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15 January 2021
Friday fold: Three from Alaska
Earlier this week, I was alerted to an online photo collection from the Alaska Division of Geological and Geophysical Surveys. For those of us who are feeling the lack of field work over the past year, it’s pleasant to browse through them and get a taste of backcountry Alaska. Many of the photos are shot on old slide film, but that kind of adds to the “Alaskaness” of them in …
19 October 2018
Friday fold: the Brooks Range, Alaska
It’s Friday, thank goodness. Today our “Friday fold” feature heads north, way north, to the Brooks Range of Alaska. There we find a trio of mountainsides exposing folds photographed in the 1990s.
6 April 2018
Friday fold: “wrecumbent in Wrangellia”
Darrel Cowan of the University of Washington has pitched in a Friday fold. Check this lovely scene out: Darrel says this is a recumbent fold in the Upper Triassic Nizina and Chitistone limestones. I took the photo when I worked for Shell in 1973 or 1974. I’m pretty sure it is on the west wall of the canyon occupied by the Root Glacier, several kilometers NW of McCarthy, Alaska. The …
31 December 2017
To the Bright Edge of the World, by Eowyn Ivey
My friend Betsy recommended I read this novel, and I’m glad she did. It’s of an unusual structure: a series of documents, arranged in more or less chronological order (with some variation for plot structure), written by 5 principal characters, two in particular. The two are a U.S. Army captain sent on an expedition to explore the Wolverine River Valley of Alaska, and his wife, who remains behind in Vancouver, …
17 August 2012
Friday fold: soft sed def in Kodiak
The Friday fold is a seaside outcrop of soft sediment deformation (not post-lithification tectonic deformation) on Kodiak Island, Alaska.
15 April 2011
Friday fold: A cold one
The Friday fold is glimpsed from Google Earth. Atop a valley glacier in south-central Alaska’s Kenai mountain range, a fold of “transverse moraine” displays parasitic folds.
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.