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22 June 2010
At the edge of the intrusion
Mountain Beltway reader Greg Willis attended my colleague Ken Rasmussen’s Triassic Rift Valley field course last weekend, and sent me this photo of the view inside the Luck Stone diabase quarry in Centreville, Virginia: Here’s an annotated version: Both photos are enlargeable by clicking on them (twice). This quarry chews into rock right along the contact between a mafic igneous intrusion and lake sediments that formed when water pooled in …
4 March 2010
Triassic rifting in the Capitol
My girlfriend’s mom was in town in January, and we took her down to visit the Capitol Building. The tour had a good bit of history, but definitely missed the opportunity to talk geology. I was particularly struck by the columns in the Hall of Statuary: Close up of one column, with my hand for scale: That’s the Leesburg Conglomerate, a Triassic-aged deposit found in the western part of the …