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You are browsing the archive for January 2018 - Mountain Beltway.

26 January 2018

Friday fold: eastern Andes

This image graces the cover of the new report, Challenges and opportunities for research in tectonics: Understanding deformation and the processes that link Earth systems, from geologic time to human time. A community vision document submitted to the U.S. National Science Foundation: Make it bigger by clicking it The photo is of a landscape in the Eastern Cordillera of the Andes, southern Peru, showing folded Permian carbonates cut by a …

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23 January 2018

A kid and his slicks

On a family hike, Callan’s son finds some interesting smooth lines on a rock. What are they? What do they tell us? Tune in for a brief history of Appalachian geology.

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19 January 2018

Friday fold: crumpled quartz vein from VGFC

Remember the Virginia Geological Field Conference from back in October? Well here’s a folded quartz vein we observed along a small shear zone in the Blue Ridge basement complex. There are two views of it, from approximately perpendicular points of view: These rocks are Mesoproterozoic, but the vein would obviously be younger than that, and the deformation is likely Alleghanian in age (late Paleozoic). Annotated copies of the photos:

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18 January 2018

Surviving AI, by Calum Chase

I know what you’re thinking: another book about AI, Callan? Really? Yes, really. I don’t know what compelled me – but perhaps that the author’s name was so similar to my own spurred me onward. Surviving AI is Calum Chase’s summary of the current state of affairs with AI risk management (specifically, of course, relative to artificial superintelligence). It’s a well balanced book in that it plainly states where there …

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17 January 2018

Winter ichnology puzzle

Here’s a puzzler to warm up your chilly brain this Wednesday morning: Click to enlarge Figure out the story told by this set of imprints in the snow. The branch of science called ichnology studies the traces organisms leave behind. There’s a neat little story here. If you’ve got a guess, then you can check your answer by watching the video that this screenshot came from. It was posted on …

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13 January 2018

Year Zero, by Rob Reid

I was so impressed with After On that I went out an got the only other novel by Rob Reid, Year Zero. The plot set up is something rather ludicrous, but the novel works in spite of the silly premise. Here’s the idea: There are a lot of alien civilizations out there, and they are really advanced. Banded together into a Refined League, they have mastered almost all forms of …

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12 January 2018

Friday folds: Hayden Butte (“A Mountain”), Tempe

In keeping with the Arizonarific theme of this week’s posts (thanks to my participation in the 2018 Structural Geology and Tectonics Forum), I thought I would wrap up my ‘geology of the Phoenix area‘ posts with a walk I took on my last day there. This was to what Google Maps calls “Hayden Butte,” but the locals call “A Mountain.” Not “a mountain,” but “the mountain called ‘A‘.” It has …

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11 January 2018

Landslide breccias in Papago Park

A visit to Papago Park, north of Tempe, Arizona, reveals hanging wall rocks from the South Mountain detachment fault, a long way from South Mountain. Also, feast your eyes on these gorgeous red sedimentary breccias, interpreted to be landslide deposits from the Neogene.

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10 January 2018

SGTF field trip

A virtual field trip to the Phoenix Mountains and South Mountains of Arizona, along with participants in the 2018 Structural Geology and Tectonics Forum.

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5 January 2018

Friday fold: Scott Paterson in Tasmania

My friend Vali Memeti posted this photo of her husband Scott Paterson examining some folded rocks on the coast of Tasmania last week. It looks like Vali and Scott enjoyed a fun excursion to this “Even Further” Down Under location. This is the Sulphur Creek geologic site, part of a geocache suite called “Created from Chaos,” though I don’t get too much additional information from their website. Presumably the rocks …

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