You are browsing the archive for March 2018 - Mountain Beltway.
30 March 2018
Friday fold: Recumbent Harpers
Stop the presses! This late-breaking Friday fold has just been submitted here at Friday Fold Headquarters. This is from Philip Prince/Virginia Division of Geology and Mineral Resources: It’s a recumbent fold of Harpers Formation metasandstone in the James River Face area. Pretty lovely exposure. This outcrop would make a good 3D model. Happy Friday to all. Hope it’s a good one!
28 March 2018
The Fifth Season, by N.K. Jemisin
After reading Mika McKinnon‘s endorsement of this series on Twitter (example), I downloaded an audiobook copy of N.K. Jemisin’s first book in her “Broken Earth” trilogy, The Fifth Season. It is a fantasy novel with a healthy seasoning (ha! no pun intended) of science fiction. The story is set in a world called “Earth,” but it’s not clear if it’s the same world as our own, in the distant past …
26 March 2018
Raider of the Lost Anticlines
A solo hike in search of anticlines yields new outcrops and good views!
23 March 2018
Friday fold: Snow day edition
Snow may have cancelled the geology class, but there’s plenty to see outside! Join us for a tour of three fine examples of physical analogues in snow that show deformation akin to that we observe in rocks under tectonic stresses.
16 March 2018
Friday fold: a boulder from Spitsbergen
Today’s Friday fold comes to your eyeballs courtesy of my colleague Shelley Jaye, who took it in 1982: She found this in a glacial moraine adjacent to Lovlibreen Glacier, on the north shore of St. Jonsfjorden, Spitsbergen, Svalbard. Very cool disharmonic folding. Thanks for sharing, Shelley! Happy Friday to all.
14 March 2018
New media to show off exemplary features of the Devonian-aged Hampshire Formation along Corridor H, West Virginia
Last week, I was in Morgantown, West Virginia, to deliver a colloquium talk to the geology department at West Virginia University of geological visualization. The next day, I took some time on the way home to geologize a bit on the road called Corridor H, a gorgeous transect through the eastern Allegheny Plateau and western Valley & Ridge provinces. I focused that day on the Hampshire Formation, Foreknobs Formation, and …
13 March 2018
The Evolution of Beauty, by Richard Prum
This fascinating new work by ornithologist Richard Prum re-examines sexual selection (mate choice) as a driving force of evolutionary change independent of (and sometimes in contradiction to) the mechanism of natural selection (environmental adaptation). Prum positions himself as a modern advocate for the ideas Charles Darwin expressed in The Descent of Man, and that Alfred Russel Wallace argued against in the years following Darwin’s death. In The Evolution of Beauty, …
9 March 2018
Friday fold: Raplee Monocline
It’s Friday! Let’s head to Utah for a guest Friday fold photo – a river rat’s view of the Raplee Monocline!!
1 March 2018
A GIGAmacro view of a cool outcrop in Scotland
As noted previously, the old way of viewing gigapixel imagery is no more. But there is a new, better way. The GIGAmacro company has a better viewing platform that can be used either with images uploaded to their server or with pre-existing images that currently “live” at GigaPan.com. Here’s an example: a roadcut of limestone of the Grudaidh Formation (Durness Group) in the Northwest Highlands of Scotland, near Ardvreck Castle, …