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18 May 2008
New York Geology: Day 2
In an earlier post, I shared some pictures and interpretations from the first day of a two-day whirlwind tour of New York geology. Now without further ado is day 2! Our first stop on Day two was Stark’s Knob, a tall outcrop of basaltic rock jutting out of the middle of an otherwise unremarkable bit of New York countryside. The basalt is in the form of rounded blobs or “pillows”, …
14 May 2008
New York Geology Trip: Day 1
Over the weekend I went on a joint Astronomy/Geology department field trip to visit some cool geologic sites in eastern New York state. As a planetary scientist, it is good to sometimes go out and actually, you know, study an actual planet. I will do my best to describe some of the sights here, but I’m afraid my field geology skills are lacking so I won’t nearly do the locations …
7 March 2008
How old is the Grand Canyon? The speleologist knows…
I learned a new word in Science this week: Speleology: the study or exploration of caves. Think “spelunking.” The word was in an article by UNM geologists Polyak et al. on a new age estimate of the Grand Canyon. For many years now, geologists have estimated the formation time of the Canyon at around 6 million years. The new study puts the age at close to 20 million. This may …
