You are browsing the archive for maine Archives - Mountain Beltway.
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!
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.
18 November 2015
Beach sand of coastal Maine
You could use a macro GigaPan of some pretty sand, I think. Link That’s sand from near Acadia National Park, in Maine. Exploring it, you can find both small chunks of Acadian granite, and green rods that are sea urchin spines. It’s fun – check it out.
2 January 2015
Friday folds: Cabbage Island, Maine
Devonian metamorphic rocks (garnet-bearing gneiss) exposed on the western side of Cabbage Island, Maine: And here it is in GigaPan form: link
27 June 2014
Friday folds: Acadian metamorphics and pegmatite from coastal Maine
Some folds this week from coastal exposures in western Boothbay Harbor, Maine, where I’m on vacation for one more day… Acadian metamorphics (schist, gneiss), with injected granite pegmatite that has also been folded (and boudinaged): Happy Friday!
26 June 2014
The eyes have it
Okay, I photoshopped that one up. This one too… Here are the originals… And, if you’re a scale-off-to-the-side-of-your-main-subject purist, here’s a different shot of this quintessential boudin: And, while we’re at it, here are some other fine boudins (of granite pegmatite) exposed along the coast of West Boothbay Harbor, Maine: Some nice coastal ecology to be seen in that last shot, eh?
25 June 2014
Pemaquid Point, Maine
Pemaquid Point, Maine, is a locally-owned and -managed park near an old lighthouse. I went there yesterday with my family. We’re on vacation in coastal Maine for a week. At Pemaquid Point, the action of waves have cleaned the rocks, and they offer a delightful three-dimensional look at Acadian-aged metamorphics and granite pegmatite dikes, with a fair amount of structural geology superimposed on the whole lot. Learn more about the …
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.