You are browsing the archive for April 2013 - Page 2 of 3 - Mountain Beltway.
16 April 2013
Squashed pillows
Join Callan for a look at submarine volcanism and later deformation near Ely, Minnesota. Archean tectonics fluffed these pillows up and squashed them down again.
15 April 2013
Boston Marathon: 17 years later, and a couple minutes
On Tuesday in 1996, I showed up very tired for my 8am paleontology class at the College of William & Mary. I had driven all night back to Williamsburg from Boston, where the day before I’d run the 100th Boston Marathon. It was my first marathon (I ran it unofficially – I was what runners call a “bandit”). It was an amazing experience to take on a run of that …
Monday macrobug: Twilight of the ladybug infestation
Spring has arrived in the Fort Valley. We went from snow and sub-freezing nights to two 80°F+ days in a row, and then throttled back to normal springtime temperatures. The pulse of heat brought about a big release of ladybugs from our walls, and at times it was as apocalyptic a scene as it was back in October and November when they swarmed all over the house, looking for a …
12 April 2013
Friday fold: Mosaic Canyon
For the Friday fold today, let’s return to the warmth of Mosaic Canyon in Death Valley National Park, California: Can you see it there? Let’s zoom in on the dark area in the middle of that first photograph…. Ahh! Now that’s a fold to end the week on! Enjoy the weekend, everyone.
10 April 2013
Primary structures in the Lake Vermilion Formation
Callan showcases some extraordinary depositional structures (graded bedding and flame structures) seen in Archean turbidites in the Superior province of northern Minnesota.
8 April 2013
Nice plume
Another scene from the South Page Valley Martinsburg outcrop featured here last week: a slightly mud-bedecked example of plumose structure. This plume occurs within a single graded bed (turbidite) of the Martinsburg Formation. It gets younger (paleo-up) to the right. The joint propagation that the plumose structure records began somewhere vertically above the area of this photo, and advanced downward, with the plumes spreading out as it grew. Note the …
6 April 2013
Mystery fossil (?) for crowd-sourced identification
A Fort Valley neighbor brought me this sample yesterday, asking me to tell her what it was. But while my brain’s pattern-recognition centers lit up when examining its “rows” of scale-like bumps, it didn’t match up with anything that I know from anywhere else here. Take a look, and click any of these images to enlarge it… The source unit is likely to be the Mahantango Formation, as that is …
5 April 2013
Friday fold: shale and sandstone from West Texas
No time for more details than that – sorry! Happy Friday and a restful weekend to all!
Two new GigaPans of Rockfish Gap, Virginia
I took a trip down to Charlottesville this week for a couple of meetings, and I made time along the way to capture two new GigaPans of the lovely exposures of Catoctin Formation greenstone at Rockfish Gap, where Interstate 64 traverses the Blue Ridge. This is very close to the southernmost tip of Shenandoah National Park, and at the northern terminus of the Blue Ridge Parkway. The Catoctin is an …
4 April 2013
Slump / earthflow at JMU campus, Harrisonburg
Yesterday I drove down I-81, through the heart of Harrisonburg, Virginia, and the campus of James Madison University. On the east side of the road, a big new slump / earthflow caught my eye. On my way back up the same stretch of road today, I pulled over and photographed it: Panorama 1 (click to enlarge: ~6000 pixels wide): Panorama 2 (click to enlarge: 10,000 pixels wide): It’s this slope …
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.