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18 April 2018
Visiting St. Francis’s lovely limestone
The Cretaceous-Paleogene limestone called Scaglia Rossa was used to construct a basilica in tribute to St. Francis. Let’s head to Assisi and take a look.
10 April 2018
An outcrop showcasing a strand of the Kentucky River Fault System
Roadcuts in Kentucky show Ordovician limestones of two distinct types, replete with fossils and primary sedimentary structures, and juxtaposed by a fault, one strand in the Kentucky River Fault System.
9 April 2018
Orthocone nautiloids of the Lexington Limestone
I took a trip last week to Kentucky. My colleague Kent Ratajeski from the University of Kentucky took me out on a nice all-day field trip to examine some of the local geology. I was particularly impressed with the large straight nautiloid fossils that abounded in the Ordovician-aged Lexington Limestone. Here are a series of photos I took of these orthocones, all on pavement exposures (horizontal bedding planes) with my …
6 April 2018
Friday fold: “wrecumbent in Wrangellia”
Darrel Cowan of the University of Washington has pitched in a Friday fold. Check this lovely scene out: Darrel says this is a recumbent fold in the Upper Triassic Nizina and Chitistone limestones. I took the photo when I worked for Shell in 1973 or 1974. I’m pretty sure it is on the west wall of the canyon occupied by the Root Glacier, several kilometers NW of McCarthy, Alaska. The …
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, …
13 February 2018
S-C fabric in limestone, Camerino, Italy
Some scaly Italian limestone shows off two foliations (S and C) which reveal the kinematic motions that built the Apennines.
26 January 2018
Friday fold: eastern Andes
This image graces the cover of the new report, Challenges and opportunities for research in tectonics: Understanding deformation and the processes that link Earth systems, from geologic time to human time. A community vision document submitted to the U.S. National Science Foundation: Make it bigger by clicking it The photo is of a landscape in the Eastern Cordillera of the Andes, southern Peru, showing folded Permian carbonates cut by a …
27 November 2017
Visiting the K/Pg boundary at Bottaccione Gorge, near Gubbio, Italy
A trip to one of the most famous outcrops in the world, a place with a stratum that marked a profound shift in the state of the planet, and a profound shift in geologic thinking. Plus, for the author, it’s a romantic journey back in time.
14 July 2017
Friday fold: chevrons in the Scaglia Rossa, Apennines
The Friday fold visits the Apennine Range of central 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. …
Callan Bentley is an assistant professor of geology at Northern Virginia Community College. He is a fellow of the Geological Society of America and the 2018 National Association of Geoscience Teachers' James Shea Awardee. 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. Callan served as a contributing editor at EARTH magazine for many years. He is Past President of the Geological Society of Washington and the Geo2YC division of NAGT. He lives in the Fort Valley of Virginia.