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26 May 2016
Glaciotectonic thrust at Waubonsee Community College
Glaciers can cause thrust faults! Explore an example from a trench south of Chicago.
20 September 2011
Giant City State Park, Illinois
Giant City State Park is a patch of protected forest south of Carbondale, Illinois, where there are some pretty cool exposures of Pennsylvanian-aged Makanda Sandstone. Here’s a typical look at one: Notice the deep chasm on the right. This leads, maze-like, to other flat-bottomed and vertically-walled canyons: The orthogonal joint sets produces some nice tall, cliff-like vertical exposures that reveal the history of these rocks in several stages: deposition by …
15 July 2011
Friday fauxld: liesegang banding at Giant City
Today, the Friday fold is a fake! Looks like a nice set of asymmetric antiforms and synforms, right? But it ain’t! It’s naturally wiggly; primary not tectonic. The photo shows nothing more than differential erosion of hematite that was deposited by groundwater in permeable sandstone. It’s Liesegang banding! These hematite blobs are in the sandstone at Giant City State Park, south of Carbondale, Illinois. Several are cylindrical in form, presumably …
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.