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17 August 2012
Friday fold: soft sed def in Kodiak
The Friday fold is a seaside outcrop of soft sediment deformation (not post-lithification tectonic deformation) on Kodiak Island, Alaska.
New macrobugs from the Bentley farm
It’s been a while since I’ve posted a “macrobug” photo. So here’s two for you: a harvestman (“daddy longlegs”), and a pelecinid wasp:
Guest post: Turtle Mountain and the infamous Frank Slide
A guest post by Nicholas Rossi, a student in Callan’s Canadian Rockies field course. Turtle Mountain is located in the Blairmore Range in Alberta Canada about 160km south of Calgary. It is the site of the Frank Slide, a landslide of over 90 million tons of rock that gave way on Turtle Mountain’s East side and covered part of the small coal mining town of Frank in about 100 seconds! …
16 August 2012
Bearpaw bivalves
Cretaceous clams from the final big transgression of the Western Interior Seaway, the “Bearpaw Sea”: We saw these last month at Devil’s Coulee in southern Alberta. They’re big!
14 August 2012
My new favorite pater noster lake photo
Photo by Stephen Smith Alderson / Carthew lakes / summit area, depending on who you ask. Waterton Lakes National Park, Alberta.
13 August 2012
Class portrait at the Walcott Quarry
Here’s my crew from July’s Regional Field Geology of the Canadian Rockies course, checking out the Burgess Shale at the Walcott Quarry in Yoho National Park. A couple of the locals joined us for this portrait. Original photo courtesy of Stephen Smith, modified by CB
10 August 2012
Friday fold: Kinked limestone laminae, Consolation Lakes
The Friday fold is a kink fold in thinly-laminated limestone from the same site as yesterday’s mysterious orange oncoids.
9 August 2012
Orange oncolites from Consolation Lakes
Callan presents a mystery rock found in blocks of sedimentary rock on a talus slope near the Consolation Lakes in Banff National Park, Alberta. Are they orange oncolites? Or alien embryos? 🙂
8 August 2012
Armored mud balls
Ever seen an armored mud ball? In this post, Callan encounters a small herd of these geological oddities in a coulee in southern Alberta.
What those geologists were looking at
Yesterday, I showed you a scene of geologists (including me) clustered around some (presumably interesting) outcrop. I asked what you thought we might be looking at. Howard Allen, a denizen of this part of the globe, immediately identified the scene as that of the downstream end of the Athabasca Glacier. Several people guessed that we were looking at “glacial striations,” and that’s a good guess. Indeed there were plenty of …
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.