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March 23, 2015
Monday Geology Picture: Samail Ophiolite Plane View
I’m busy traveling at the moment, so Georneys will continue to be quiet for another couple of weeks. However, I thought that I’d quickly share a picture from my recent flight for this week’s “Monday Geology Picture” post. This picture shows the impressive topography of the Samail Ophiolite, which is located in northern Oman and the United Arab Emirates. An ophiolite is a section of oceanic crust and mantle that …
October 21, 2013
Monday Geology Picture: A Field Geologist’s Hotel Room
Have you ever stayed in a hotel room and packed it to the brim with camping gear and scientific equipment and samples? Then chances are you’re a field geologist! I took the above picture at a hotel in Muscat, Sultanate of Oman after 4 weeks of fieldwork in the Samail Ophiolite back in 2009. Our hotel room was packed full of camping gear, boxes of rocks and water samples, and various …
October 10, 2012
Accretionary Wedge #50: Camel Sunrise
I have the honor of hosting Accretionary Wedge #50 here at Georneys. The topic I chose for the September (Deadline: October 10th) Wedge is: Share a fun moment from geology field camp or a geology field trip. You can share a story, a picture, a song, a slogan, a page from your field notebook– anything you like! I have many fond memories from Dartmouth’s geology field camp (called “The Stretch”) in …
March 26, 2012
Monday Geology Picture: Serpentinized Harzburgite in Thin Section
For this week’s Monday Geology Picture, I thought I would share a picture of peridotite in thin section viewed under a microscope. This particular peridotite originates from the Samail Ophiolite, Sultanate of Oman, and is a weakly-deformed harzburgite that is ~40% serpentinized. You can see the fine network of serpentine veins throughout the sample. The brightly-colored patches are olivine and pyroxene minerals. I really enjoy looking at rocks in thin …
March 12, 2012
Monday Geology Picture: Listwanite Hills in the Sultanate of Oman
Today I am going to share some pictures of listwanite (also sometimes spelled listvenite, listvanite, or listwaenite), an unusual rock type that I bet even some of the well-educated geologists who read this blog have never seen or even read about. I don’t even think there’s a wikipedia entry about listwanite. Perhaps I’ll write one after my thesis defense next month. Listwanite forms when ultramafic rocks (most commonly mantle peridotites) …
March 5, 2012
Monday Geology Picture: Fossil Seashells at Barr Al-Hikman, Oman
For this week’s Monday Geology Picture post, I thought I would share some more pictures from my trip in January to Barr Al-Hikman, Oman. A few weeks ago, I posted about some crabs and their traces at Barr Al-Hikman. This week I am sharing some pictures of some large, beautiful, fossilized seashells which we observed along one of the beaches at Barr Al-Hikman. I believe that these seashell fossils formed …
February 7, 2012
More Crabs in the Sand at Barr Al-Hikman, Sultanate of Oman
My post yesterday about the crab houses in the sand at Barr Al-Hikman turned out to be quite popular, so I thought I’d share some more pictures of crabs and crab houses and other crab life traces which I observed at Barr Al-Hikman. In addition to the Ocypode saratan “ghost” crab (thanks for the identification help, Tony Martin!), I observed at least two other species of crab at Barr Al-Hikman. …
February 6, 2012
Monday Geology Picture: Crab Houses in the Sand at Barr Al-Hikman, Sultanate of Oman
Last month I participated in a three-day geology field trip to Barr Al-Hikman, a peninsula in Oman. On the peninsula there are numerous beautiful beaches and interesting geological features such as sabkhas and paleolagoons. We visited the peninsula to look at some recent carbonate deposits and also to investigate some modern beach features, such as the coral reefs located just off shore and the traces left on the beach by …
January 18, 2012
Mantle Peridotite in the Samail Ophiolite, Oman
Over the past couple of weeks, I posted pictures of pillow basalts and sheeted dikes in the Samail Ophiolite, Oman. To round out the crustal ophiolite sequence, I thought I would post a couple of pictures of mantle peridotite in the Samail Ophiolite. As you can see in the below pictures, mantle peridotite in the Samail Ophiolite is generally highly-weathered and a dullish brown color. Harzburgite tends to be a …
January 17, 2012
Sheeted Dikes in the Samail Ophiolite, Oman
Last week I posted a picture of pillow basalts in the Samail Ophiolite, Oman. I recently visited Oman for a geology conference, and I was fortunate enough to see pillow basalts and many other wonderful geological sights in the Oman mountains and beyond. When I posted the picture of pillow basalts, geoblogger Ron Schott asked if I also had some pictures of sheeted dikes with chill margins. Good news, Ron. …
