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9 October 2012
AW50: The tweaked pinkie
My AGU Blogosphere neighbor Evelyn of Georneys fame is hosting this month’s Accretionary Wedge. Her topic? “Field camp memories”… I never attended a bona fide field camp myself, but I attended a lovely “regional field geology” course that my undergraduate alma mater, the College of William & Mary, put on each summer in the Colorado Plateau. Most of my field course experience has actually been in the past four summers, …
26 September 2012
Drumheller portrait of a field class
That’s my posse of field course students (plus co-instructor Pete Berquist, fifth from the left) at Drumheller, Alberta, in July.
21 September 2012
Friday folds: one from the Icefields Parkway
Limestone strata in a variety of orientations, with a nice tilted axial plane. Outcrop is on the east side of the Icefields Parkway, across from one of the many glacier overlooks. Lucy and Alex both wanted to act as sense of scale for this one… Can’t say I blame them.
20 September 2012
Pachycephalosaurs were boneheads
This is a display at the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Drumheller, Alberta: It shows the domed skull of a pachycephalosaur: And it shows a virtual cross-section through that skull, revealing the size of the brain it protects: Weird animal. Great museum display: it says it all!
18 September 2012
Stratigraphy session
What are these students up to? I’ll give you a hint: this is Dinosaur Provincial Park in the Great Plains of southern Alberta. The badlands style topography here offers a nice vertical section through clastic sedimentary rocks originally deposited adjacent to the Western Interior Seaway. On our Canadian Rockies field course in July, my co-instructor Pete Berquist (from Thomas Nelson Community College in Hampton, Virginia) led an afternoon exercise in …
6 September 2012
Ribs & hackles
Concentric ribs with hackles on a joint face, quartzite (metamorphosed fine-grained quartz sandstone stained with hematite) from Waterton Lakes National Park, southern Alberta.
4 September 2012
Primary sedimentary structures, old and new
Modern raindrop impressions in wet mud, West Virginia: Mudcracks in limestone, Mississippian, Alberta, Canada:
30 August 2012
Miette outcrop
Here’s a cool outcrop of the Neoproterozoic Miette Group. Most of the Miette is classified as “slate” and “gritstone,” through these particular exposures, on the Icefields Parkway south of Jasper, are fine-grained and lacking in slaty cleavage. They don’t seem to have been too metamorphosed at all right here, as Sebastian shows in this photo: You’re looking (obliquely) up at the bedding plane there, with the bed dipping towards your …
28 August 2012
Guest post: Red Rock Canyon
A guest post by Callan’s student Jacob Douma Traveling with Callan Bentley and Pete Berquist through the Canadian Rockies on their Regional Geology Field Course in July 2012, we were exposed to a variety of physiographic features. Among them, was Red Rock Canyon located 16 km from Waterton Townsite within Waterton Lakes National Park, Alberta. In this guest blog post, I’ll be talking about the canyon’s physiographic features and origins. …
20 August 2012
Morning with the local expert
Royal Tyrrell Museum geologist Dave Eberth donates time and expertise to help Callan’s students understand the Cretaceous-aged Horseshoe Canyon Formation in central Alberta.
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.