You are browsing the archive for August 2010 - Mountain Beltway.
28 August 2010
Traffic along Kennedy Boulevard, Istanbul
Another animated GIF, this one showing the ancient defensive walls that bound old town Istanbul (which is old town Constantinople, which is old town Byzantium), now ringed by a freeway and then the rip-rap-covered shore of the Bosphorus: There’s a paved walking path between the freeway and the shore; that’s where I was standing to take these photos. Here’s about where the photos that make up this GIF were taken. …
26 August 2010
Field gear that I loved this summer
Here’s some stuff that I used this summer and found to be awesome and well worth investing in. MSR WindPro camp stove – Unlike most MSR isopro stoves, where the stove screws on top of the squat fuel canister, in this one, there is a little hose that connects the two, side by side. This means it’s MUCH more stable. Having a campstove that’s not tippy is super important — …
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 August 2010
Tipping your tension gash
Tension gashes are small veins that open up when rocks get stretched. Often, they are arrayed en echelon with respect to other tension gashes, all oriented in the same direction. Here is a sample of tension gashes I found this summer in rip-rap (i.e., not in situ) at some building site in New England. (I forget where, but it doesn’t matter, since it’s rip-rap. Could have come from anywhere!) Check …
23 August 2010
Rocks of Glacier National Park
This is the second of my Rockies course student projects that I wanted to share here on the blog: it is a guest post by Filip Goc. Enjoy! -CB —————————————————————————– The Rocks around Glacier National Park, Montana: Introduction to the formations The geology around Glacier National Park is great for beginners because the area is structurally straightforward and formations are generally easy to distinguish. Still, there is a lot to …
22 August 2010
Geology of Massanutten Mountain, Virginia
Here’s a new video from Greg Willis, the same guy who brought us a fine video on Piedmont geology. In this new opus (20 minutes), Greg details the geology of the Massanutten Synclinorium (Shenandoah Valley, Massanutten Mountain, and Fort Valley) in western Virginia. WordPress isn’t letting me embed it here, but you should go and check it out!
21 August 2010
Volcanic features of the Rockies trip
This weekend, I wanted to share some of the best work from this year’s Rockies field course students. Let’s start with a nice video by Marcelo Arispe: I thought this was a really nice job making a video using still images and a voiceover. The only thing I would change would be in the Gallatin Range basalt column discussion: cooling lava loses volume, not mass. Nice work, Marcelo!
20 August 2010
The Purgatory Conglomerate
After my thesis defense at the University of Maryland, my mentor and friend E-an Zen asked me if I had ever heard of the Purgatory Conglomerate. I had not. Over the years, E-an has been a great source of new ideas and information to me, and so when he raises a notion, I pay attention. In my thesis, I had done some strain analysis on volcanic clasts in a meta-ignimbrite …
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.