You are browsing the archive for basin and range Archives - Mountain Beltway.
6 May 2020
The Broken Land, by Frank L. DeCourten
You might think that the last two months would have been a good time for reading, given the social isolation and stay-at-home orders. But that hasn’t worked out to be the case for me. The stresses of the pandemic, new and different work responsibilities, new homeschooling responsibilities, ongoing textbook writing and an impending move for my family have all conspired to gobble up my time, and there’s been very little …
1 February 2013
Friday fold: Mosaic Canyon Monster
While out in Death Valley with my Field Studies students last March, we encountered an extraordinary fold in Mosaic Canyon. Check this thing out: The rock is the Noonday Dolostone (“Noonday Dolomite” in mineralogically biased argot). It may be hard to make out what’s what there… So let me assist with a little annotation, tracing out the bedding: Wild, eh? That’s an extraordinarily messed up rock. “Goopey” is the adjective …
30 January 2013
Sand avalanche animated GIF
Some of the dynamics of small-scale mass wasting in granular materials are captured in this animated GIF from sand dunes in Death Valley.
17 January 2013
Cross-bedding in Owens River sediments
Today, we take a look at an outcrop of young, basically unlithified sediments east of Bishop, California, on the way out Poleta Road, toward the White Mountain Research Station’s Owens Valley Lab, where you can get a nice view of the Coyote Warp Relay Ramp. These photos were taken just west of the bridge over the Owens River. The rapidly-eroding outcrop there is on a small bluff a few meters …
15 January 2013
Ripples in the sand
All seen last March in Death Valley, at Mesquite Dunes…. within ten minutes of one another.
28 March 2012
Hanksite and other wonders of Searles Lake
Callan’s field studies class journeys to Searles Lake, California, a playa rich in evaporite minerals both prosaic and exotic.
21 March 2012
More folds from the White Mountains
I know we spent time last Friday on some nice folds in the Poleta (?) Formation in the White Mountains of California, but here are a few more that I saw on my way up to the Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest… Some elliptical objects caught my eye: Traced out along the plane of bedding, these turned out to be boudins of a more competent layer, which was tightly folded higher …
20 March 2012
Eruption column in Owens Valley :)
I’ve been showing a lot of photos lately from my field course’s trip up into the White Mountains. While we were driving up the road from Westgard Pass to the Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest, we saw something interesting going on in the southern Owens Valley. Take a look at this view to the southwest, from the overlook: See it, way there in the distance, but between the photographer’s vantage point …
19 March 2012
Overturned bedding in Poleta (?) Formation, White Mountains, California
After a roadside explanation just an hour and a half earlier on how the relationship between bedding and cleavage can reveal whether bedding is likely right-side-up or up-side-down, my students and I were walking up the road to the Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest in the White Mountains of California, and I saw this outcrop that illustrated the concept perfectly: The blue thing is a pen, to provide a sense of …
16 March 2012
Friday folds: Serendipity in the White Mountains
Callan and his field studies students encounter a lesson in the White Mountains of eastern California that combines bedding, cleavage, folding, and even fossil archaeocyathids!
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.