You are browsing the archive for June 2023 - Mountain Beltway.
30 June 2023
Friday fold: Wissahickon block
Click to enlarge I’m writing this on the Amtrak train from New York back to Charlottesville, traveling (again) under orange-hazy skies due to Canadian wildfire smoke. I took my son to Manhattan for a concert, and we stopped off en route for an overnight in Philadelphia, visiting a former student of mine who’s now an assistant professor of geology at Rowan University in New Jersey. While walking around Philly, I …
29 June 2023
Bird update June 2023
Click to enlarge A brief update here, since it’s getting close to the end of the month. I’ve added a half dozen species to my county list since I last reported out to you all. I’m up to 151 for the county for the year. This means that I’m still ranked in the top ten, but I’ve slipped to #4. I’m helping to lead a public-facing birding walk on Saturday …
12 June 2023
Tension gashes in the Tonoloway Formation
I spent yesterday on Corridor H in eastern West Virginia’s Valley & Ridge province. The rocks here are a mid- to upper-Paleozoic set of strata that record the switch from post-Taconian passive margin sedimentation into Acadian clastic deposition, and then everything is deformed by Alleghanian folding and thrusting. I found myself taking photographs of the same old outcrops I know and love there – but here’s something new that I …
9 June 2023
Friday fold: Pleasant Grove Park
Happy Friday, friends. Here’s a rock sample that I recently polished up: It shows crenulations in “pinstriped” schist of the western Piedmont in Pleasant Grove Park in Fluvanna County, mapped as the Mine Run Complex. Lovely stuff, eh?
7 June 2023
Seeing spots thanks to Canadian wildfires
The eastern United States is being choked by thick wafts of Canadian wildfire smoke, and that has resulted in a rare opportunity to observe detailed features on the surface of the Sun.
The unconformity gets its portrait taken
Callan recounts a little lesson in taking a photograph of an outcrop that expresses itself more readily to the novice eye.
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.