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7 September 2013
Monday macrobug: Colonial spiders at the Fort Valley Library
I volunteer on Wednesdays at the Fort Valley Public Library. We have some bushes out front, and in the past month, I’ve noticed something about the bush closest to the library door… It’s having some trouble, and the trouble seems to be coming from… (( brace yourself )) … a colony of spiders! You’re seeing a single giant dense web there, occupied by many many individual spiders, and full of …
6 September 2013
Friday fold: Kananaskis Trail, Alberta
The Friday fold returns to Canada this week, with a look at an internally crumpled mountain along Alberta’s Kananaskis Trail…
5 September 2013
Strained stylolites at Foamhenge
One thing that’s 100% worth doing if you find yourself visiting Natural Bridge, Virginia, is to pop in for a visit at Foamhenge, an art installation a few miles away. Foamhenge is a full-scale replica of Stonehenge, made of styrofoam (covered in gray latex paint). It’s a few years old now, so it’s begun to weather a bit: You’ll notice that classic orange soil and that there are also outcrops …
4 September 2013
Granite balls, boudins, and tadpoles in Archean schist, Laramie Range, Wyoming
A final post from my visit to the Laramie Range with Bob Bauer and Fred McLaughlin earlier in the summer -Recall that there is schist and granite at this site, and much of the granite shows cross-cutting or inclusive relationships indicating it is younger than the schist, while still younger mafic dikes cross-cut than the granite. Both exhibited folding. However, in other places, we observed the opposite: granite inclusions within …
3 September 2013
A new outcrop of Catoctin meta- volcanic breccia
Lily and I took our son to the Virginia Scottish Games on Sunday. This is an annual competition of events in traditionally Scottish feats – throwing heavy things, mainly. There is also fried food, whisky, and some terrific music. The event is held at the Great Meadow, south of The Plains, Virginia. I had never been there before – it’s a site often used for horsey sorts of events, and …
2 September 2013
Monday macrobug: Antlion pits
In areas of soil protected from the rain, we find antlion pits in our yard… These are traps, dug and maintained and occupied by the larvae of the family Myrmeleontidae. When a passing insect stumbles in, the antlion will throw sand grains and cause the hapless bug to tumble down, where the antlion snags it with a monstrous pair of jaws, and eats it. The adults look like your standard …
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.