You are browsing the archive for asia Archives - Page 2 of 2 - Mountain Beltway.
13 April 2012
Friday folds: Turpan Depression
Rob Simmon of NASA’s Earth Observatory is the source for today’s Friday folds. Last week, he tweeted this image to me: That’s a excellent example of the outcrop pattern of a more or less horizontal outcrop of folded rock. To the north is a synform (notice that where streams have eroded it, the bull’s-eye pattern takes a notch inward toward the center of the structure), and to the south, a …
17 March 2012
Lageson goes up
One of Callan’s former advisers, Dave Lageson of Montana State University, heads to the summit of the world’s tallest mountain with his graduate student, the accomplished mountaineer Conrad Anker.
14 October 2010
Rumeli Hisarı
Right after I got to Istanbul on this most recent trip, I took a taxi from my hotel down to the Bosphorus, to check out the Rumeli Hisarı, a fort complex built in 1452 by Sultan Mehmet the II in anticipation of the following year’s siege of Constantinople. It’s constructed at the narrowest point on the Bosphorus (660 m wide), with the aim of controlling boat traffic coming from the …
25 August 2010
Jointed Virgelle
One of the stops my Rockies students and I made this summer was a dinosaur paleontology tour through the Two Medicine Dinosaur Center in Bynum, Montana. The folks there are very accommodating, and at my request gave the class a bit of stratigraphic context for the dinosaur fossils. For instance, we visited the geologic formation which underlies the dinosaur-bearing Two Medicine Formation: it’s a beach sandstone called the Virgelle Formation. …
4 July 2010
Turkey update
Hey there folks, Long tıme no blog. I am enjoyıng Turkey. We spent several cool days ın Istanbul, checkıng out the awesome buıldıngs and twısty streets and great food there. Took a boat tour up the Bosphorus, walked across the Golden Horn. The Haghıa Sophıa ıs amazıng… a Chrıstıan cathedral datıng to Emporer Justınıan, then retrofıtted to be a Muslım mosque after the fall of Constantınople ın 1453 to Sultan …
2 June 2010
1453, by Roger Crowley
So, I think I dropped a hint here that I was planning to travel to Turkey this summer. Lily and I will be there from the end of June until the middle of July. (And I’ll be going back in October for the Tectonic Crossroads conference.) In preparation for a trip like this, I enjoy doing some research and reading some books. There are a lot of books about Turkey, …
24 May 2010
The coming flood
In January, a large landslide occurred in the Hunza Valley of Pakistan’s Karakoram Range, near the village of Attabad. Like the Madison River landslide in Montana (1959), or the Gros Ventre landslide in Wyoming (1925), a river was dammed by the slide debris, and the impounded waters began to rise. At Gros Ventre, the landslide-dammed lake overtopped the debris and caused a catastrophic flood which killed 6 people in Kelly, …
11 May 2010
Lola and the maps
My cat Lola has a thing for big sheets of paper, particularly maps. Here she is this morning, “helping” me plan a summer trip to Turkey:
5 March 2010
Is this dike a feeder?
A new paper in the journal Geology examines an interesting question: how can you tell feeder dikes from non-feeder dikes? The answer is, normally you can’t. Normally, there’s no way to tell for sure whether a given dike actually funneled magma to the paleo-surface, or whether it never reached the paleo-surface. The reason for this is that usually, the paleo-surface is gone by the time the dike is exposed at …
24 February 2010
Snowy décollement
Earlier in the month, during the big snowstorms, my window got plastered with snow. This snow formed a vertical layer which then deformed under the influence of gravity. Looking at it through the glass, I was struck by how it could serve as a miniature analogue for the deformation typical of a mountain belt. Let’s start our discussion by taking a look at an iPhone photograph of the snow: So …
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.