My friend Joshua Villalobos was celebrated this week at #GSA2016 as the recipient of the Biggs Award for Geoscience Teaching Excellence. I was his citationist (nominator), paying forward the effort and attention that Heather Macdonald and Bob Blodgett showed for me two years ago. Josh is a talented and accomplished educator on many levels, and an exemplary choice for this honor.

Now, as it turns out, I was able to get Joshua hooked on GigaPanning (he has over 60 images to his name so far), and I went out to El Paso in 2013 to do a brief field campaign with Josh and his colleagues and his students. One of those students, Jenn, turned up again at GSA. It turns out that not only is she now in graduate school at UTEP, but that GigaPanning campaign was inspirational, and she’s now working in high-resolution imagery and 3D modelling using drones. Yay!

Okay – so now you know the backstory. How about some folds?

Here are two views of quarry walls of the American Talc Company near Van Horn, Texas. The rocks are talc-bearing strata of the Precambrian Allamoore Formation (1.25 Ga). Much of the deformation seen in the Allamoore is considered to be the northernmost extent of a Grenville-age collisional belt along the southern margin of Laurentia. Happy fold exploration!

Link GigaPan by Joshua Villalobos

Link GigaPan by Joshua Villalobos