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11 October 2013
Friday fold: below the Dorado Thrust
Here’s a scene from last summer’s Regional Field Geology of the Northern Rockies course… students examining and sketching some tight folds in Cretaceous strata of the Western Interior Seaway, crumpled beneath the Dorado Thrust (a more southerly equivalent of the infamous Lewis Thrust to the north)… I’ve featured this site before, in a previous Friday fold. Photo courtesy of Tom Biggs, University of Virginia.
9 October 2013
The Earth Moved, by Amy Stewart
Today, I finished a book about earthworms. It wasn’t the greatest natural history book I’ve ever read, but it was the first one I’ve read specifically on the subject of worms. I’ve gotten interested in soil ecology and chemistry. Now that I own some land, I’m curious how to manage it for maximum productivity (both natural productivity / biodiversity and also crops that can feed my family). That was also …
7 October 2013
Monday macrobug: Female walking stick
Here’s a big plump female walking stick (“stick insect”) I saw last week… These bugs are all over the place right now. I frequently find them in flagrante delicto, with the smaller male mounted on the female’s back, and the tips of their abdomens pressed together.
5 October 2013
Birdprints
A long time ago, I posted here an image of an “owlprint” – the pattern of duff left on a pane of window glass when a screech owl smacked into it. We’ve had a couple of new avian impacts lately out at Fort Bentley… Here’s a clear mourning dove imprint on the upper level window glass (viewed from below, both inside and outside). No flash in either case… And here’s …
3 October 2013
Sand fom Þorlákshöfn, Iceland, under the GIGAmacro lens
I think this one of the most fascinating batches of sand we’ve yet had the pleasure of macro-GigaPanning: link So much igneous goodness hidden in those grains, collected from a beach on the south of Iceland… The image was made by Robin Rohrback-Schiavone (my student at NOVA) as part of the Mid-Atlantic Geo-Image Collection (M.A.G.I.C.). The sand sample was donated by my colleague Beth Doyle. Thanks to both of them!
1 October 2013
New macro GigaPans of sedimentary rocks from the Massanutten Synclinorium
I have two new GigaPans of hand samples to share with you this morning… The Edinburg Formation graptolites from Mint Spring, Virginia, that I featured here back in May, can now be explored in GIGAmacro hand sample: link Students: are these colonial or solitary organisms? Benthic, nektonic, or planktonic? Does this relate to their usefulness as index fossils? And here’s a graded bed from the Martinsburg Formation (Ordovician turbidites) exposed …
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.