You are browsing the archive for September 2012 - Mountain Beltway.
26 September 2012
Drumheller portrait of a field class
That’s my posse of field course students (plus co-instructor Pete Berquist, fifth from the left) at Drumheller, Alberta, in July.
24 September 2012
Monday macrobug: Mantisfly
Mantisflies: an awesome, under-appreciated family of insects. This one was on a glass sliding door on our house: I love the diversity of insects that we get around our new house.
21 September 2012
Friday folds: one from the Icefields Parkway
Limestone strata in a variety of orientations, with a nice tilted axial plane. Outcrop is on the east side of the Icefields Parkway, across from one of the many glacier overlooks. Lucy and Alex both wanted to act as sense of scale for this one… Can’t say I blame them.
20 September 2012
Pachycephalosaurs were boneheads
This is a display at the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Drumheller, Alberta: It shows the domed skull of a pachycephalosaur: And it shows a virtual cross-section through that skull, revealing the size of the brain it protects: Weird animal. Great museum display: it says it all!
18 September 2012
Stratigraphy session
What are these students up to? I’ll give you a hint: this is Dinosaur Provincial Park in the Great Plains of southern Alberta. The badlands style topography here offers a nice vertical section through clastic sedimentary rocks originally deposited adjacent to the Western Interior Seaway. On our Canadian Rockies field course in July, my co-instructor Pete Berquist (from Thomas Nelson Community College in Hampton, Virginia) led an afternoon exercise in …
17 September 2012
Monday Macrobug: spotted pine sawyer
That’s an adult Monochamus clamator, the spotted pine sawyer, a kind of longhorned beetle. This one was on my deck this morning. My, what long antennae you have! “Give me a kiss,” the beetle says…
14 September 2012
Friday fold: Siim Sepp’s SS
Geoblogger Siim Sepp contributed this lovely fold. He says: I saw a nice fold in Ireland. I like it because it looks like SS to me which are my initials. If you want, you can post it as your friday fold. I haven’t used it yet in my blog. This small outcrop is in Donegal, NW part of Ireland. I accidentally stumbled upon it. The fold formed most likely during …
11 September 2012
Colorful confluence
NASA’s Earth Observatory posted a colorful confluence image last Thursday, and it reminded me that I have a similar site of my own to share. This is on the Icefields Parkway, north of the Athabasca Glacier and Snow Dome, a hydrological drainage triple point. Here, we’re a short distance into the Arctic Ocean drainage. (West of Snow Dome, the rivers drain to the Pacific; southeast of it, they drain to …
10 September 2012
New GigaPans: Red hole, Blue hole
Last Thursday, I shot a few GigaPans of moderately-dipping quartz sandstone layers (the Silurian-aged Massanutten Formation) in the creek a few miles from my house. All four GigaPans are at popular local swimming holes. The first three are from Red Hole, and the last one is from Blue Hole. Check them out: link link link link Explore here on the webpage, or click through to “visit” Passage Creek full screen.
8 September 2012
Yard bird
We had a turkey in the yard this week: Pretty cool. These photos were taken from my “office” on the second floor of our house, through the window overlooking the front “yard.” I saw a flock of about 15 individual turkeys strutting through a neighbor’s field last week, too. I love living out here in the Fort.
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.