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6 November 2015
Friday fold: ptygmatic in northern India
Another image from northern India’s Himalayas, courtesy of Martin Schmidt: The “intestine-like” aspect of this fold has a descriptive adjective in geology: ptygmatic. Gorgeous! Thanks for sharing, Martin. Happy Friday!
30 October 2015
Friday fold: Himalayas, northern India
My colleague Martin Schmidt of the McDonogh School, who I know through the National Association of Geoscience Teachers eastern section, recently shared a bunch of fold photos with me. They have a “dated” feel because they were originally shot on slide film, but the folds themselves of course are timeless. I’ll be featuring a bunch of them here in the weeks to come. Here’s a scene Martin captured in northern …
17 March 2012
Lageson goes up
One of Callan’s former advisers, Dave Lageson of Montana State University, heads to the summit of the world’s tallest mountain with his graduate student, the accomplished mountaineer Conrad Anker.
25 August 2010
Jointed Virgelle
One of the stops my Rockies students and I made this summer was a dinosaur paleontology tour through the Two Medicine Dinosaur Center in Bynum, Montana. The folks there are very accommodating, and at my request gave the class a bit of stratigraphic context for the dinosaur fossils. For instance, we visited the geologic formation which underlies the dinosaur-bearing Two Medicine Formation: it’s a beach sandstone called the Virgelle Formation. …
24 February 2010
Snowy décollement
Earlier in the month, during the big snowstorms, my window got plastered with snow. This snow formed a vertical layer which then deformed under the influence of gravity. Looking at it through the glass, I was struck by how it could serve as a miniature analogue for the deformation typical of a mountain belt. Let’s start our discussion by taking a look at an iPhone photograph of the snow: So …
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.