You are browsing the archive for October 2017 - Mountain Beltway.
27 October 2017
Friday fold: Quantankerous veins
What does it mean for a vein to be “quantankerous?” Well, to start with, it’s quartz. Second, it has to be disagreeable or cantankerous. This vein, seen in meta-arkose of the Catoctin Formation near the summit of the Blue Ridge at Rockfish Gap (not Afton Mountain), is such a quantankerous individual: You’ll notice its “S” shape, which might imply top-to-the-left kinematics. But just down the outcrop is this set of …
24 October 2017
The View from the Cheap Seats, by Neil Gaiman
I’ve been reading a fair bit of Neil Gaiman over the past year or so: American Gods, Good Omens (with Terry Pratchett), and The Ocean at the End of the Lane. Each of those books is good in its own way, and each is fiction. I just finished a compilation of Gaiman’s nonfiction, and there is enough about it that I think is applicable to the audience of this blog …
20 October 2017
Friday fold: Kink folds in Glacier National Park, part II
Over the summer, I treated you to a great big kink fold in the sedimentary rocks of Glacier National Park. Here’s another set: Did you see both of them in that first picture? – one bigger down below, one smaller up above. Both kink bands dip to the left. Let’s zoom in on the upper one: There’s more where this came from – stay tuned for more…. and in the …
18 October 2017
VGFC 2017: Limbs of arkose
The 2017 Virginia Geological Field Conference had a heavy arkose infusion. Meet some of these feldspar-rich Neoproterozoic sediments of the Lynchburg Group.
16 October 2017
After On, by Rob Reid
It turns out that Rob Reid can write. This “novel of Silicon Valley” is a tour de force of writing. Reid shows off his chops at writing potboiler adventure stories, ironic Amazon reviews, and sparkling dialogue. It’s a story of Silicon Valley culture, of start-ups and venture capital and social navigation in the Bay Area, but it’s also a novel that explores artificial intelligence (AI) in a fun, engaging way. …
13 October 2017
Friday fold: ptygmatic vein from Finland (NMNH)
Happy Friday! Here’s a sample from the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History in DC: As the label says, we have a nice example of ptygmatic (“intestine like”) buckle folding here. It comes from Finland. The coarse equigranular crystals in the vein appear to be mainly potassium feldspar and quartz. The surrounding matrix has a pronounced foliation. Note the cuspate “flames” of matrix between the broad “lobes” of folded …
11 October 2017
Pompeii vs. Herculaneum
Italy’s celebrated archaeological site of Pompeii is compared and contrasted with nearby Herculaneum in terms of art, architecture, visitor experience, and (of course) geology.
9 October 2017
Braiding Sweetgrass, by Robin Wall Kimmerer
Braiding Sweetgrass is a collection of thematically-linked essays by Robin Wall Kimmerer, an environmentalist, academic, and Native American. The themes that unite them are plants, the human relationship to the natural world, and love. I’ve read Kimmerer’s essays in Orion before, but there’s a sort of literary force multiplier when you get a whole book full of her thoughtful insights, story after story, back to back. Braiding Sweetgrass is a …
6 October 2017
Friday fold: recumbent isoclinal folds in Saruratown Mtn window, NC
Here’s a cool fold pair that rolled through my Twitter feed today: 2nd day Appalachian field trip. Recumbent isoclinal folds on a clear morning at Sauratown Mtns window NC pic.twitter.com/sHkmbp6roh — Joe Allen (@CU_in_the_field) October 6, 2017 Joe Allen gave me permission to share it with you here. Here’s the photo with bedding traced out (by me) in yellow: Happy Friday, all!
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.