You are browsing the archive for December 2011 - Mountain Beltway.
23 December 2011
Friday fold: a wrinkled mountain in Hermanus
While I was away in South Africa, both Brian Romans of Clastic Detritus and Evelyn Mervine of Georneys posted pictures of folds in quartzite of the Cape Fold Belt in southern South Africa. Well, I’m not going to be left out. Here’s a belated Friday fold for December 23, showing a bunch of sweet folds in a mountain just east of the coastal whale-watching town of Hermanus: Zooming in: And …
22 December 2011
Virtual sample gigapan #1: pyrolusite dendrites on limestone
With my new “macrogigapan” rig from Four Chambers Studio, I produced this image last week before I left on vacation: That sample measures 18.5 cm long, and is about 4.9 cm wide. Pretty good resolution, eh?
20 December 2011
Video book review: “Smithsonian Institution Secretary, Charles Doolittle Walcott”
Here’s where to get yourself a copy: Smithsonian Institution Secretary, Charles Doolittle Walcott My visit to Walcott’s grave (alluded to in the video) is here. [youtube=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=armXHEa4PGo”]
19 December 2011
Video book review: cartoon books
A brief video review of two books presented in a cartoon format: Feynman, by Jim Ottaviani and Leland Myrick The Book of Genesis Illustrated, by R. Crumb [youtube=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tsbcS2_ZAhg”]
16 December 2011
Friday fold: granitoid wiggles
Another Friday fold from the pre-GSA Superior Craton field trip: Happy Friday. I’m setting this to auto-post on the day that my wife and I arrive in Johannesburg to start our honeymoon. I hope everyone’s doing well in my absence.
14 December 2011
Aligned tourmalines
…in an Archean schist within the Superior Craton. Same outcrop as the criss-crossing dikes I showed yesterday. We’ve got tourmalines on the plane of foliation in the Setters Schist in Maryland, too, but they aren’t aligned like these Canadian tourmalines; instead the Maryland ones are scattered willy-nilly across the plane of foliation, like pencils on a desktop.
13 December 2011
Dikes crossing dikes
A pretty cool outcrop I saw on my pre-GSA structural geology field trip to the Superior Craton: Can you see what caught my eye here? It’s a nice series of cross-cutting relationships. A series of sedimentary rocks were sheared out and metamorphosed, transforming into schists with internal boudins, and then they were cross-cut by first a felsic dike, and then a mafic dike, as seen in this modified version of …
12 December 2011
Upcoming plans
A heads-up: I’m leaving Wednesday afternoon for a 3 week trip to South Africa. My wife Lily and I are off on our half-year-delayed honeymoon (to be distinguished from our Canadian Rockies pre-honeymoon last summer mainly by its exorbitant cost and low levels of geology). We will be spending the day in downtown London, England, on Thursday, and then we’ll get to Johannesburg on Friday morning. The plan is to …
11 December 2011
Just the thing for a winter day on the east coast…
… a brief glimpse of summer in the Rockies: [youtube=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hbRx7W1nYUk”] Footage shot south of Blacktail Butte, in Jackson Hole, looking west towards the Teton Range, in Wyoming. July 2011. Gros Ventre River terrace in the mid-ground.
9 December 2011
Friday fold: crumpled & faulted Brallier
The Friday fold is found on a newly-opened section of road in West Virginia. Join Callan in checking out some synclines and associated faults in the Devonian-aged Brallier Formation.
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.