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17 December 2013
Ice oddities
I took a walk through my neighborhood on a cold morning last week. I saw some neat features in the ice. Here’s a frozen backswamp next to Passage Creek (which lies in the tall trees just beyond the snow-covered natural levee… My neighbors (on whose land this backswamp can be found) had driven an ATV through the ice and water the previous day, and it had created a series of …
19 November 2013
Adrift On An Ice Pan, by Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
This very short narrative (hardly even a proper “book” in the modern sense of the word) is by the survivor of a wretched ordeal, as the title suggests, off the coast of Newfoundland in 1908. I consumed the audiobook version, as a free download from my public library, and finished it in a single day’s commuting, with time left over for a podcast or two. The deal is this: The …
5 February 2013
After the flood
After Passage Creek receded following last week’s flood, I went down to the bridge and the floodplain to have a look around. Here’s a little bit of what I saw… Let’s start at the bridge itself. The view is to the west, and Passage Creek flows north: On the other side of the bridge, looking back in the opposite direction (that is, to the east), you can get a better …
2 February 2013
Frosty spikelets
Saw these porcupine-like ice spikelets this morning in a frozen puddle:
28 January 2013
Asbestiform ice
I’ve mentioned this phenomenon before, but I thought this was a particularly impressive example, found in my back yard over the weekend. Pipkrakes (ice “fibers”) with iron oxides and oak leaves, Fort Valley, Virginia, January 2013. Dana saw some in Seattle, too.
18 January 2013
Friday fold: “Chasing Ice”
Callan watches the new documentary “Chasing Ice” about James Balog’s Extreme Ice Survey project, and spots a lovely Z-fold during the largest glacial calving event ever recorded.
26 July 2012
Athabasca Glacier panorama
Click through for a big version… That’s the Athabasca Glacier, crown jewel of the Icefields Parkway in Jasper National Park, Alberta, Canada. Its lateral moraines show well its retreat and “deflation” in recent years.
5 July 2012
Floe Lake hike
Last summer, my wife and I spent some time in the Canadian Rockies. One of the things we did was to take a three-day backpacking trip to Floe Lake, in Kootenay National Park, British Columbia. We picked a rough couple of days for hiking – We got a lot of Canadian Rockies precipitation out there: we got rained on, hailed on, and snowed on during those three days. Here’s our …
16 May 2012
Contemplating the IARC-JAXA graph
One of the ~350 or so blogs I subscribe to is Arctic Sea Ice by Neven. Today, he put up a post highlighting new daily data from IARC-JAXA, a collaboration between the International Arctic Research Center (IARC) at the University of Alaska-Fairbanks and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). Check it out. Here’s a couple of things I was struck by: The annual variation between summer and winter ice cover …
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.