You are browsing the archive for June 2014 - Page 2 of 2 - Mountain Beltway.
9 June 2014
The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, by Bill Bryson
Bill Bryson is a very fun writer. Like many people, I first dipped into his oeuvre when he published his book about hiking the Appalachian Trail. Though I bruised my ribs laughing as hard as I did, I went back and read many of his other books – about traveling in Australia, or the UK. The one that totally knocked my socks off, though, was his superb book about science, …
6 June 2014
Friday fold: differential weathering of carbonate intraclasts in mudstone
Howard Allen is the documentarian of this week’s fold: Howard writes that this is: Middle Cambrian Chancellor Formation rock with recessive weathering intraclasts(?). Hamilton Lake trail, Yoho National Park, British Columbia. My interpretation of this one is a little shaky–it was raining when I took the photo (in 1982) and I was hiking with a non-geologist friend, so I didn’t linger at the outcrop or record the precise location. I …
5 June 2014
Palimpsest tales from a Silurian limestone
My favorite rocks are those that tell multiple stories – rocks that are “palimpsest” with subsequent “chapters” of their biography capable of being teased out, based on different features to be observed in the rock. Click to enlarge What can we see in this small sample of the Silurian-aged Tonoloway limestone, from Corridor H, West Virginia? To start with, it’s sedimentary, and stratified. There are multiple layers of fine-grained gray …
4 June 2014
Faults in the Tonoloway Formation, Corridor H
Here’s something fun: Click to enlarge Those strata are Silurian-aged Tonoloway Formation carbonates. There are plenty of dessication cracks to be seen, as well as salt casts, among the layers exposed. But more eye-catching at this distance is the faulting that disrupts the high-contrast layers… Both (apparent) normal and reverse faults can be seen in this road cut. Exciting stuff! We visited it two weeks ago on “Border to Beltway’s” …
3 June 2014
Recent GigaPannery from Team M.A.G.I.C. & GEODE
It’s been a while since I’ve shared some of the work of our GigaPan making team. We’re gearing up for our NSF-funded summer GigaPan generating session, so it’s worth taking a look back at some of the highlights from the last couple of months of work… See if you can find (a) evidence of pressure solution, (b) a thrust fault, (c) red beds, (d) a cross-section of a trilobite shell, …
2 June 2014
The Moral Landscape, by Sam Harris
Sam Harris wrote a couple of excellent missives on the downsides of modern religious thinking and religious institutions in The End of Faith and the sequel which rebutted some of the U.S. criticism from it, called Letter to a Christian Nation. He published a new major work in 2010, The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values. In this philosophical and scientific argument, Harris argues that the traditional dichotomy …
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.