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26 March 2023
Bird update March 2023
Click to enlarge I’m still birding voraciously. I’m up to 89 species in my county for the year. So that means I added a dozen since last month. A few of those are freshly-arrived migrants from southerly climes, and some are just me putting in the time to go rack up waterfowl at nearby lakes. I’ve maintained my high county ranking, which has oscillated between #4 and #2 this month. …
16 May 2022
Qwitter
On April 25th, it was announced that Elon Musk had arranged to buy the social media company Twitter. He had just attained majority shareholder status a few weeks earlier. I’ve been an avid Twitter user for twelve years, accruing 11.5K followers over that interval, and very much enjoying the conversation — but I decided to leave the service when the sale was announced. Musk has articulated both an interest in …
27 December 2017
Ten years of Mountain Beltway
Callan has been blogging about geology for a decade. Here are a few reflections on those ten years behind the wheel of “Mountain Beltway.”
29 December 2016
Year in review
We approach the end of another calendar year, and with it comes my ninth anniversary of beginning to write about geology online. (A year from now will mark a decade of geoblogging for me!) It’s been a rough year, health-wise for my friends and family. Loved ones have suffered strokes, brain cancer, Alzheimer’s, and other horrible ailments. I myself have been battling a persistent respiratory infection for most of the …
17 November 2015
Hitting a nerve with popular posts
I blog here a few times a week, when I can manage it. Mostly I focus on new things I discover on field trips, advances in geologic imagery, and structural geology. I get about 500 readers per day. But occasionally I write about other things, like creationism or current events disasters like earthquakes, and those posts garner a lot more attention. They get shared and reshared and spread out. My …
1 May 2014
Blogging → science
I thought this was pretty cool. Remember the blog post a year ago wherein I documented a slump on a hillside on the campus of James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia, adjacent to Interstate 81? Well, a student at JMU, Dan Rowson, ended up doing his research on that slump, and it turned out that the high-resolution panorama I posted was the best available image of the phenomenon. Dan emailed …
18 January 2013
Callan describes what he does in #upgoerfive language
Okay, I’ll bite. I work at making people understand more about the big rock that we live on. I use pictures and drawing on the pictures to show how the rocks have changed because of pushing on the rocks. This pushing happens because of blocks of rock that move together and sometimes push into other blocks. Other times, a rock block will move away from another rock block. Then the …
27 December 2012
5-year blogiversary
Half a decade ago today, I wrote my first blog post. A lot’s happened since then. Blogging is fun, and it’s brought me a lot of great opportunities and new friendships. Any thoughts on the material I’ve produced since that initial foray? Want more of something or less of something? Thanks for reading…
28 November 2012
AW 52: Dream geology courses
Shawn at the blog Vi-carius is hosting this month’s Accretionary Wedge. He asks for a geoblogosphere-wide brainstorm on “dream geology courses” – an inspirational topic! I have a few ideas: A travel course dedicated to exploring the roots of geological thinking and the geological timescale. It would clearly need to be based in the U.K. and Scotland in particular, with forays into Ireland, France, and the foothills of the Alps. …
18 August 2012
Migmacatization
Evelyn put up a cat photo on Geokittehs earlier today, and it reminded me of anatexis, the process of partial melting. Anatexis is my favorite way to produce a migmatite. In this model, the light-colored (felsic) ginger cat is derived from the partial melting of another cat, partly dark (mafic) and partly felsic (ginger). Where the low-melting-temperature minerals have been extracted, the source cat is much darker. Fresh injections of …
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.