You are browsing the archive for November 2022 - Mountain Beltway.
30 November 2022
Ichnoanalogue
Another glimpse of sand on the beach at Esterillos Oeste, Costa Rica… This time, I offer you a trace of an organism moving through the wet sediment: Note the two parallel lines of tracks laid down by little feet, and the central groove that overprints them. It reminded me very much of this similar arrangement, from near St. Andrews in Scotland, but: (1) this is the underside of a bed …
27 November 2022
Book report
Callan offers reviews of a suite of good reads – some old and some new, some geology and some general science, and some social justice/history.
13 November 2022
A Geological Miscellany, by G.Y. Craig & E.J. Jones
A fun, if a little musty, compendium of random writings about geology and geologists from a wide variety of sources, excerpted and packed together into a slim paperback volume. It begins with Mark Twain and concludes with Russell Baker, and there are hundreds of entries in between – some poems, some short essays, some clipped correspondence, some newspaper articles, and so on. It’s miscellaneous, as the title suggests. Many of …
12 November 2022
Catastrophes and Lesser Calamities, by Tony Hallam
This is a thoughtful volume on mass extinctions written for the novice. One thing I really liked about this book is that it was written very clearly from the mind of a skeptical scientist who is conscientious about explaining each step in his thinking while explaining fairly complicated, murky stuff for a lay audience. Hallam succeeds magnificently in defining ideas first, and only later attaching jargon or terminology to the …
11 November 2022
How the Mountains Grew, by John Dvorak
Callan reviews a recently-published book that offers “a new geological history of North America.”
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.