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You are browsing the archive for April 2016 - Mountain Beltway.

27 April 2016

An opportunity to help in Canoa

As I mentioned last week, I have family in one of the coastal towns in Ecuador that was hardest hit by the magnitude 7.8 earthquake the previous weekend. Don and Wendy have asked me to share this opportunity to help: The James Dean Byrd Foundation runs a school in Canoa, La Escuela Bilingue los Algarrobos, whose campus is currently being used as a staging ground for the military’s assistance in …

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26 April 2016

Brachiopodapalooza via GIGAmacro

Another week, another batch of new images produced on my home-based Magnify2 imaging system from GIGAmacro. This week, you can see that I’ve been on a real brachiopod tear – here are seven images of those two-shelled filter feeders from the Paleozoic… Link Link Link Link Link Link Link As always, enjoy exploring them for details.

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25 April 2016

The Floating Egg, by Roger Osborne

A quick report today on a delightful book – The Floating Egg: Episodes in the Making of Geology, by Roger Osborne. It’s a collection of pieces, some only a few sentences long, others full essays, and still others short stories that fictionalize real life events. The range of styles is extensive, but what unites them all is geology in coastal Yorkshire, England. It’s a fascinating tour. The title may seem …

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23 April 2016

Mineral surfaces under the SEM: 6 new micro-GigaPans

As mentioned yesterday, my student Robin has been having some success lately in making GigaPan-scale imagery using the new desktop scanning electron microscope that our division acquired. They aren’t as super-high resolution as most of the other GigaPan images I post here, but they are very, very small – and thus expand the scope of our imaging initiative. Enjoy exploring: find cleavage planes, microscopic plumose structures, examples showing the constancy …

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22 April 2016

Friday fold: Crumpled Dinwoody Formation, Sheep Mountain, Wyoming

Today for your folding pleasure, I give you two field GigaPans shot by Jeffrey Rollins, a two-time Rockies field course alumnus and Old Dominion University student working under my colleague Declan De Paor, assisted by NOVA student Bridget Gomez, during last summer’s extended GigaPan expedition at the Sheep Mountain Anticline, Wyoming. This particular outcrop was found near the axis of the massive Laramide fold, and shows an extensively deformed section …

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A suite of plankton S.E.M. micro-GigaPans

My student Robin has been working (on and off) for more than a year to figure out the best way to make GigaPan-scale imagery using the new desktop scanning electron microscope that our academic division acquired. There are several technical challenges to be overcome, each different, and some with ‘solutions’ that cause other problems. Dealing with all that takes time and has caused a lot of frustration. (We have a …

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21 April 2016

Firsthand reports from Canoa, Ecuador after the quake

Callan’s mother-in-law lives in one of the most strongly-shaken regions of Ecuador. Here, she and her boyfriend recount the experience of the earthquake Saturday night and its aftermath. Includes 8 photos from the scene.

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20 April 2016

Who ate the woodpecker?

Occasionally, our big windows get in the way of birds. The latest casualty was a hairy woodpecker, Leuconotopicus villosus. While it’s sad that our home being where it is caused the end of this bird’s life, its body was an opportunity to teach my son something about wildlife and ecology. We have a motion-sensitive wildlife camera trained on our compost pile, and so I put the woodpecker’s body there in …

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Cooling columns of the Catoctin Formation, Indian Run Overlook, Shenandoah National Park

An inaugural visit to an outcrop in Shenandoah National Park reveals the signature of lava flows ~600 million years old.

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15 April 2016

Friday fold: Shiny pahoehoe

James Farrell is our newest Friday fold source. Today he shares a primary (not tectonic)  fold – the fold is in the ropy texture of a pahoehoe flow: Those colors! What a gorgeous rock. Thanks for sharing, James! You, too, can share your folds here. Send me your images. I look forward to featuring them on the Friday fold!

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