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15 July 2017
Flow-banded rhyolite from Vulcano, Italy
I collected only a single rock on my summer travels in France and Italy. (Those of you who know me will realize how extraordinary this low number is!) It’s a flow-banded rhyolite from Vulcano, in the Aeolian Islands north of Sicily a few weeks ago. It contains porphyritic vesicular basalt xenoliths. I featured a similar sample on Twitter yesterday on the occasion (supposedly) of “International Rock Day”: For #InternationalRockDay , …
14 July 2017
Friday fold: chevrons in the Scaglia Rossa, Apennines
The Friday fold visits the Apennine Range of central Italy.
7 July 2017
Friday fold: marble in a thermopolium at Herculaneum
It’s Friday. Let’s find a historic sort of Friday fold in the ruins of Herculaneum, Naples, Italy.
23 June 2017
Friday fold: Canoeing the Célé River, France
I was in southern France last week, exploring an awesome suite of caves cut into the Causses limestone plateau. My family and I took an afternoon to paddle a canoe down 5 kilometers of the Célé River. While floating along, we spied a gentle, open fold in the limestone layers that crop out along the banks. This low-amplitude fold is highlighted with the “horizontal” reference line of the river’s edge. …
26 May 2017
Friday fold: Macigno turbidites II
It’s Friday. We return to Italy’s Macigno Formation for a fold, courtesy of blog reader Samuele Papeschi.
11 May 2017
The Seven Hills of Rome: A Geological Tour of the Eternal City, by Grant Heiken, Renato Funiciello, and Donatella de Rita
I’m preparing for some time in Italy this summer, and picked up a couple of books to bring me up to speed geologically. The first is a geological guide for Rome. It’s structured around the archetypal “seven hills” of Rome, but the story is simpler in many regards than some other seven-hilled European capitals I could name. Rome’s geology appears to consist of four major units: older sedimentary rocks (which …
20 June 2016
Cushendun Conglomerate of the Cross Slieve Group, Northern Ireland
Want a geological irony? Here’s one! You’re looking at a rounded boulder of Cushendun Conglomerate, a Devonian “Old Red Sandstone” unit (Cross Slieve Group) exposed at Cushendun Caves, Northern Ireland, U.K. The irony lies in the repetition of history – a tumbling environment of high water energy, rounding cobbles and boulders and depositing them, in order to make the conglomerate. And now, ~400 million years later, history repeats itself, with …
13 May 2016
Friday fold: 3D syncline in Macigno Formation
Alan Pitts is the source of today’s fold, a beautiful 3D model of a differentially-weathered sycline in the Late Oligocene to Early Miocene deep water Macigno Formation from western Tuscany, Italy. Here’s a photo: Now for the 3D model, hosted by Sketchfab; After it loads, use your mouse to grab this thing and finesse it around. What an outcrop! What a great 3D model! Thanks for sharing this, Alan!
2 April 2016
Five new GIGAmacro images
Here are a few new images I’ve been working on with my home-based Magnify2 imaging system from GIGAmacro. Strophomenid brachiopods from Mississippian Mauch Chunk Formation, West Virginia: Link Boninite from New Caledonia: Link Lepidodendron scale-tree bark from Poland: Link Potassium feldspar crystal, from a pegmatite: Link Catoctin Formation greenstone from a feeder dike east of Linden, Virginia: Link Enjoy exploring them for details.
4 December 2015
Friday fold: interference patterns on Elba
Samuele Jæger Papeschi shares one more fold with us: some deformation here… type III (Ramsay…) interference pattern in Cretaceous calcschists… Cavo, Elba Island Awesome! I hope everyone has a great Friday.
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.