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21 May 2023
Earthquake Storms, by John Dvorak
I’ve come to the end of my run of reading John Dvorak’s geology books. This is the fourth one for me to consume, but it was apparently the first he wrote. The topic is earthquakes, specifically those that occur along the San Andreas Fault in California. I’ve read a fair bit, it feels like, about the San Andreas: Carl-Henry Geschwind’s history, Susan Hough’s books, and just yesterday I started Andrew …
26 March 2023
Bird update March 2023
Click to enlarge I’m still birding voraciously. I’m up to 89 species in my county for the year. So that means I added a dozen since last month. A few of those are freshly-arrived migrants from southerly climes, and some are just me putting in the time to go rack up waterfowl at nearby lakes. I’ve maintained my high county ranking, which has oscillated between #4 and #2 this month. …
18 September 2020
Friday fan: Death Valley, California
Working up some new images for my free, online Historical Geology textbook, I annotated a photograph I took in March of this alluvial fan in southern Death Valley. The development of desert varnish on older parts of the fan shows their age visually in a quick and easy way of determining fan deposit sequence: I’ve been making a lot of these animated annotations as a way of conserving space in …
27 March 2020
Friday fauxld: a false syncline in Titus Canyon
What day is it again? Hard to keep track in the days of raging coronavirus infections, but it is in fact Friday, which means that if you want a dose of the halcyon pre-COVID-19 days, you can enjoy this example of a false fold from Death Valley National Park’s Titus Canyon.
20 March 2020
Friday fold: more folds from lower Titus Canyon
We are living in surreal times. It hardly seems possible, but a week ago this evening, I drove down the Las Vegas strip with my students, ogling at the glitz and spectacle and crowds. Now, a mere 7 days later, Vegas has been shuttered, and it’s been shuttered for days. We traveled freely through California and now a week later, everyone in the state is ordered to stay home. What …
7 February 2020
Friday fold: Kings Canyon
The Friday fold shows disharmonic crumpling in marbles of the Boyden Cave Root Pendant in California’s Sierra Nevada. The GigaPan image displayed is part of the digital legacy of Ron Schott, who passed away a year and a half ago.
13 December 2019
Friday fold: blueschist & eclogite at Jenner, California
A pre-Fall Meeting field trip to the coast of northern California yields rare sights of garnet-bearing blueschist, plus eclogite, some pillow basalts, birds, waves, wind, and a lot of rain.
10 December 2019
‘Streetcar 2 Subduction’ is live!
This week marks the launch of a new digital revision of a field guide to the geology of San Francisco, “Streetcar 2 Subduction.” Learn more here!
22 November 2019
Friday fold: Noonday Dolomite in Mosaic Canyon
Because I’m putting together a field course for spring break 2020 to Death Valley California, I was looking through old Death Valley photos this week, from the last time I went to that special place. It was seven years ago! How time flies… This one is in Mosaic Canyon, and was taken by my student Marcelo Arispe, a talented photographer as well as a talented geologist: By the standards of …
