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7 September 2010
Dolly Sods
Over the long Labor Day weekend, my fiancée Lily and my friend Seth and I took a three-day backpacking trip in the Dolly Sods Wilderness area of West Virginia: Dolly Sods is a unique place, a little patch of flora that is more typical of Canada. It sits atop the eastern Continental Divide, and most of the area drains to the Gulf of Mexico via the Ohio River. Parts of …
3 September 2010
Friday fold: tight syncline in Montana
This fold is located on Highway 287, north of Wolf Creek, Montana. Annotated version: As with last week’s Friday Fold, this fold owes its existence to (a) deposition of sandstone and shale in the Western Interior Seaway, and (b) deformation under a giant thrust sheet during the thin-skinned compressional tectonics of the Sevier Orogeny. In this case, we’re south of the Lewis Thrust, and the local equivalent is called the …
2 September 2010
The Creationists by Ronald L. Numbers
Over the summer, I finished reading an excellent history of creationism called The Creationists, authored by Ronald L. Numbers. Many of my students at Northern Virginia Community College come to my geology classes from a creationist background. Some are true believers, some are looking for the perspective of science. Some are quiet about it, others flaunt it. Regardless of whether their minds are already made up or not, I deal …
1 September 2010
Another metamorphosed graded bed
Over the summer, when my blogging access was limited to my iPhone, I uploaded a photo (taken with the iPhone) of a metamorphosed graded bed on the summit of Mount Washington, New Hampshire. Here’s another one that I saw, further down on the mountain, on the Auto Road (famous for its iconic bumper sticker): Lens cap for scale. …And here’s the obligatory annotated copy: Both of these images are enlargeable …
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.