You are browsing the archive for September 2018 - Mountain Beltway.
28 September 2018
Friday fold: Big Cottonwood Fm., Slate Canyon, Utah
It’s Friday and that means it’s time for a fold. Today we head to Cottonwood Canyon, Utah, with reader Octavia Spencer, for a lovely antiform.
21 September 2018
Friday fold: quartz veins in metagraywacke of the Mather Gorge Formation
It’s Friday! Here’s a lovely sight, contributed by reader Fred Atwood: Those are quartz veins in one of my favorite local rock units, the Mather Gorge Formation. Fred reports, This is at Madeira School in Great Falls between Black Pond and the Potomac. The rocks around Great Falls, particularly those on the Billy Goat Trail’s “A” Loop, are exemplary in many regards. That’s why I am taking my Physical Geology …
19 September 2018
The Tangled Tree, by David Quammen
The talented science writer David Quammen has a new book out, and it’s excellent. The Tangled Tree explores endosymbiosis and horizontal gene transfer, two aspects of evolution that undercut the traditional ever-more-branching “tree of life” vision for the relatedness of living things. The lineage of organisms is not only divergent, but convergent too: populations diverge and sometimes merge, in whole or in part, complicating the traditional “ramose” structure of phylogenetic …
14 September 2018
Friday fold: Ferruginous sediments in Barberton Mountain Land
A trip back to Archean sedimentary rocks in Barberton, South Africa, reveals a few folds on the roadside…
13 September 2018
A New History of Life, by Peter Ward and Joe Kirschvink
Yesterday, I finished listening to the audiobook version of A New History of Life, by Peter Ward and Joe Kirschvink (2016). This book is only a couple of years old, and takes as its topic ‘the modern perspective’ on life’s long history on Earth, using the latest insights available. It aims to debunk old hypotheses that don’t stand up to new data, and to expand the purview of life’s reign …
11 September 2018
Drawing geological structures, by Jörn Kruhl
After blogging about geovisualization, reader James Safranek alerted me to this new book about two of my favorite things: drawing and structural geology! I requested a review copy from the publisher, who kindly provided one. It’s great! This is “a whole book” about drawing and geology and specifically structural geology. As such, it’s not going to be as pertinent to every reader as it was to me. But I found …
7 September 2018
Friday folds: Continuing contorted Conestoga carbonates
The first Friday of September calls out for a fold. The Burle Business Park in Lancaster, Pennsylvania has an answer – several of them, in fact!
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.