You are browsing the archive for January 2019 - Mountain Beltway.
29 January 2019
The Parallel Roads of Glen Roy
What can we learn from Scotland’s Parallel Roads of Glen Roy?
25 January 2019
Friday folds: more Marli Miller
Four Friday folds from Marli Miller’s online photo archive of geological images.
18 January 2019
Friday fold: Saluda Dam, South Carolina
Scott White (@SeafloorScott) of the University of South Carolina pitched in with today’s Friday fold: Click to enlarge This shows a section of high grade gneiss in the spillway of the Saluda Dam in Columbia, South Carolina. Zooming in there, you can see a nice fold hinge on the left edge: Although I don’t know the precise location of this outcrop, I did a bit of internet sleuthing… According to …
15 January 2019
Easing of selective pressure on Opuntia cacti in the Galapagos Islands
A cactus you can pet with your bare hand? Turns out it can tell you something about whether that island contains any land iguanas. A case study in the easing of natural selective pressure.
14 January 2019
A tale of three iguanas
As noted last week, I spent the week spanning New Year’s Eve in the enchanted isles of the Galapagos. The previous week (over Christmas) my family and I were in coastal Ecuador. I saw a total of three species of iguanas in the two locations, and they offer a neat little story of evolution. Let’s take a look. First, let’s introduce the key players: The green iguana, Iguana iguana (coastal Ecuador, …
11 January 2019
Friday fold: more from Utah
For the final Friday fold of 2018, we return to Utah’s Slate Canyon, where “Mountain Beltway” reader Octavia Sawyer shares an anticline with parasitic folds shaped like “sea serpents.”
8 January 2019
Geology of the Galapagos Islands
Dozens of delectable geological images from the Galapagos Islands, showing fluid basalt flows and violent pyroclastic deposits along with many primary volcanic features (and a bit of sedimentology thrown in for good measure).
1 January 2019
2018 Yard List
New year’s day is the time I tally up and report the bird species seen in my yard on the forested slope of Massanutten Mountain in Shenandoah County, Virginia. This is my seventh such annual list. Here are the previous iterations: 2012 (39 species) 2013 (51 species) 2014 (58 species) 2015 (65 species) 2016 (59 species) 2017 (56 species) It’s been a good year. Two new “seen for the first …
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.