You are browsing the archive for January 2020 - Mountain Beltway.
31 January 2020
Friday fold: tension gashes near Sunflower, Arizona
Reader John Christian shared these folds with me via email last week. They are quartz veins in slightly metamorphosed Precambrian igneous rocks found near Sunflower, AZ in the Mazatzal Mountains. The second photo is a close-up shot of the curviest, cleanest batch of folds from the first shot. These are beautiful examples of folds in similarly oriented quartz veins; we call them “en echelon” for the way you have a …
29 January 2020
The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet, by Becky Chambers
Last night, I finished a wonderful little book of science fiction, The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet, by Becky Chambers. It’s the first book in a series of novels, called “Wayfarers” after the name of the ship whose crew are the subjects of the story. Like Joss Whedon’s TV series “Firefly,” the crew of the Wayfarer is motley. Unlike “Firefly,” though, and more like Star Wars, they are …
24 January 2020
Friday fold: Pelham Parkway
A roadside boulder in the Bronx shows folded gneissic banding. It’s another guest-submitted Friday fold!
1 January 2020
2019 Yard List
New year’s day! For this blog and me, the first day of the year is time for the annual recap of birds seen on my land in Fort Valley, Virginia. Here are the previous iterations: 2012 (39 species) 2013 (51 species) 2014 (58 species) 2015 (65 species) 2016 (59 species) 2017 (56 species) 2018 (60 species) This year’s list (biggest year yet!), in chronological order of first sighting: Pileated woodpecker …
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.