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8 December 2011
Currents in the Devonian deep
This blog has been noticeably photo deficient lately! Time to remedy that. Today, I offer you a couple of shots of the Brallier Formation (shale / fine-grained sandstone) in West Virginia’s Valley & Ridge province, a few miles northwest of Moorefield, on the newly-opened section of New Route 55. The Brallier was deposited in a deep, low-oxygen portion of the epeiric Kaskaskia Sea. Flute casts: Cross-bedding: These sedimentary rocks were …
6 December 2011
AGU 2011, day 2
In the interest of conveying a sense of the sort of stuff that goes on a large science conference like the AGU Fall Meeting, I’ll resume my narrative where I left off with yesterday’s description. I began by swinging by the press room where I grabbed a complimentary breakfast, then headed down to the “early earth” session where I got a review on zircons of Hadean and Archean age. Then …
5 December 2011
AGU 2011, day 1
I got to San Francisco on Saturday afternoon, flying in on the same flight from DC as Rob Simmon and Maria-José Viñas. MJ and I took the BART downtown, and then met up with Jess Ball for Thai dinner and a yummy dessert of banana wrapped in roti with Nutella and coconut ice cream. Then, jet lag informing me it was time for rest, I went to bed. I had …
2 December 2011
ACM
From “Volcanic Versus Anthropogenic Carbon Dioxide” by Terry Gerlach in the June 14, 2011 issue of EOS: Human activities emit ~135 times as much carbon dioxide as the world’s volcanoes? Holy cow.
Friday folds (and boudinage): Superior Craton day 3, stop 1
Today the Friday fold comes with copious bonus structures. It’s the first stop we hit on Day 3 of the pre-GSA Minneapolis field trip to examine the structural geology of the subprovince boundaries within the Superior Craton. This particular site showed granitoid dikes that had been deformed during dextral transpression into a variety of structures depending on their initial orientation, pre-deformation. Those with orientations parallel to the maximum extension direction …
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.