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17 March 2023

Friday fold: Pinto Gneiss, varnished and un-

Last week, I was lucky enough to visit Pushawalla Canyon in the Indio Hills region of southern California. There, my colleague Kim Blisniuk (San Jose State University) led our students through an exercise mapping alluvial deposits as a way of constraining offsets along the Mission Canyon strand of the San Andreas Fault. I noted that much of the alluvium was sourced to the northeast, to the Little San Bernardino Mountains. …

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10 March 2023

Friday fold: Painted Canyon

Greetings from southern California! I’m running a spring break field course in the Mojave and Colorado desert. Here’s a pretty amazing fold pair in Palm Springs Formation, butted up against (darker) Mecca Formation along a fault. This is in Painted Canyon, in the Mecca Hills, a transpressional pop-up between the Painted Canyon Fault and the San Andreas Fault. Happy Friday!

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10 February 2023

Friday fold: Kelvin-Helmholtz waves in granite?

Reader Christian Gronau returns with another “guest Friday fold” submission. Christian writes, Greetings from a cold and wet west coast.   A good time to root through old rock samples   –  and let the imagination run free …  The little compilation below strikes me as visually compelling (both photographs are mine)  –  but how likely is it that the suggested analogy has any merit ? Would it have some …

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3 February 2023

Friday fold: Kyanite quartzite

A return to the “video Friday fold” format:

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2 December 2022

Friday fold: Hidden Rock Park, Goochland County

Two weeks ago was the annual Virginia Geological Field Conference, which was centered this year on the Goochland Terrane, an interesting block of crust in the Piedmont which shows some similarities to the Blue Ridge geologic province, but also shows some differences that suggest it’s not just a mini-Blue-Ridge. One of the best exposures was in Hidden Rock Park, where a series of “whaleback” outcrops expose things like this: There, …

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16 September 2022

Friday fold: isoclinal limestone near Harrisonburg

This weekend, my family and I traveled to a little agrotainment complex north of Harrisonburg, Virginia, a joint called Back Home On The Farm. It featured a corn maze, hayrides, petting zoo, apple cider donuts, and pumpkin picking. All typical fall frolic; good clean fun. But there were also big blocks of limestone everywhere on the property. I did my best to check them all out. I was mainly scanning …

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16 August 2022

Kinked metavolcanics of the Castine Formation, eastern Maine

Callan shares a few outcrops from coastal Maine, part of the Avalonia terrane that accreted to ancestral North America during the Acadian Orogeny. They are volcaniclastic rocks, coarse and fine, and showing both overprinting kink bands and cross-cutting basaltic dikes.

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1 July 2022

Friday fold: lithified python

A quick Friday fold that I observed last month in a boulder of riprap at Chippokes State Park in Surry, Virginia. I have absolutely no idea where this rock was quarried; but it doesn’t look like anything I’m familiar with in Virginia, so maybe the Baltimore Mafic Complex??? Anyhow, it’s not native to the Coastal Plain, but it shows a pleasing fold train of green and gray amid the black …

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24 June 2022

Friday fold: Kinked Lynchburg metasediments near a soapstone body

Happy Friday! Here are some kink-folded metasediments from Virginia’s Lynchburg Group to help usher in the weekend.

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29 May 2022

Accretionary wedge turbidites from the Lost Coast

The Lost Coast of northern California shows geological evidence of deep sea turbidity current sedimentation, tectonic accretion during Mesozoic subduction, and then isostatic uplift interacting with shoreline erosion. Check out a few photographs taken by Callan’s wife on a recent backpacking trip through the region.

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