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In which I am eaten by a stromatolitic Pac-Man
Let this be a lesson to you, kids. Don’t get too close to wild stromatolites, even if they are Mesoproterozoic… These exceptionally large stromatolites are on the threshold of the Grinnell Glacier, in Glacier National Park, Montana. No stromatolites or geologists were harmed during the production of this blog post. Photos by NOVA Rockies student Filip Goc.
17 August 2010
What'soup?
Check out this selection of fine soups, as displayed at the front of a restaurant (that we bypassed) in Pamukkale, Turkey: Close-ups that may be easier to read: Bon Appétit!
16 August 2010
How to prep your pocket fold
“Pocket folds,” as my Rockies co-instructor Pete Berquist has defined them, are rock samples exhibiting folds that are small enough to stick in your pocket (and take back to your lab). Here’s a pocket fold that I found last week in the White Mountains of New Hampshire: I brought it home, and today I unpacked it from the car, along with about 70 pounds of other samples. I turned on …
Pine Marten, Adirondacks
Hello everyone, I’m back in my office after 7 weeks away. I had some great travels this summer, to Turkey, Montana, and New England… and great geological photos to share from each of those locations. I’m going to start off with something non-geological, though: something furry and alive! That, my friends, is a pine marten, a smaller relative of the fisher (“fisher cat,” in the local parlance) and a member …
10 August 2010
Metamorphosed graded bed
This is the coolest thing I’ve seen this week: a graded bed metamorphosed via Acadian mountain building: The graded bed starts at the Swiss army knife at left, where you see an abrupt transition between coarse grained metamorphic porphyroblasts (“pseudo-andalusites”) and finer grained quartzite. This was once a mud to sand transition when these were loose sediments in the Kronos Sea, but with elevated temperature and pressure, the clay minerals …
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.