You are browsing the archive for August 2015 - Mountain Beltway.
29 August 2015
Mystery structure: please help identify / interpret
I have a mystery for you today: These are samples of Tonoloway Formation carbonate (not sure if it’s limestone or dolostone in retrospect), with bedding more or less horizontal in these images, and a few petite stylolites running orthogonal to that. The top sample has a gentle fold 2/5ths of the way across. All of the samples are from the same site in West Virginia, along Corridor H. I’m wondering …
21 August 2015
Friday fold: a kink fold at Baldwin Gap
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you… The Friday fold: This beauty came to my attention on Monday, when I was lucky enough to go on a field trip with my friends Leigh and Mary. They are founding members of our local informal geology club, and we have been meaning to take a Cedar Creek field trip together since I moved out to the Fort Valley. One of the sites we …
20 August 2015
Stromatoporoids in a Devonian reef
Here are a few shots of a Devonian aged reef exposed in Mustoe, Virginia – one of the sites I visited this spring with GMU’s Rick Diecchio, when he led his sedimentology and stratigraphy trip there. At first, the outcrop made no sense to me – I kept searching for bedding, and failed to find it. Then, the reef interpretation clicked, and suddenly I didn’t “need” bedding any more… Stromatoporoids …
19 August 2015
Iron oxide sweat stains in sandstone
What do a sweaty baseball cap and fractured sandstone have in common? Episodes of absorption of dirty liquids that pile up material such as iron oxide at the soaking front.
18 August 2015
The Revenant, by Michael Punke
On the recommendation of my friend Troy Holland, I just finished reading Michael Punke’s novel about Hugh Glass. The book has been optioned as a film, and because it stars Leonardo diCaprio, it will doubtless be a hit. What got Troy’s attention, though, is the director: Alejandro González Iñárritu, the guy who gave us Babel, Birdman, and Amores Perros, all of which were masterful films. So what’s a ‘revenant?’ Wikipedia’s …
17 August 2015
Geology Underfoot in Western Washington, by Dave Tucker
I’m grateful to Mountain Press for sending me copies of all of their new books. There are some terrific volumes that have arrived in my mailbox over the past year, and I feel guilty for not reviewing more of them. But when I upwrapped this one, I was struck by two things: 1) The author is a geoblogger, and a prolific one. Dave Tucker writes Northwest Geology Field Trips, and …
15 August 2015
Paleobiology database survey request
Dear colleagues, My collaborators and I are exploring the potential of big science databases, like the Paleobiology Database (see below), to enhance geoscience education and research at all types of institutions. We’re very interested in learning who is and isn’t currently using this and other databases for education and research and why. This work is supported by an NSF DUE grant #1504588. If you could take about 10 minutes to …
14 August 2015
Paleoslump features and fluvial incision in the Conemaugh Group, West Virginia
The answer to this week’s geological interpretation contest is revealed, sort of. Annotations, GigaPans, and outcrop detail photos reveal the story of equatorial fluvial incision and ancient slumping during the Carboniferous ice ages.
12 August 2015
Rockies student projects, 2015
Another year, another batch of student projects from my Rockies field course, each intended to elucidate some aspect of the geology of the Montana / Wyoming Rocky Mountains for the general public: Geology of Grand Teton National Park (Marcell) Tilted glaciolacustrine beds near Glacier National Park (James) Blog on various aspects of the field course’s geology (Zack) A geologist’s guide to the Beartooth Highway (Peri) The Sawtooth Range and the …
Student guest post: the Belt Supergroup in Glacier National Park
As longtime readers know, late summer is when my Rockies students submit their final projects – web-based explanations of key geologic sites they examined during the trip. Today, I offer you a guest blog post by student John Leaming. You’ll notice that I’m not *completely* absent from the post, however – I make a couple of cameos as “sense of scale.” Enjoy, -CB ______________________________________________________________ Glacier National Park, Belt Supergroup I …
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.