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5 December 2022

Mafic blocks in Wind River Range granite

Got these photos from a reader, showing outcrops in the northern Wind River range (ESE of Island Lake). The question, inevitably, is are these MMEs (microgranular mafic enclaves) or xenoliths? They’re fine grained and mafic… but some lithologies of xenolith could be too! This next set shows what appear to be a bunch of blocks strung out in a line… This one is shaped like a toaster or a television …

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20 August 2022

Two erratics from coastal Maine

Happy Saturday! Here are two erratics (glacially transported boulders) that I saw last week in coastal Maine. This one shows prominent subparallel striations: And this one, in the town of Penobscot, next to the greasy spoon called Bagaduce Lunch, shows aligned feldspars that suggest magmatic flow: Nothing like a good erratic to get the weekend started off right!

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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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13 December 2019

Friday fold: blueschist & eclogite at Jenner, California

A pre-Fall Meeting field trip to the coast of northern California yields rare sights of garnet-bearing blueschist, plus eclogite, some pillow basalts, birds, waves, wind, and a lot of rain.

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6 December 2019

Friday fold: a secret Santa rock exchange gift!

I participated this year in the Secret Santa Rock Exchange, wherein I shipped out a mystery rock to a random person, and got back a mystery rock from another random person. What fun! My mystery rock has folds in it! It’s from Matt Bruseke at Kansas State University. Check it out: Matt writes that this is a piece of the Silver City rhyolite, from the Owyhee Mountains, Idaho. The sample …

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9 August 2019

Friday fold: crumpled green metavolcanics from St. Anthony

The Friday fold erupted out of a volcano, completing the second part of its two stage cooling history, then later got folded and metamorphosed. It was found atop a high cliff near the northern Newfoundland town of St. Anthony.

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11 July 2019

A submarine slump complex at Sandy Cove, Newfoundland

Traveling in Newfoundland, Callan visits a seaside outcrop showing a Proterozoic submarine slump complex, overprinted by tectonic cleavage and weathered by the sea.

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22 February 2019

Friday folds: Sardinian tuff

It’s the last day of the work week. Some photos of isoclinal syn-depositional folding in Sardinian tuff will get your Friday off on the right foot.

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17 November 2018

Flow banding in pseudotachylyte, South Mountains, Arizona

Watch the flow of frictional melt in a “fossil earthquake,” frozen in time atop the South Mountains metamorphic core complex in Phoenix, Arizona.

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1 March 2018

A GIGAmacro view of a cool outcrop in Scotland

As noted previously, the old way of viewing gigapixel imagery is no more. But there is a new, better way. The GIGAmacro company has a better viewing platform that can be used either with images uploaded to their server or  with pre-existing images that currently “live” at GigaPan.com. Here’s an example: a roadcut of limestone of the Grudaidh Formation (Durness Group) in the Northwest Highlands of Scotland, near Ardvreck Castle, …

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