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 …

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3 February 2023

Friday fold: Kyanite quartzite

A return to the “video Friday fold” format:

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